Spreading the Agile Practice
Extending new processes beyond a single project team presents unique challenges
October 15, 2007 —
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Many organizations have begun to reap the benefits of agile development on their internal projects—shorter time-to-market, better quality software, more team productivity. Now, they want to know how to get those same advantages when doing agile development throughout a distributed team.
The answer? Get a Subversion code management system, a Webcam for whiteboard meetings and a speakerphone.
Of course, achieving agile success with a distributed team is quite a bit more complicated than that. But three principles—the ability to share plans, access the code from a single repository, and communicate effectively—form the cornerstones of spreading agile processes over disparate locations. Then, experts agree, the members of the team must be highly competent and working in an environment that fosters trust, provides a feedback structure, and gives visibility across business and development efforts.
One of the messages of agile is that it improves quality. Andrew Glover, president of the consulting firm Stelligent, said that’s the wrong message. “People don’t want to pay for quality. You say quality, people think QA, and QA has no money. Switch out ‘quality’ with ‘delivery speed,’ and people start buying it,” he said.
The core principles remain the same regardless of the specific agile process in use; although at the recent Agile 2007 conference, a number of consultants and developers mentioned that distributed agile development is most effective when Scrum is used in tandem with Extreme Programming, or XP. Scrum provides the overarching management structure, while XP is in place at the developer level where the coding is actually done.
Before any code can be written, though, it’s important to get everyone on the same page. Several experts suggested bringing the teams, or at least representatives of each team, together before the project begins in a sort of common architecture design meeting. “It’s important for teams to get familiar with each other before they are dispersed,” said Paul Hodgetts, CEO of agile consultant practice AgileLogic. “It’s costly, but the benefit offsets the cost and helps the project not drift off.”
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