Elegant Code: Code Cast 22 – Distributed Agile

Wednesday, February 18, 2009 – 1:03 PM

Elegant Code’s code cast this week is on distributed agile development:

Code Cast 22 – Distributed Agile

Tamara Sulaiman is the Stage Producer for Distributed Agile at the 2009 conference in Chicago. She joined David Starr to talk about effective practices in distributed Agile software development teams. Tamara shares some great experiences with teams striving to be effective and Agile while not sharing a team room together.

Some key points I took away from this:

  • Agile adoption and distributed development are both growing trends
  • Team distribution is usually driven by the desire to reduce costs
  • Agile practices assume collocation and rely on face-to-face communication
  • Challenges for distributed teams:
    • Effective collaboration and team coordination
    • Configuration management
    • Knowledge management and distribution
  • Key practices:
    • Think about how you divide up the work
    • Have people travel and work together
    • Look for tools like IM, video conferencing and Skype that can help
    • Coaching works better in person
    • All check into a single branch and do CI there
    • Use wikis as information radiators
    • Have a scrum master (or assistant scrum master) for each team in each location

The Distributed Agile Stage at Agile 2009 already has some interesting talks going on and Tamara talks about some of them.

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