Agile Distributed Development done right – QCon London 2009

Working distributed is all about handling distance. Geography, culture, methods & tools, timezones, languages are all adding to that distance. Not measured in miles but in people.
How to get a focus on individuals and interactions when your people are distributed across the globe? What is the secret sauce to use to get it running smoothly?
The classical route of bringing this ‘gap’ under control involves adding process and handovers. It actually forces you to go into a waterfall-like model and therefor widens the Gap instead of bridging it. All waste is institutionalized. Sounds like a horror to you? It does to me.

Agile is the key to radically eliminate this waste and get the full power of both Agile and offshore benefits. However Agile and offshoring seem like oil and water, at first glance they don’t seem to mix.
What I talk about at QCon is just how to blend the two. I’ll discuss the different models that in use for distributed Agile along with their impact. The final solution being a fully distributed scrum model that allows for linear scalability and causes the team to behave like a single local team in most aspects.
To just tell you what it is all about: People. The issue with distributed development is indeed the distance but measured in people, not in miles. The Fully Distributed Scrum is the approach that we use very successfully to deal with that distance.
The case story from the presentation is explained in much more detail in the paper that Jeff Sutherland and which we wrote after a lot of great experiences at Xebia.
The presentation was filmed and will be online in due time with the great folks at InfoQ.com. Untill then:
Download the presentation slides or Download the original paper