Agile

Distributed Scrum: A Day In The Life Of A Distributed Team

In my earlier post on “How to Address People and Communication Challenges on Distributed Scrum Teams” we discussed about importance of communication in building trust. Quality and Quantity of communication needs get amplified as soon your team gets distributed.

Distributed teams I have worked with have organized their schedule and overlapping hours some thing like below.

Distributed Agile: How to Address People and Communication Challenges

by Avienaash Shiralige 12 Comments

The main challenges of Distributed Agile revolve around People, Information sharing / Communication, and Project Structure.

Let’s talk about first 2 challenges and how to address them. I wrote an article couple of weeks before on “10 Best Practices of Distributed Agile“. You will find few more practices in that article to address below concerns.

People

[pullquote]Effective, honest communication and trust is the foundation of all Agile teams. Most productive development teams thrive in an environment of trust.[/pullquote]

Half or more of your development team is distributed across continents. How do you create that all important environment of trust and alignment to common vision when your team is distributed?

Your development team (onshore + offshore) now consists of engineers whose primary language is not English, or at least sounds different than your version of English. It adds another complexity to communication.

Cultural, tone and body language differences will compound the challenge. Multi-shore Agile requires changes to the norm. The best environment is when all developers (local and remote) feel part of the larger team and make decisions for the benefit of the single team. But how do you do this?

5 WHYs: Positive Root Cause Analysis To Find Good Practices

by Avienaash Shiralige 3 Comments

In my earlier article I shared my opinion about using 5 WHYs to find root causes. What I really missed to point was, it is not just applied to find root cause to problems, but it can be used to find root cause to good things that are happening on the team.

In sprint retrospectives we usually pick some problem that occurred, try to figure out why it happened, and then understand how we could prevent this problem from happening again in the future. Our root cause analysis meetings are usually always on “What is That Not Going Well”.

Now let’s apply 5 WHYs thinking to this question…

Distributed Agile:10 Good Practices of Successful Teams

by Avienaash Shiralige 8 Comments

10 good Practices of Distributed Agile Teams

Distributed agile teams can exist in different forms like.

Product Owner is onshore, Team is offshore
Team split between two or more locations
A complex model like product owner not with onshore team and development team distributed across time zones

I would like to share top 10 good practices that are implemented by successful distributed agile teams.

5 Whys: Sprint Failed – Team Did Not Deliver Committed Work

by Avienaash Shiralige 9 Comments

Applying 5 Whys is a good way to address the problems that you are facing on your teams. This thinking is very simple, just ask WHY multiple times till you reach to root cause. You can read more about 5 Whys here.

Some benefits of using this Lean technique are:

Helps identify root cause of a problem
Determine the relationship between different root causes of a problem
Very simple to use without any statistical analysis
Very useful when problems involve human factors or interactions

Asking 5 times WHY generally leads you to a root cause. In some cases you may reach in fewer iterations and in some it may take more than 5.

Now let’s apply this technique to our problem on hand.

Problem: Team failed in their sprint as they were not able to complete all the work committed.