Agile Scrum with Virtual Teams

November, 2013

Luca Sturaro

SW Project Lead / Facilitator

Agile Manifesto

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Agile GURUs:

“Agile with Virtual Teams is simply Agile”

IS IT TRUE?

Agenda

Project & Team composition

Sometimes

During sprints

Day by Day

Bug-fixing

Summary

Project & Team composition

Environment:

Desktop & Embedded System SW application for wireless TLC devices (Microwave Radio Links)

Team: Cross-Functional

1 Facilitator + 5 engineers (S&A, SW, I&V, SW Pre-Integration) in Italy

2 Java SW engineers in Bangalore (India)

Product Owner in Italy - iteration period: 2 weeks

Sometimes

Product Owner interactions & negotiation:

Conference calls & Emails: OK

Planning Activities

Planning Poker is OK but it is “off-balance”

Co-located team members' estimation is uniform

Different locations perturb team members' evaluations

Our action: Clarify among team members divergent estimations

During sprints

Sprint & Velocity:

Tasks are not performed at the same rate on both sides of the team

Communication is not immediate as to be in the same place

Bottlenecks during feature development

Our action: Re-planning & reduce throughput

Day by Day (1/2)

Kanban:

How do we manage Kanban?

Simple solution: Use a virtual one!

Most of them are free web based applications (trello, kanbanpad...)

My company policy does not allow it!

Patents, no requirements or user stories on the web

Our action: Temporarily using emails, excel sheets report

Day by Day (2/2)

Daily Scrum:

Daily scrum in conference call every day for 15 min?

Room availability for conference calls

Team members get bored

“common overhead” perception, not “agile”

What about lag? Bangalore: UTC/GMT +5:30 hours

Our action: reduce daily scrum frequency using conference calls (requested by team)

Bug-fixing

Bug-fixing during sprints:

Again: Bangalore: UTC/GMT +5:30 hours

Bug-fixing rate is not the same on both sides

In fact, GUI got more bugs than in previous releases

Our action: take bug-fixing “rythm” during an iteration. In our case, notify bugs in the evening, solution for the following day at noon.

Mitigation: reduced bugs in embedded software using test automation

Summary

Do “Agile” with virtual teams....

Company infrastructure ready:

Virtual Kanban, SW planning tools

Rooms for audio and/or video conferences

Agile is grounded on “communication”, it's more difficult with virtual teams

Take into account lag time evaluating time-zones

Thank you