I have an article posted at InfoQ, Swarming Across Distance. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. You have to think about how to swarm. It’s not always intuitively obvious. Enjoy!
Once you have a program (a collection of interrelated projects focused on one business goal) and you have technical debt, you have a much bigger problem. Not just because the technical debt is likely bigger. Not just because you have more people. But because you also geographically distributed teams, and those teams are almost always
I have posted my two most recent Pragmatic Manager email newsletters: Building Rapport Distributed? Yes. Alone? No. If you think you subscribe, but you are not receiving your own personal copy, email me. We’ll discern what is going on with your subscription and fix it. If you don’t already subscribe, and you would like your
Shane and the participants and I had a great time at the Geographically Distributed Agile Teams workshop last week. We ran a couple of simulations, and here are some of the emails the teams had: Do you have something for us to test yet? We have completed the card Hi again. I didn’t hear back
Imagine this scenario: you want to transition to agile, and you have a geographically dispersed team with people all over the world. You have two developers in the UK and two in Boston, two testers in Portland, Oregon, a product manager in Brazil, and you, the project manager are in Sweden. And, you are pretty
My column, Roll Your Own, about how to organize for teamwork for a geographically distributed agile project team is up. Please leave comments there. Enjoy! Oh, and I am just about to send the logistics email for our workshop next week on geographically distributed agile teams next week in Pleasanton, CA. I am sure we
I’ve had several conversations in email and with clients recently that have all been about this question: “What do we do about our infrastructure?” Either the project or the program has to create/update/upgraded their architecture or automated test infrastructure, pay down technical debt, or somehow do something that’s not part of a story. And, that’s
Tom Cagley interviewed me a few weeks ago on his Software Process and Measurement Cast. It’s posted now, as # 180. When Tom interviews me, he makes me think. This is good. I would love to hear your comments about this one. We started with transparency and wove our way around to several topics. I
Distributed? Yes. Alone? No. As I’ve sent these Pragmatic Managers about geographically distributed teams and received these responses from many of you, I keep hearing one theme: “I thought I was the only one dealing with this issue.” You are not alone. Many of you have sent emails and asked questions. I answered those privately,
Developing and Nurturing Respect in Geographically Distributed Teams Joseph, a tester, was reading an email from a developer in Germany. He exploded out of his chair, and ran to the product owner. “Those people have no respect for us! How can they ask us to do this?? Don’t they realize what they are asking for?