Friday, August 29th, 2008
During the distributed agile workshop at Agile 2008 there was some discussion of Conway's Law (named after Melvin Conway). Conway's law basically says Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it. So distributing your team not only effects its communication dynamics adds dysfunction, it also may ...
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams, Large teams, Scrum
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Thursday, August 14th, 2008
If you've been in software a while a lot of the time your gut starts to tell you that something feels wrong before you figure out exactly why. This year's Agile 2008 conference gave me several insights into why some things I've had deep reservations about are wrong in a ...
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams, Large teams, News & events, Toronto
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Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
This is a dump of all the suggestions that came up during the "What Makes Distributed Agile Projects Succeed (or Fail)?" workshop by Chris Sims on Tuesday afternoon. I've highlighted the ones what the group agreed were the top three.
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams, News & events, Toronto
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Friday, July 18th, 2008
A couple more sources someone pointed me to on distributed agile. Worth a read but for the lazy I've summarized some key points here: Elastic Path uses Distributed Agile and Outsourcing to Stay on Top in Fast-Paced E-Commerce Software Choose a vendor with experience in ...
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
Tomorrow night (Thursday 12th June) I'll be talking to the Seattle XP Users group about "A Hundred Days of Continuous Integration". This is a dry run for giving the talk at Agile 2008 in August. At the very least I'm hoping for audience feedback, and not of the rotten fruit ...
Tags: Agile, Continuous integration, Distributed teams, News & events, p & p, Seattle
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Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
I finished reading "Adaptive Engineering of Large Software Projects with Distributed/Outsourced Teams", Sutherland, Viktorov & Blount last night. The authors describe an Integrated Scrums model which deliberately splits Scrum teams across different geographical locations, rather than co-locating teams and using the scrum-of-scrums approach.
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams, Scrum
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Monday, May 19th, 2008
In the course of surfing the web for related things I discovered a few more useful articles on distributing teams:
More on Distributed Teams - Ping Identity’s “Swarm” Model for Remote, Distributed Agile Development
Agile Project Management for Distributed Teams
Can distributed teams be agile?
InfoQ: Can Virtual Teams Ever Work?
Transitioning to Agile in ...
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams
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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
Here's the final abstract... Many agile teams use Continuous Integration (CI). It is one of the Extreme Programming practices and has been broadly adopted by the community [1]. Just how effective is it? Does the effort of maintaining the CI server and fixing build breaks save time compared to ...
Tags: Agile, Continuous integration, Distributed teams, News & events, p & p
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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
The whole choosing an agile process thread ran pretty long. Here's a summary of all the posts:
Designing your own agile process - Part 1: Don't!
Designing your own agile process - Part 2: Buy vs. build
Choosing an agile process - Part 3: Evaluation
Choosing an agile process - Part 4: Offshore development
Choosing ...
Tags: Agile, Best practices, Distributed teams, p & p
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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
Peter Provost blogged on some of his experiences with Simulated Agile Team Rooms, largely at p&p. I've added some comments based on my experiences with the distributed/offshore model here and elsewhere...
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams, p & p
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Welcome to my blog on software development and probably a whole lot more. If you're looking for alpine climbing you'll find it on my 
