Distributed Scrum Teams — World Of Agile
Today businesses are shifting to emerging economies (such as India) due to reduced business operations cost and an easily available workforce. The businesses certainly are more virtual and distributed, with “distributed” as its key element. Thus the need for better managing such teams, using the right tools and processes, is becoming increasingly critical for any enterprise company.
Here are some reasons for the shift and need for having distributed Agile teams:
· Globally distributed teams reduce costs.
· They can reach the market more quickly with a “follow the sun” model.
· Distributed teams expand access to new markets.
· Acquisitions as a result of consolidation results in companies working together to integrate their businesses.
· Expansion can aid innovation and thought leadership.
· Telecommuting gives options for communicating with teams effectively.
· Collaboration tools — improved tools for distributed communications and server-based, multiuser tools for product development — are removing barriers, and more teams view distributed collaboration as an alternative.
1.1 Handling Distributed Scrum Teams
· Distributed teams increase the need for clear, timely communication between sites. You might be thinking of increases in complexity due to more time zones, language barriers, and cultural differences getting in the way.
· Communication is the core issue among the distributed teams. Different time zones, conflicting working hours, cultural and language barriers impact communication and collaboration.
· Investing ineffective enterprise tools for requirements repositories, Source Control management, build and deployment setup, defect tracking, and project management tools is essential.
· Practicing Test Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration and Automation of Testing are recommended
· Proper communication setup such as telephones and video conference are essential in a distributed setup.
1.2 Collaboration within a Sprint
· Scrum Teams should follow continuous integration, test automation, and test-driven development practice to foster distributed collaboration during the sprint and help teams complete user stories within a sprint.
· Documentation helps to overcome distance: Because of language barriers, distributed teams often need more written documentation than co-located teams.
· Using the right tools: In a distributed environment, right tools and effective practices can help team members communicate more effectively.
· Valuing the whole team: The Scrum Master should focus on an “us” versus a “them” attitude in the distributed team, due to more delays in communications and fewer opportunities to work together.
· Transparency: Distributed Agile teams should use project management tools to identify tasks that are open, in progress, and completed so everyone is aware of the current status.
· Dealing with defects: Distributed teams may want to consider creating a user story with a certain number of story points in the Sprint to deal with the problems, or they can set a priority for the maintenance tasks as per the customer log, or create a sub-team to focus only on handling these issues during the Sprint, or — depending on the skill set of the technical support team — make the necessary code changes.
· Handling blockers during the sprint: In the large-scale enterprise transitioning to agile, the Scrum Master needs to hear from distributed Scrum team members who are facing blockers and dealing directly with inhibitors will help increase the velocity of the team over time, as well as the velocity of other teams as they transition to Scrum.
· Responding to questions during the sprint: For enterprise product development, the Product Owner should look for ways to match representative stakeholders with the teams’ working hours and to be available during that time as well.
· Sharing time zone challenges: One approach to help manage such cases is to make sure that distributed teams in different time zones are fully self-sufficient and the team spreads the work to minimize dependencies.
· Automation and Continuous Integration
o Continuous integration.
o Report any build failures to the team
o Reduce the risk of integrating code.
o Automated Test Cases.
o Improve the efficiency of the team.
o Builds can run at different frequencies.
o Test automation.
· Dedicated automation teams.
Test-driven development: Developers write unit tests, the small tests that fail first. Testers work with developers to ensure that any later tests do not repeat the work the developers have already done.
Tags - CSM Training, CSPO Certification, Advanced CSM Certification
