Software Development Roundtable: Maximizing Distributed Agile Development Teams

There
are some that claim that in order to maintain the highest levels of
productivity, everyone has to be in the office.  Others find that with the
need to find the best, perhaps specialized talent, teams are most likely
distributed across multiple locations utilizing both onshore and offshore
resources. 

 At tonight’s software development roundtable
session, Steve Habermas, VP of Product Development at Verivo
Software
and Mark Ringer, Director of Engineering, at Rally
Software facilitated a terrific conversation on the
decision to distribute a team, how to organize and create trust and coherence
among team members, the infrastructure to be considered in terms of
collaboration, and the tools and tracking mechanisms to help be successful.
 Mark has teams distributed across the world from Boulder, Colorado to
Helsinki, Finland. Take a look at Mark’s presentation for some tips and pictures of what has
worked for them. 

Steve Habermas
gave distributed team examples from 3 different companies that he has worked
for.  He and the audience agreed that you have to overcome trust and
cultural issues and present projects differently based on the country that you
are currently working with.  Steve recommended organizing teams geographically
to maximize colocation – it’s hard to beat.  

A quick
note, many of you were interested in agile modeling and metrics.  Brad Neighbors, from VMWare recommended
@scottwambler Www.agilemodeling.com.

Thanks
to Endurance International for being terrific hosts and our software development
cluster sponsors: DYN, InterSystems, Rally Software, Verivo Software and
VMWare.  

We
hope to see you all again at our next session in June on Automated Testing.
 

Christine
Nolan

@c3nolan

MassTLC