Agile in distributed teams: challenges and solutions

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Agile in distributed teams: challenges and solutions

Rosalba Giuffrida [email protected]

Rosalba Giuffrida - [email protected]

n  Distributed teams: advantages, challenges and approaches

n  Agile practices in distributed settings and lessons learned n  A successful case: XP@Scrum

n  A successful case: Scrum in Danske Bank

n  A case of Scrum abandonment

Agenda

Rosalba Giuffrida - [email protected] 2

Splitting the development of the same product or service among globally distributed sites.

Global Software Development


F. Lanubile, "Collaboration in Distributed Software Development", in Software Engineering, LNCS 5413, 2009.

n  Advantages n  Lower development costs

n  Access to most talented developers

n  Proximity to market

n  Time to market - Follow-the-sun

n  Challenges n  Geographical distance

n  Temporal distance

n  Socio-cultural distance

Distributed software teams


Carmel, E.: Global Software Teams. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River (1999)

XP combined with Scrum


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht2xcIJrAXo

n  Approach used: XP@Scrum

n  Tools used: OneNote, Team Foundation Server, SkyDrive, Lync

A successful example: dispersed agile

Rosalba Giuffrida - [email protected] 6 © Helen Sharp

H. Sharp, R. Giuffrida, G. Melnik, Information Flow within a Dispersed Agile Team: A Distributed Cognition Perspective. In Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, 62-76.

n  stand-up meetings every day

n  2-week sprints

n  iteration planning meeting, customer demo, retrospective

n  user stories

n  test-driven development and continuous integration

n  Pair programming

XP@Scrum practices used in the team




Physical location: co-located agile

Physical location: dispersed team



Daily standups and synchronous meetings



n  Synchronous communication was possible n  Overlapping hours + adapting working hours

n  audioconference, no video

n  Communication mainly informal n  Impromptu conversations

n  Collaborating on a daily basis with remote colleagues

n  Technology n  Virtual for everyone

n  If technology issues, meeting must go on

n  Recording of important meetings to share asynchronously

n  Distribution was not a problem for this team

n  Artifacts used were all digital

n  Knowledge sharing has to be explicit

n  Individual responsibility very high



Lessons learned

A successful case: Scrum in Danske Bank


Pries-Heje, L., & Pries-Heje, J. (2011). Why Scrum Works: A Case Study from an Agile Distributed Project in Denmark and India (pp. 20–28). Presented at the AGILE Conference (AGILE), 2011, IEEE. doi:10.1109/AGILE.2011.34

n  Team members in Denmark

n  had common work experience

n  not familiar with Scrum

n  Team members in India

n  very limited knowledge about each other

n  no experience working together

n  no experience with Scrum

n  The Project manager had prior experience managing Scrum projects

n  The Indian Scrum Master and the Project Manager knew each other

The initial setup



n  Project kickoff in India Build social ties within the team

n  1 scrum team in each location with physical scrum board and daily standups

Maintain social ties within the team Knowledge-based trust

n  Daily Scrum-of-Scrums meeting Performance trust

n  Frequent deliveries Performance trust

n  ‘All Hands’ meeting: all team members were present in a video conference towards the end of a Sprint.

Social ties across sites

Practice used



n  Build up network of ties and relationships

n  Trust can be built in distributed settings

n  Synchronous communication

n  Experienced project manager

Lessons learned



Scrum abandonment case


Ralph, Paul and Shportun, Petr, "Scrum Abandonment in Distributed Teams: A Revelatory Case" (2013). PACIS 2013 Proceedings. Paper 42.

The project setup


n  One single Scrum team

n  1 Scrum Master, 1 Product Owner, 3 team members in California,

n  4 developers (1 senior), and 3 testers in St. Petersburg

n  Synchronous daily meetings – no standup

n  Wall both physical and digital



n  No overlapping working hours: inconvenient standup meetings

n  Physical wall useful only if it is used

n  Scrum Master’s credibility

n  Attention to team member’s perceptions of role changes – hierarchical culture

No overlapping hours?

Physical wall?

Lessons learned



No overlapping hours: recording of standups

R. Giuffrida, Y. Dittrich, How social software supports cooperative practices in a globally distributed software project. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE) 2014


Integrated physical and virtual Wall

Bardram, J. Esbensen, M. Tell, P. Supporting Co-located SCRUM Processes in Global Software Development. Supporting. Workshop on Local Remote Collaboration, CSCW 2015

Research on agile in distributed teams


Research on agile in distributed teams


Agility Across Time and Space - Implementing Agile Methods in Global Software Projects Editors: Šmite, Darja, Moe, Nils Brede, Ågerfalk, Pär J. (Eds.), 2010, Springer

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Agile in distributed teams: challenges and solutions

Rosalba Giuffrida [email protected]

Rosalba Giuffrida - [email protected]