Distributed Agile - Symbiosis or Antagonism? A white paper recently presented at an Agile meetup with focus a on distributed agile misconceptions, barriers, patterns and antipatterns, culture-structure-practices model with industry case studies.

1. Distributed Agile – Symbiosis or Antagonism?
Agile Gurgaon MeetUp
Speaker
Deepak Sharma, Enterprise Agile Coach, OrganIQ
Location
91 Springboard, Gurgaon
March’ 2016
Copyright OrganIQdeepak@organiq.in www.organiq.in

2. About OrganIQ
Agile Workshops
Enable Agile Competency
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Agile Values, Principles &Practices
Lean Thinking
Scrum
Extreme Programming
Kanban / Scrumban
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1500+ Participants
20+ Consultants
300+ Person-Years of Experience
Agile Assessments
Assess Agile Maturity
Agility Health Radar
Organiq Agile Maturity Model (OAM)
Agility score of teams, dept. & organization
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Current and Future State agility index
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Recommendations
Transformation Roadmap
80+ Teams
5-Dimension & 5-Characteristic OAM
2-4 weeks
Agile Coaching
Enable Agile Transformation
Achieve business outcomes
Agile coaching – high touch & low touch
Agile Facilitation
Agile mentoring
DevOps & Engineering coaching
Metrics & Measurement
Scaling Agile
Agile Mindset
7+ Organizations
40+ Teams
Improve score from 3+ to 8+ (12-16 weeks)
OrganIQ is an Agile consulting company based out of Gurgaon who sole mission is to improve the IQ of an
organisation with the help of its Agile practice which offers following services :-

3. Distributed Agile – Butterflies in your stomach?
Dilbert by Scott Adams @Copyright

4. Industry Case Study
Case Study presented by Jeff Sutherland (co-creator of Scrum) at an Agile Conference in
2008

5. WikiSpeed

6. Spotify

7. Lack of Trust Different Time zones Cultural Differences
Communication Barrier Lack of Visibility Varying level of business & tech context
Barriers

8. Common Misconceptions
Produces Poor Quality Deliverables Can’t do with distributed Agile or Scrum teams
More specifications up front No additional overhead

9. Enablers

10. Enabler – Culture

11. Kickoff Visits Build Trust Ambassador
Multiple Communication Modes Virtual Shared Location Remote Pair
Patterns for distributed eXtreme Programming

12. Enabler – Structure

13. Component to Feature Teams

14. Distributed Scrum Models

15. Large team distributed agile structure

16. Enabler – Practices

17. Good Agile Practices for Distributed Teams
 Release Planning
 PO to travel to the team location
 Co-located Collaborative Chartering, User Personas and Story Maps
 Team Get-Together / Party, Culture Trainings
 Sprint Planning
 Split into two parts –
o 1st
day - Story elaboration with PO on a VC
o 2nd
day - Capacity Planning, Sizing & Tasking (Co-located Scrum team)
o 2nd
day – Discussion with PO and JIRA loading
 Backlog Grooming
 Focused grooming with PO & few members of Scrum team on a VC
 Mid Sprint Review
 Demo with PO for the ‘DONE’ stories to get interim feedback
 Daily Scrum
 Co-located stand-up in the morning. Clarification with PO, if required
 Sprint Retrospective / Sprint Demo
 Co-located retrospective , wherever possible
 Use of Online tools to conduct effective retro / demo with PO
 Tools – Skype, Visio, Video Conference, White Boards, JIRA, Confluence,
Wiki, Screen Hero, HipChat, PlanITPoker, OnlineBoardz

18. CI Pipeline
Developers GIT
Check-in
CI(Jenkins
)
Poll - 5s
Checkout
Compile
Static Analysis
Run Unit test
Run Code Coverage
Deploy
Run Smoke Test
FailedNotify Team
Limit
failed
Notify Team
Limit
failed
Notify Team
Test
Failed
Dev
QA
SLT
IT
Run
Regression
Run
Performance
Run Security
NightlyContinuously
Compile
Static Analysis
Run Unit test
Run Code
Coverage
Notify Team

19. Case Study - I
Structure
PO
SM
TL
WFH
Practices
• 4 hrs. of Sprint Planning every 2 weeks over the phone
• 30 mins of Daily Stand-up every evening over the phone
• 30 mins of demo & retro every 2 weeks over the phone
• No Backlog grooming sessions , No mid sprint review
• Negligible use of video conferencing facility for meetings
Culture
• ‘We’ vs. ‘They’ Culture
• No travel
• Low level of collaboration
• Tool based communication
• No ambassadorship (Proxy PO)
Business Outcomes
• Low Predictability in ‘Do’ vs. ‘Say’ Ratio
• Unpredictable Throughput & Velocity
• Variable Quality Deliverables
• High Cycle Time
• Low Agile Index Score
• Low team morale & trust with the business
Scrum Team
Onshore
Offshore
(Loc 1)
Offshore
(Loc 2)
Offshore
(Loc 3)
DM
TL – Technical Lead DM – Delivery Manager
Dispersed
teams
Doing Agile

20. Case Study - II
Structure
PO
SM
TL
Practices
• Sprint Planning in 2 parts – one with PO & other with the
team in a collocated, collaborative fashion
• Co-located Daily Stand-up in the morning
• Focused refinement, backlog available for next 2 sprints
• Review of ‘DONE’ stories with Proxy PO on an ongoing basis
• Use of Task Board as Information Radiator
• Effective facilitation of retrospectives using white boards and
collaborative techniques to inspect, adapt, generate ideas
and recognize team
• Effective use of agile metrics
Culture
• ‘One’ Team Culture
• Proxy PO for clarifications, reviews and feedback
• High level of collaboration
• Face to Face communication
• Frequent get together and team parties
Business Outcomes
• High Predictability in ‘Do’ vs. ‘Say’ Ratio
• Increased Throughput & Velocity
• High Quality Deliverables
• Increased Speed to Market
• High Agile Index Score
• High team morale & trust with the business
Proxy PO
Scrum Team
DM
Onshore
Offshore
(co-located /
same premises)
TL – Technical Lead DM – Delivery Manager
Being Agile

21. References
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.95.8032&rep=rep1&type=pdf
3. Distributed Extreme Programming
http://wikispeed.org/
1. Wikispeed
http://blog.crisp.se/2012/11/14/henrikkniberg/scaling-agile-at-spotify
2. Spotify
https://www.solutionsiq.com/docs/successful-distributed-team-working-patterns.pdf
4. Distributed Agile Working Patterns

22. THANK YOU !