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Agile 2009: Distributed Agile Development

Thanks to everyone who attended my talk today at Agile 2009 on Distributed Agile Development and our experiments with it at Microsoft’s patterns & practices team. I’ve been speaking about this on and off for the last year and a half and it’s interesting to see audiences grow as this becomes a significant issue for more and more teams.

You can download the deck here. It comes with speaker notes so isn’t completely incomprehensible.

The white paper which covers most of the content from the talk in more detail can be downloaded from MSDN. Since writing it I’ve also written a series of blog posts on some of the new ideas we’ve discussed since.

Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices (paper)

Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft Updated (updates)

I mentioned Bas Vodde and Craig Larman’s book on scaling lean agile development . This is definitely worth a read if you’re working on a large scale project and want to understand the impact of a component team approach. Just to be clear—as someone asked me about this afterwards—when I said their book didn’t have the answer, I meant exactly that. Their book has lots of answers and some great ideas and approaches for thinking about problems but there is on one single answer to developing really large scale software. A point also made in the book.

I’m also considering writing an updated version of the paper at some point. If you have any further things you think it should cover then post a comment here.