The presentation was initially given at the Conference Sundsvall42 2012 and describes how Loxysoft's aproach to working with distributed teams

1. It takes two to tango
Distributed Teams
Mille Bessö

2. What’s the problem?
• Agile Development is how we do it
these days...
• ...but Agile emphasizes proximity!

3. Agile Highlights – from the Manifesto
• ”Business people and developers
must work together daily throughout
the project.”
• “The most efficient and effective
method of conveying information to
and within a development team is
face-to-face conversation.”

4. The solution
A successful solution must address:
• The Team
• The Requirements
• The Trust
• The Tools

5. The Team
• Product Owner in Östersund and
Härnösand, developers in
Östersund, developers in Chisinau
and customers all over the place
• Who is in the wrong place?
• Everything is fine as long as
everyone accepts that everyone is
distributed.

6. The Team
• Long term committments
• We speak code (in our case C#,
Erlang and Javascript)

7. The Requirements
• Skype is your friend.
• Short, scheduled meetings often.
• We do demos twice a week, have daily standups (of course), biweekly
retrospectives and ad-hoc meetings as often as we need.
• We speak functionality with Product
Owners
• Demo, demo, demo
• Release often (at least try to)
• Developers are clever, they will
know the business given time.

8. The Trust
• Reflect together on what you are
doing.
• Frequent retrospectives
• Follow up on things that stop you (the impediment list)
• Review each other’s work
• Code reviews
• UI reviews
• User Story reviews
• Avoid hieararchies within the Team
• Cooperative code ownership – anyone can (and should!) review anyone
else’s code.

9. The Tools
• Anything that works and that does
not get in the way
• Trello (tracking progress and workflow)
• Trac (tickets and revisions)
• Subversion (Source Code Management)
• Skype (calls and chats)
• Balsamiq (UI mocks)
• Code Collaborator (code reviews, but it’s a change waiting to happen)
• TeamCity (Contiuous Integration)
• GoToMeeting (Screen sharing)
• Powerpoint (just kidding)

10. Questions?