1. Distributed Agile
Lessons Learned Working
with Offshore Teams

2. About Stephane
• Consultant for banks, insurances, European
institutions & SMEs
• Java Architect (16+) & Agile Practionner (7+)
• Co-founder of Arexo Consulting
stephane.rondal@arexo.be
@stephanerondal

3. • Context
• Problems
• Solutions
• Q&A

4. The Project
Confidential

5. Architecture
Confidential

6. Geographical Dispersion

7. Differences: Language & Religion

8. Differences: Time

9. Management’s Fear

10. Problems

11. Bad Comprehension of Requirements

12. Slipping Planning

13. Teams Blaming Each Other

14. Overall Low Quality

15. Dissatisfaction of Management

16. Build Respect In

17. Send Ambassadors Out

18. Alignment

19. Align Iteration Boundaries

20. Iteration Plan is a Contract
Agreed upon by developers

21. Align Estimation Techniques

22. Multi-disciplined Teams

23. No Server Team/GUI Team

24. Smart Slicing of Work

25. Being eXtreme

26. How to Improve Communication

27. Communicating Requirements
& Vision

28. Scrum of Scrums

29. But sometimes you just need to adapt

30. RUP Use Cases

31. UC-SC-xx – Login
Description Basic Flow
The user shall • The user requests to open
authenticate himself in a console (supervision,
order to be able to use the configuration,
system. administration)
• The SC requests the user
Actors to provide his username
User (initiator) and his password.
Supervision Console (SC) • …
Flow of Events
This use case begins
when…

32. Wireframes

33. Relentless Push

34. Relentless Push

35. Review Code Often

36. Integrate Often

37. Invaluable Tools

38. It’s All About
• Smoothing (cultural) differences
• Reducing inter-team
dependencies
• Increasing cross-team awareness
/ syntony

39. Conclusion
It’s just common sense
but common sense is not that
common