Who moved the cheese? team rooms and agile

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Over the past year I've posted quite a few times on the topic of distributed teams and how to work with them. No doubt about it, it's difficult and the teams velocity will be slowed up if they're not co-located. It seems like the stock solution, co-location, just isn't getting ...

Agile 2008 - Conway’s Law and Distributed Teams

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 impact the actual ...

Agile 2008 - Something is wrong but why?

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 ...

Agile 2008 - One Hundred Days of Continuous Integration

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

My talk on the patterns & practices Service Factory:ME team's experiences with Continuous Integration (CI) and our data analysis of the CI and Team Foundation Server logs is this morning at Agile 2008. You can find the presentation for this talk here: One Hundred Days of Continuous Integration - slide deck One ...

Agile 2008 - Distributed Agile

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.

More Distributed Development Best Practices

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 ...

I’m Speaking at the Seattle XP Users Group

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 ...

Integrated Scrums

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.

Distributed agile - The thoughts of others

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 ...

Agile 2008 - A Hundred Days of Continuous Integration

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 ...