Virtual teams get a bad press - especially in agile world. Anyone who has ever worked in geo-distributed teams know how difficult and ineffective such teams usually are. However due to various good reasons most of the global companies still distribute their teams across geographies. And some of them do it with very good results...
Wojciech has been working in geographically distributed teams and/or for remote customers in Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, Israel, United States, Australia and Canada for 12 years. Some of these teams were far from perfect, whereas the others were very effective and really successful. Despite changing tools or technologies and evolving agile practices, the most important factor in an agile geo-distributed team has remained the same for years - the human.
This presentation covers these values, principles and practices which have proven to be the most important in creating highly productive agile software development culture in geographically distributed environment - including such extreme situations were team members live on the opposite side of the globe (like Australia, Europe and the North America). It also describes how proper tooling not only enables effective remote collaboration, but also provides several advantages over collocated teams.
Video over just voice – sleeping warning. 2 – 4 people work best. Avoid more than 7, unless it an announcement
Giora Morein Ambassadors and Carrier Pigeons One visitor vs many at a time Cities matter Frequency of meetings Company apartments Atlassian secondmends
No sense of responsibility. Us-them approach
Also domain knowledge here, devs there Turning developers into „coders” or „programmers” Destroys trust, hampers productivity
Communication, travel, management, etc. - overhead Poor workers – poor results Smart workers – they will know how much you earn and get frustrated pretty soon Great people are not cheap regardless of the country, cheap workforce fallacy Esher Derby – train people and they will go, but don't train and they will stay...
Remote teams are different Planning is different, dynamics is different It's easy to get disconnected Allocate extra budget for travels
Too many F2F meetings – lower efficiency, being a host to often is tiresome, costly Too many virtual meetings – frustration Our rule – max. 1 – 2 virtual meetings a week (with as few participants as possible) Max. 1 - 3 F2F meetings a year More participants => video conf