Process oriented approach to
Agile Software Development
Tomasz de Jastrzebiec Wykowski
Agileee, 18 Sep 2009
Kiev, Ukraine

Let me introduce myself

Distributed teams – the pain
• Different location, different time zones
– “phone” stand-ups
– How to make demo, retrospection and planning in
one meeting
– How to share story
– What to do if I’ve completed my story
– Why shall I bother about other’s stories

The Pain
• Anyone who’s attended an Agile planning
meeting knows they can often last about an
hour longer than you can stand it.
Jeff Patton
http://agileproductdesign.com/blog/2009/kan
ban_over_simplified.html

Distributed teams – the pain
• The pain is increasing with team size

Process
• definition

Let’s combine
• Discuss stories in advance
• When you finish your story:
– Demo to product owner (can even be done during
development)
– Select next story. Decompose and Estimate.
• You can still share a story in one location
• On stand-ups, concentrate on things “other
need to know” like blockers or completed
stories, rather than detailed info about tasks

Profs
• Iteration planning becomes a be-weekly review (much
shorter)
• Shorter stand-ups – concentrate on critical things
• Release Burn-down chart showing progress
• Feedback from product owner received earlier than in
traditional iteration (as soon as story is completed)
• “Iteration” can be reduced to any short period of time
• Stories can be bigger and more meaningful (no need to
decompose stories to very low level to fit iteration)
• Newly discovered work (bugs, new stories) can be
implemented faster – no need to wait till the end of
iteration to start it.

Cons
• Limited value of iteration burn-down, as
stories can be added in the middle of iteration
• Required “agile”-educated and self motivated
team
• Might cause bigger variance to velocity. It’s
not a problem for long running projects
• This still does not solve “we vs. them”
problem observed in multi-locations
environment

Thank you!