Staying Agile when team is distributed
A distributed agile team is a group of resources that reside in multiple locations to achieve a common goal, sharing an understanding of key business processes. The concept of distributed agile emerged as organizations started facing problems like high costs, infrastructure investments, lack of resources, ..etc. Distributed agile helps organizations to get talent from a global pool without compromising on their workflows and software development processes.
Working with a team sitting in a different corner of the world with a different time zone, is a bit tedious and requires extra effort. There are key challenges to tackle when teams are distributed, need to make sure the development proceeds seamlessly and the end product meets all business needs.
Let’s look at good practices which should be implemented by distributed agile team to work through the key challenges.
- Define overlap hours
- Build team of T-Shaped Skill set
- Proxy business representative
- Encourage maximum collaboration with tools
- Respect and learn each other’s cultural viewpoints
- Get together in person with periodic travels
- Experienced Agile Lead (/ Scrum Master)
- Maintain right ‘information radiators’ well
- Implement XP engineering practices
- Define clearly ‘Ready’ and ‘Done’
- Adopt good branching strategy
- Train the team on Agile methodologies and practices
