As Agile and Scrum are adopted by an increasing number of companies, this book from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde provides important thinking tools to remind us that it is more important to “be agile” than to “do agile”. Scrum or Lean are frameworks that we can use for continuous improvement of our software development process and not tools that should be applied blindly like cooking recipes.

This article focuses on the obstacles to using Agile in a distributed team environment and recommends how to counter them with what is called “de-Agile.” De-Agile is tailoring Agile to fit your team by taking out processes that don’t make sense and tweaking those that need to be modified to suit your needs. In a distributed team environment, de-Agile is mostly about removing the sense of being distributed. You need to educate each team member about the additional communication responsibilities required when working with remote team members and emphasize the …

This podcast interviews Rini van Solingen about scrum and agile software development in distributed settings where the team is spread across different locations, different buildings or even different countries and continents.

Some estimates say that 80% of Software development projects are now global. According to these trends, if you work in or manage a co-located team, it will not last long. There are two approaches to global projects: outsourcing and distributed teams. My concern is distributed teams, where team members can work from a location of their choice.

Have you worked on a distributed team where management apparently thought it should hobble local members to make everybody equally frustrated and ineffective? The Agile Manifesto principles say that:
1) Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
2) The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

In this blog post, Joseph Little proposes a set of suggestions and questions that should help you to think on how you should make decisions about distributed scrum.

The article “Distributed Teams and Agile” by Craig Knighton shares experiences and a model to organize and operate distributed Agile teams. It conveys a simple main message: Agile is the best way to manage distributed software development teams.

After acting as scrum master for several months on a distributed team with people in six different locations, three different time zones and two different countries, Jon Archer offers ten tips to help get past those inevitable awkward silences in Scrum teleconferences.

“After working for some years in the domains of large, multisite, and offshore development, we have distilled our experience and advice down to the following: Don’t’ do it.”
“Scaling Lean & Agile Development – Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum”, Craig Larman & Bas Vodde, Addison -Wesley

Written by Jeff Sutherland, Anton Victorov, and Jack Blount, “Distributed Scrum: Agile Project Management with Outsourced Development Teams” analyzes and recommends new best practices for globally distributed agile teams. Toyota routinely achieves four times the productivity and twelve times the quality of competitors. Can Scrum do the same for globally distributed teams? Two agile companies, SirsiDynix using Scrum, and StarSoft Development Labs using Scrum with some XP engineering practices, achieved comparable performance developing a Java application with over 1,000,000 lines of code. SirsiDynix best …