Agile development - Remote/Distributed teams

Applying Agile methodologies at the best of times can be difficult, getting all the business to buy into the concept is a tough sell. I see the key strength of Agile as regular communications via demos, scrums, kanban… all of these are about communicating progress, however what do you do when you teams are spread globally or on customer sites. In this situation the Kanban whiteboard and post-its don’t work.
I currently work in a company where the development team is spread across multiple regions, from Vietnam to the UK and many stops in-between, people work from home on a regular basis, all this makes communication hard. To overcome this we use a couple of techniques to address the gap and make it feel like we are all in one office.

Daily Scrum

This goes without saying but we use Skype/Lync both these tools allow for our whole team to do a stand-up(seat down with headsets). Ideally getting people to have the video camera on where possible, keep the call short and sweet.

Digital Team Board

Dashboards

We are a Microsoft house traditionally so we opted TFS as our project tracking system. The benefit of TFS 2012 is the introduction of the Web access and dashboard. This new web access brings a wealth of tools with it which in most of the case just don’t exists in the Visual Studio version.

Team Capacity

In TFS dashboard you can also configure and view you Team capacity Vs Requirements. This is a really powerful live view of each individuals ability to deliver, allowing for you to take into consideration holidays per sprint/iteration.

Digital Kanban

In TFS you also have several Kanban style dashboards to allow you to share progress at a multiple of levels.

1. Work>Board>Requirements
2. Work>Board>Team
3. Work>Backlog>Board

All are pretty similar as below but obviously depict different information. One great bit of the Backlog board is the ability to customize the columns, this allows for you to add more steps to your process very easily.

The key is to share these boards during you daily calls with the team, and share them outside the team. The point is to replicate this as a white board on the wall.

Live Burn down

Using the information gathered about the requirements and the capacity TFS is also capable to provide a burn down, this is great to share to the non-technical teams the estimates completion date.
A Burndown is rarely a perfectly linear line, in all processes you will have times where development is more productive than others. Be careful when sharing this that people do not get scared that you are behind or add work because you are in front, the line is a prediction and not fact.

Custom Counters

On the home page of TFS 2012 you also have the ability to configure TFS Query counters, ideal for showing bug counts etc. In addition you can also add on this screen the Build status, for continuous integration this is key as it will show the whole team that the builds broke before they go home for the day.

Alternatives to TFS Dashboard

You have plenty of add-ons for TFS which can achieve similar and more, below is a list but I have not tested them all.
http://scrumdashboard.codeplex.com/
http://www.telerik.com/teampulse/tfs
If you do not use TFS you do have alternatives options still with Team-City for example you can use
http://www.sonarqube.org/

But where is my whiteboard

So, all the above is great but how do we make sure people look at it? “When we was not digital we could ensure that the team could see it everyday buy having it on the whiteboard in the dev area” is the question I can hear. The simple answer is you cannot make sure people look at it unless you keep a board, but lets have a digital board.

Display

We opted for a 42inch screen in each location local and remote(obviously we could not enforce this on home works). We also had to have something to run our display so we repurposed an old laptop, most companies have one, it really doesn’t have to be special.

Sharing content

Now we had our screen we needed some content, I wanted a scrolling screen showing everything from burndowns, capacities, company twitter… The main goal is to make this something worth looking at daily.
Things I have on our screen:

• Company Twitter feed
• Each Project Dashboard
• Burndown chart (Note for this you need to access the tfs team chart api, to do this press F12 click on the chart and it will have an image URL, this is your api).
• Team Capacities
• Popular Blogs
• Microsoft Training sessions
• Company Logo
• Team Social Pictures

One of the key things is to pick content that will change naturally, we need to make the screen engaging.

Adding live web pages (TFS Dashboards)

To achieve this I come across a tool called LiveWeb which is a addin for PowerPoint, you can follow the guide to setting up a presentation containing web pages here. The key benefit that LiveWeb brings is the fact your web pages will refresh each time you load a slide, showing only the latest information.

Looping you PowerPoint

In PowerPoint 2013 you have the ability to loop your slide show based on timings, as below.

• Click on “Set up Slide Show”

• Select “Loop Continously until ‘Esc’” and “Using Timings, if present”

• For each slide set the timings, you do this by click on “Start Recording from Current Slide…”, you then need to wait for the time you want for this slide and then press esc. Do this for every slide until all of them have a timing associated, this process is better for adding new slides as you can change the timing for the current slide only and not all.

• Press F5 and away you go.

You also have the option to Broadcast this presentation, with this option you can potentially let other remote location view the exact same presentation, although I never tried this.
More to come as we continue on our journey of multiple location development…..