Agile Methodology, Customer Experience, Nearshore, Product Development
Common Myths & Misconceptions for Distributed Agile Teams in Software Development
Throughout this series, we have explored some of the best practices for agile-scrum teams, but in the light of distributed team situations. Scio provides software development teams – working from our development center in Morelia – for projects throughout North America. Our practices, methodologies, and culture are tuned to distributed team situations in a nearshore deployment. We discuss the realities of outsourcing and distributed teams with our prospects and clients on a regular basis. As we wrap up this series, let’s discuss some of the common myths and misconceptions that we hear about frequently.
There is no additional overhead for projects using distributed teams for agile-scrum projects.
Reality: Shared vision, communication, strong procedures, and planning are part of the required overhead for working smart in a distributed team environment. But, the truth is – these same elements should be part of any software development project to ensure success. While a distributed environment requires more rigor and attention to details, all projects benefit from addressing these issues.
More specification must be done at the start of a distributed team project
Reality: Increasing the upfront development of specifications for an agile-scrum project creates a false sense of security and understanding. When something needs to change, there will be latent resistance. There is an increased focus for the full team on understanding where the team(s) are and assuring knowledge is shared – but that should be a normal part of communication in any situation.
Distributed teams cannot do agile and scrum
Reality: If teams are able to organize independently, are cross-functional, collaborative, etc. – there is an overhead in coordination between teams (scrum of scrums) but mitigation in the form of improved awareness of the state of tasks can keep it to a minimum. It is much better to spend resources on coordination than fixes because one team went off the track, wasting time and resources.
Distributed teams have lower quality, more redo’s
Reality: If teams are cross-functional, managing their own tasks and backlog, enabled to work directly with the product owners, have a full development environment using test-driven development, continuous integration and practice regular builds on the central repository for the project, a great number of problems can be avoided. Regular team-wide meetings for planning, pruning, technical issues are overhead, but they will lower impediments greatly if done with openness and trust.
In larger projects, it is better to work as one team than two or more smaller teams even if some members are not co-located with the majority of team members
Reality: The communication and planning overhead does not go down in one larger team in comparison to two or more smaller teams, it rises. Size matters – smaller, self-organizing teams are more efficient overall. Team members in a larger team have less push to be individually responsible and to participate actively in the project. They can easily «hide» in the larger team. In larger teams, the overhead for work review actually climbs, because of the number of people who have to be informed and communicated with. And if the «larger team» is composed of remote members without properly recognizing them as distributed teams or single outside team members – the adherence to standard methodology, processes and assurance procedures tends to drop dramatically. They are literally «out of sight, out of mind.»
There are a lot more things that could be said, but the bottom line is – best practices matter in all agile-scrum projects. Agile is not a license to operate without structure – quite the opposite. It depends on individual responsibility, communication, and adherence to the processes and methodologies adopted by the project team. Agile is adaptive. It will scale along with scrum to situations with distributed teams. Teams that adopt the practices and procedures necessary to be successful in distributed situations as a part of their regular work patterns will have better results in all situations.
We hope this series has been useful and informative for you – helping you to understand what is «behind the curtain» in successful projects and some of the lessons we have learned in the field. If you have a project that you believe could benefit from a team that understands how to leverage agile and scrum in a nearshore implementation, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Agile Methodology, Customer Experience, Nearshore, Project Management
Organizational & Team Best Practices
In the previous article in this series, we started exploring the general organizational and team best practices for agile-scrum projects. In this article, we’re going to finish up a few basic issues and then move into points for distributed teams specifically.
As we have said, the main issue to be considered for software development with agile-scrum teams is communication. If communication is in any way blocked or stifled by cultural or organizational constraints, the team and the project will suffer. In a very real way, knowing how far along the work is on a given user story is part of that communication. We discussed building the technical elements of a system for test-driven development and continuous integration for projects, but there is an organizational element too. Team members must feel these tools are a part of their obligation to their team. They must use them religiously and fully to ensure the tools are doing the job of maintaining code and the development process for all team members. Here a few simple rules to live by:
- All development team members should check work into the common code base as frequently as possible.
- Automated, continuous builds should be run hourly with full logs turned on.
- Each individual team member must exchange a clean build by the end of their shift. Avoid situations where an individual is allowed to push multiple builds outside team core hours that could take planned work or tasks off course.
- If a specific development issue is to be addressed outside of core hours by developers, ensure the scope, limitations, and boundaries are clearly negotiated with everyone and adhered to.
Distributed Team Best Practices
When a software development project is based on distributed teams, some specific organizational practices need to be considered. It isn’t enough to just set up groups in a couple of places, and expect everything to work like it did when you were all sitting in the same big room and able to just turn around and see your teammate.
The first point to consider is how each distributed team in the project will work. One common practice is to put all the QA (as an example) in one team and to have another team be just developers. The problem is – when locations are role-based, they tend to lose overall team collaboration and become an island to themselves. The tendency in this situation is to move to an «us against them» mentality. To avoid this, set up fully cross-functional teams that have their own user stories and backlog. It promotes the team and individual responsibility and gives them a clear role in the project as a whole.
With that in mind, there are a few additional points to consider:
- Use feature-based, rather than component or layer-based teams because it ensures teams continue to have a feeling of being integrated with other teams with shared vision and knowledge. It also allows them to be more flexible if the project changes. They can take on a different backlog because they understand where the project is going.
Distribute work evenly – don’t allow one team to sit fallow while another catches up. This, of course, implies that regular discussions of workload (a scrum of scrums), dependencies, and assumptions is critical to the balance on the project as a whole.- When a team has a local «proxy» for the client-side product owner, it is critical that that proxy role has daily contact and communication with the core product owner to assure they can make decisions quickly and with the assurance they are in sync with the current vision.
- Each team must feel enabled to clarify issues directly with the client side (they have their own user stories – remember…) and not be tied to a chain of notification. Invariably, notification chains shorten messages, misunderstand the context, and create communication loops that just slow down clarification and decisions.
- Teams must have daily points of contact between them (scrum of scrums again) to discuss progress, dependencies, impediments, etc. and assure product owners are not being quarried about the same issues multiple times.
One Team Member «Outside»
There are times when it is necessary to have one lone team member outside the main development group or even a couple of individuals remotely located by themselves. This is not an unusual situation, but it is one that takes care to handle properly. All the work you do to assure a cohesive, collaborative team can be lost when one remote member is not paying their role and participating in the process properly.
In basic terms, all the distributed team and organizational best practices apply except:
- Single development team members cannot be a stand-alone unit in the same way a minimal team can – so they need to be formally paired with other team members in a way that assures they will remain «in the loop» throughout the project. To make this work, consider pair programming (especially early in the project) and pairing with a specific QA.
- Avoid situations where single team members are outside of the team core hours more by more than one or two hours. Longer isolation will simply assure they will not integrate easily with the rest of the team – they will remain the lone wolf on the outside you have to watch constantly to assure they don’t go off course.
- «Standard practices» (development environment, burndown chart, shared repositories, active participation in meetings, communication systems, etc. become critical resources to assure the remote team member feels they are a fully integrated and vital part of the project. All aspects of processes must be proven, clearly documented and relatively easy to setup and use.
- If the remote team member is new to your procedures and processes, have a standard initiation program as a part of the project initiation or before. The program should include not just the setup, practices and methodologies necessary to understand the way the team will operate. It should also include the reasoning and expectations they as a team member will operate under.
The single team member working remotely deserves some special consideration. They must feel they are part of the organization and able to be productive in their environment. For that reason, it is important to consider if they are working from their home, what kind of set up they have. Do they have good networking? Do they have a regular work area with good ventilation, light, and isolation from distractions? A worker at home, with the TV blaring in the other room or perhaps a baby that requires attention on a regular basis is going to find it very difficult to be as productive as their teammates. What can you do to assure they are not at a disadvantage? Consider issues in the same way you would any impediment in agile development – what can you do to move the impediment out of their way?
The Take-Away
In the end, it should be easy to see that that making an agile-scrum project successful with distributed teams is nothing more than doubling down on the best practices that are an integral part of agile. If they were important in a team in a single location, they are doubly important in a distributed team and have even more impact on project outcomes. Does a distributed team model immediately burden a project with additional overhead? Well, we will discuss this aspect more in the last article in this series, but the simple answer is no. If you have been using best practices for agile-scrum projects religiously – a project with distributed teams just requires a little more focus and diligence. If you were not as judicious as you should be about your practices, then yes, there will be overhead because your risk of failure will be much higher for distributed teams until you get your practices in line.
In our last article in this series, we will explore common myths that crop up whenever anyone proposes any level of distributed teams in software development. Remember, as a nearshore software development provider, these are objections we discuss with potential clients regularly. So join us – won’t you?
If you jumped into the middle of this series, you can go back to the start here.
Agile Methodology, Customer Experience, Nearshore, Product Development, Project Management
Organizational and Team Best Practices
While it might seem that adopting the agile-scrum framework to distributed teams is all about the right tools (especially if you read marketing materials from tool makers), in general, it is more about how you organize your teams and processes than anything else. For that reason, we decided to break this part of the discussion into two sections. Our assumption is you are only going to read so much during your breaks between meetings, on your smartphone….
Project Initiation
There are all sorts of reasons that a «kick-off» meeting is critical for project success, in fact, we’ve already talked about a few in the earlier posts from this series. But in this part of the series, we’re focusing on the organizational elements of a successful agile-scrum software development team.
One of the areas that are especially important is the cohesion and understanding between the individual members of the team. If it is not taken care of the upfront, it can take a long time to build. If you are not aware of the teaming model developed by Bruce Tuckman, this is a good time to start considering it. In short, Mr. Tuckman found that teams follow a regular pattern of «storming, norming and performing» during their lifecycle. If you can shorten this cycle and get too strong performance sooner, you are better off. We have found that kickoffs that include games, team-building, and participative events go a long way to achieving this goal. In fact, for longer projects, planning similar events around specific milestones prevents teams from going back through the cycle later in the process.
There are many guides available for these activities, but regardless of which ones you find useful, the actual activities are not something you can simply jump into and do from a book. It takes practice and experience to successfully integrate team activities into project initiation so the sooner you start using them the better. We have found teaming model to be an excellent resource, but again, it requires some hands-on experience to use successfully.
What do you need to do to assure success for project initiation meetings?
- Include as many team members as possible in a single location, even if some must travel greater distances. The time and expense will pay off handsomely in the end.
- If some team members or teams cannot attend, arrange parallel events that the teams can report on or share in an online conference format (voice, video, photos, etc.).
- Sync your agile – scrum processes, artifacts, and ceremonies across teams and participants with actual sessions during the joint event. Execute sprints if possible (use Sprint 0 as a base). Set expectations with everyone that the processes will be standardized and adhered to across the entire team.
- Establish a shared product vision with presentations, question/answer sessions, product games, etc.
- Agree on core project hours for the entire team (including product owners, proxies, etc.) and communication standards. Core hours should overlap considering the time zones involved. Ensure everyone commits to core hours and provides proxies if they cannot be reached.
- Agree to set regular meetings during core hours even if not everyone expects to be in the meetings. This assures if questions come up during the meetings, they can be quickly answered.
- Agree on timing for sprint planning, retrospectives, and other planning activities. The more standardized the timing for these meetings, the more likely they will be to be integrated into individual routines.
- Learn and respect cultural viewpoints across the team, festivals, language preferences. Plan to share status around holidays, common activities, etc.
- Encourage an atmosphere of fun, respect, and collaboration.
This is a lot to accomplish in any timeframe, much less a day or a few hours. Project kickoffs must be carefully planned and managed. They could and often should take more than a day. We’ve had initial meetings, including initial work, take as long as a week. Once you have dealt with them to and from aspects of the travel, the rest is relatively inexpensive – so don’t push to shorten the time more than necessary.
Best Practices for All Scenarios
Planning component breakdown during the kickoff.
We’ve said that part of making agile-scrum for distributed teams successful is including many of the necessary best practices in all projects, not just the ones with distributed members. These best practices are critical for distributed teams, but also just good practice in any software development project. Your distributed teams will «catch on» quicker if these are part of your regular practice and adapt to new situations better.
- Participation by every individual in the team in meetings is always important. That said, it isn’t natural for everyone. Team members must be positively coached to engage in active, personal participation. Avoiding situations where one person becomes the de facto spokesman for the team helps to ensure team members don’t sit back and not contribute. Trust is an important element in participation. Team members must feel comfortable questioning ideas and playing devil’s advocate when necessary to draw out concepts and beliefs. Each team member must feel enabled to speak directly with the client/project team to avoid forming communication chains that will inevitably muddle and shorten their message.
- Plan frequent live demos and retrospectives with time for questions and clarifications. Communication in these meetings should not be more tightly time-bound than necessary, but when long conversations do surface, don’t be shy about moving them to a parking lot to be addressed in a specific meeting meant to resolve that issue with the right people involved.
- Scrum masters should be careful to practice servant-leadership roles. They need to concentrate on removing impediments so tasks can move forward rather than prescribing how tasks should be done.
- Pre-plan a larger window of future sprints on a weekly basis (depends on the length of sprints) specifically to expose interdependencies between teams, roles, etc. and groom backlogs with the team as a whole.
- Lean to short sprints rather than long and synchronize/prioritize between teams regularly. Avoid situations where a team could go too far down a path before syncing with others.
- Have irregular, casual «brown-bag» sessions to discuss technical alignment, decisions and common ground among members and teams.
- Find ways to rotate team members. Rotation can be between locations, roles, among teams, etc. Don’t allow individuals to become insular units by themselves or with specific team members. Accomplishing this goal can be challenging, but it is especially important in longer projects. Rotation should not be «one way» (always to the client site for instance) and where it isn’t possible, consider remote pairing too as an alternative.
Granted, these points are not easy to accomplish. They take planning and practice to get right – but the aim is to ensure a successful project and enough cannot be said about how much of success is preparation. The next installment in this series will continue to explore organizational and team issues, there is a lot to cover. We will also cover issues related to specific scenarios that we have found take a slightly different approach. I hope you will stay with us to see how important it is to understand software development projects in an agile-scrum environment and learn more about what is needed to extend it to distributed teams.
If you are coming in the middle and want to jump back to the start of the series, you can start here. Or if you are looking for a software development partner and want to contact us, just click here and leave us a message and we will be contacting you ASAP.
Agile Methodology, Customer Experience, Nearshore, Product Development, Project Management
Technical Best Practices
Building on the discussion of distributed agile-scrum teams in software development we started in the first post in this series, in this post we will discuss some of the principle technical best practices our team at Scio has found to be beneficial for distributed agile teams.
Communications for Distributed Agile Teams
One of the most important areas to consider technically is the use of flexible instant messaging platforms. While these platforms cannot fully replace face-to-face interaction in all cases (especially for first-time encounters), they can go a long way toward building the trust and open relationships that are expected in an agile environment. They must be flexible enough to adapt to a wide range of network speeds and requirements while providing text chat, file transfer, desktop/app share, voice, and video interaction. This requires an understanding of the available bandwidth at each location included in the project, technical constraints of the end user environment, and fallbacks that can be used when the normal application doesn’t function correctly for some reason. Messaging tools must be as «transparent» as possible – not creating extra overhead for ad-hoc meetings that are necessary to iron out important details on the fly, while still providing some extra tools that smooth interaction in larger meetings like side-channel text chats. It may seem trivial to simply adopt one of the many tools available for the purpose, but in practice, finding something that can be widely adopted and quickly brought into daily use is more challenging than you might think. Issues to consider include:
- Messaging security – Some industries (such as health care) and some projects may require security over and above that provided by the messaging application itself.
- Standards – Special situations may require some standards or rules of the road for users and in a lot of cases, enforced rules may be the easiest route to providing compliance for issues like branding, copyright, and industry compliance. This can be especially important when desktop sharing is used – are there areas in users systems that should not be shared for some reason?
- Special needs users – Are there users on the team that require or could benefit from voice to text (rather than keyboard) interaction? Is video easier for some users? It is better to find a platform that provides options for special needs rather than trying to build in workarounds after the fact.
- Availability – There is nothing worse than a messaging system no one takes seriously. If it needs to be tucked away, if it is only used when «planned for,» if there is no response when it is needed to answer a critical question, it is just another bit of project overhead and not a useful communication tool. If everyone does not adopt the same tool – much the same is true. This is really not a technical issue, it is more organizational in nature, but it is a waste of time to implement a special system no one is using. Make it part of the agreements in the project kickoff – and use it.
And one additional tool that is indispensable for communications – a camera. It can be as simple as using a smartphone, but having a way to capture white boards, project artifacts and even selfies of team members can be invaluable to bring everyone to the «same page» quickly and to act as a project memory in future interactions or to bring missing members up to speed. It seems like a small point, but if you only think of photos after the fact – it will be too late.
Project Management, Testing and Source Control
Deciding on the project management tools to be used (or not used) during the initial planning session is critical to success. The actual tool used may depend on the standards adopted by the client team before the project starts or they may depend on the type of project involved. Regardless, they must be network-based (so everyone sees the same project status without forcing updates), agile-scrum aware (backlog, burndown charts, etc.), and easy to adopt without a great deal of unnecessary overhead. Another point to consider – can individuals take responsibility for stories and status transparently? Can they update their status as a part of their regular work? For this reason, we use the Team Foundation Server as an integrated part of our Visual Studio environment as a standard. It has agile templates built in and allows individuals to manage their work as part of their development environment. No jumping out to another application. Of course, that said, we do adapt Trello for shorter projects and smaller teams. The right tool for the job is always important to consider.
Today, testing automation, continuous integration, and standardized configuration management are not just good ideas, they should be standard for every project. That said, access and availability for members of a distributed agile team is an important technical hurdle to solve immediately at the start of the project. Along with rules (more on that in the next article in this series) to push early and often rather than «once in a while» it is a critical element of any team environment – especially for distributed teams. It is not something you can easily back into «when you decide it is needed.» It requires consideration for implementation, training and the processes that will be used. Again, this is a subject to be fully discussed in the project kickoff, regardless of who is implementing and using the systems. A single code repository with logging enforced will go a long way toward understanding clearly where the team is and what is really complete at any stage. Again, this isn’t just a best practice for distributed agile teams – all development teams should be regularly using these tools so there is little to no time required to reach productivity with them.
One more thing? Clocks on the wall, for each part of the distributed team, with labels. It seems simple – but when you need to reach someone before they leave for the day – it can make all the difference.
Wiki?
It might seem trivial, but a networked team wiki with space for sharing assets, current status (including builds, etc.), coming meetings, etc. can make all the difference to both communication and «personalizing» interactions between team members. A project wiki can include:
- Project wiki with procedures, contact lists, learning during development, editable spring plans, project artifacts (photos, documents) both up to date and historical.
- Team member profiles with photos, fun facts, recent changes, etc.
- Photos and notes from casual and social team meetings (games, lunches, etc.)
- Hours, holidays by location, agreed core team core hours and days when all team members will be available.
Each individual project may have additional technical issues that have to be considered, but this is the starting point we use to consider the set up for every project. In the next segment of this series, we will consider the organizational issues involved in adapting the agile-scrum framework to distributed agile teams. Stay tuned!
Did you come to the party late? You can find the first article of this series here
Agile Methodology, Customer Experience, Nearshore, Product Development, Project Management
Practices required for distributed teams: Basically Agile (and Scrum!)
The use of the agile methodology in combination with the Scrum framework is a widely accepted industry standard for software development throughout the world. Together the methodologies provide an iterative and collaborative system that has been proven to be adaptable and resilient over a wide range of implementations by teams in the industry.
What makes the combination of these methodologies so attractive and useful in the development of software?
- An adaptable framework for iterative software development that provides the customer working software for evaluation in regular, short increments.
- The ability to deal with incomplete or fluctuating product development concepts during the process of development in a way that allows discovery and adjustment as needed.
- The project team includes formal roles and responsibilities for both the client, development team and each individual in decision making during the development process.
- The inclusion of systems for communication, trust, and collaboration across the entire product development team.
- Recognition that the availability of team members for consultation during core working hours is critical to the iterative production process to assure alignment and to allow adjustment as needed.
- The production process includes regular daily meetings, as well as meetings for production assessment and planning that are focused on understanding the status of committed work, clearing production obstacles, and making adjustments where necessary to achieve goals the team has committed to accomplish.
- Outcomes that have proven to be beneficial to both the client and the development team in the development of successful software applications.
Of course, if you dig into the implementation details of agile and scrum for software development, you will find a number of additional benefits. Each team and project can and does adapt the processes within the framework to fit the constraints of their situation. But with the focus on real-time collaboration and face-to-face interaction, what happens when circumstances combine to require the use of agile and scrum across a team that is distributed across geography? Can the agile-scrum framework be adapted to a distributed team? That is the focus of this five-part series – Best Practices for Distributed Agile Teams.
Adapting Agile & Scrum to a Distributed Team
With the availability of broadband network access across the Internet, as well as the benefits and pressures provided by a global marketplace and workforce – it is critical that the benefits of the agile – scrum framework can be both adapted and scaled to provide their benefits to distributed teams. For the purposes of this series, we will consider any team that has members who are not physically in the same location during core working hours, they are distributed. That could mean the team is spread across a metropolitan area where colocation is both time-consuming and expensive or the team is spread across a wider area – across states or national borders.
The business advantages of opening horizons for software development by distributed teams are relatively obvious:
- A distributed model brings a wider field of skills and expertise into play, often with lower costs.
- Varied experience in both technology and problem-solving can bring more answers to the table with a lower cost of recruitment and faster fulfillment of specialized requirements
- Entire teams can be sourced with less time, training and deeper experience in leveraging agile-scrum for software and product development.
The scenarios for distributed development can include:
- Development team together in a development center with
- Client in a different location, same time zone
- Client in different location and time zone
- Split development team
- The development team is split between locations or combined with a client team in another location or both
- Same time zones or different time zones
- Various combinations – split client team, outside consultants, single team members remotely located
Continuity is Key
Regardless of where the client is, adaption to a distributed agile – scrum model is critical to ensure the involvement of key stakeholders, development and product teams and to achieve the benefits of the framework in projects. In fact, at Scio, we have found that consideration and inclusion of the practices required for distributed teams are critical to all our software development projects – whether they are considered to be «distributed» or not. We have found:
- Using the practices required for distributed teams provides a more scalable base for all software development teams.
- If distributed team practices are not in the standard agile repertoire:
- New projects that require a distributed team have a longer ramp to productivity because team members have to adapt to new tools and practices.
- Projects face a higher risk because situational adaptions selected by teams may not be proven and optimal.
- Teams may have to spend many cycles dealing with organizational issues to reach full productivity.
So, from our experience – adaptations of the agile-scrum methodology and framework to allow a distributed team environment is just good practice. They bring many benefits, including better communication, formalized technical environments, and organizational adaptions. They are a critical part of our work environment and our commitment to our clients.
During the following four parts of this series, we will explore some of the best practices Scio has found to be beneficial for distributed teams and some of the myths that we find are common when the idea is considered by organizations. We hope you will stay with us because there is a lot to know about leveraging a distributed team environment successfully for software development.
