Agile 2009: Distributed Agile Development

After searching and searching for this ballroom (this conference center is a bit of a maze), I finally found this session being held by some folks from Microsoft, Ade Miller.  They were talking mostly about their observations of working with teams in South America, but did talk about working with Teams in Asia.  This session was attractive to me because I was looking to see what other experiences people were having with distributed Teams and if my recent recommendations were on the right track.

Here is a list of ideas I jotted down while listening:

• Get good tooling to minimize the difference being in the Team Room and out of the Team Room.
• Select tools that are adaptive to the Team’s processes and ways of working together.
• Plan to travel; use the lower rate of the offsite people to offset the travel costs.
• Always have one guy from overseas in the main office.
• There will always be people difficult to synch up with due to time zone differences, so nominate a representative in the Team Room to advocate for them.
• Avoid component-based architecture and thinking to prevent local optimizations.
• Make sure every Team has a coach to remind them of the underlying principles and values of Agile.
• Have a list of books that people should read when onboarding.

As it turns out, I was mostly in the ballpark.