Johanna Rothman discusses the application of portfolio management thinking in an Agile way, and having the courage to stop work and cancel projects when they have outlived their usefulness. Tackling topics such as the mission impossible project, the sacred cow project and other management impediments and how to overcome them.
In his famous book “The world is flat”, Thomas L. Friedman talks about the convergence of events which led to many countries becoming a part of the global supply chain. This resulted in definition of new rules of economics. Israel Gat takes the concept further to suggest that software development has ceased to be location dependent, thanks to Social networking and collaborative techniques.
Though collocation is one of the prime recommendations of Agile, more and more projects are executed in a manner in which the teams are distributed. Safari Asad started an interesting discussion on the Scrum Development group to discuss about a project in crisis, which not only had a remote customer but also had remote developers.
Offshore Development is a critical success factor for many organizations as is adopting Agile methodologies. However, these two techniques have never worked well together. Overcoming this challenge, “Design for Hybrid Agile Adoption (DH2A)”, is a methodology defined to successfully execute Agile projects in a distributed and out-sourced environment. This article provides an overview of DH2A.
In this IEEE article, John Stouby Persson and Lars Mathiassen discuss a process for managing risks associated in managing the distributed software projects. The process includes identifying and analyzing distributed-team risks in the areas of task distribution, geographical and cultural distribution, stakeholder relations and communication infrastructure.
Matthew Simons and Steven Boswell consider that although distributed software development is hard, it is a strategic capability that a company should consider, presenting a framework and Agile practices that help building a healthy distributed environment.
Tamara Sulaiman presents experiences in implementing Agile in teams across different time zones in large companies. She shares the pleasure and the pain, ideas that worked as well as ideas that didn’t. She also shares the critical success factors in making program level implementations successful and sustaining.
In this interview Jez Humble discusses the concept of continuous delivery, which implies that software should always be production ready throughout its lifecycle. That means that every build could be released into production and run effectively. Continuous delivery involves build and deployment automation, continuous integration, test automation, managing infrastructure and environments and more.
In this interview, Elizabeth Woodward talks about overcoming the collaboration problems that arise in distributed team development. She also discusses using Scrum in distributed teams. As co-author of "A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum," Woodward focuses on establishing good, fundamental practices – as she says good practices are paramount for teams and tooling comes second.
For those getting started with Agile, this book offers a detailed first-person account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a distributed team of 40 people, and how they continuously improved their process over a year’s time.
