Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

The popular Agile literature can often seam naive when it comes to how Agilists work with project stakeholders:- Extreme Programming (XP) has a practice called On-Site Customer where one or more people work closely with your team to provide information and to make decisions in a timely manner.- Scrum has the role of Product Owner who is the one single person that the development team goes to for decisions about requirements. - Agile Modeling (AM) has the practice of Active Stakeholder Participation which extends On-Site Customer to get the stakeholder(s) actively involved with the modeling effort through the use of inclusive tools and techniques.

These are great strategies for small, co-located teams doing straightforward development, but they quickly fall apart at scale. This occurs for several reasons:1. Stakeholders are a diverse group. Your stakeholders include end users, business management, project funders, enterprise architects, operations staff, support staff, other system development teams, and many others. Different people have different, and often contradictory, requirements and they certainly have different priorities. It's questionable whether a single person, or a handful of persons, can adequately represent this diverse group.2. One person becomes a bottleneck. Even with a small co-located team this is a problem, let alone one that is geographically distributed or one that is very large. There's no way that a single person can be available 24/7 in a responsive manner to support distributed teams.3. It's a difficult role. The Product Owner/Customer (POC) is responsible for representing the business to the development team. They're making important decisions on a regular basis, decisions which they'll be held accountable for.4. One person becomes a serious project risk. Not only is it questionable whether a single person can fairly represent all stakeholders, even if they could what happens if you lose that person? They effectively become a single point of failure for your team.

To scale this role, consider the following strategies:1. Recognize the true scope of the POC role. Not only are they stakeholder proxies they also are a development team representative to the stakeholder community as a whole. As stakeholder proxies they'll make decisions and prioritize the work, they'll run requirements elicitation sessions, they'll negotiate priorities, and they'll put the development team in contact with stakeholders who have expertise in specific aspects of the domain. As team representatives they'll often demo the current version of the system to other stakeholders, communicate the status of the project to people, and respond to various requests for information from the stakeholders.2. Have multiple people in it. A single POC works well for small, co-located teams developing simple software. At scale you'll soon discover that you need multiple people in this role so that they don't become a bottleneck. For distributed teams it's common to see each subteam have one or more POCs who are managed by a primary/chief POC. The primary POC typically works on the coordinating team with the chief architect (I'll talk about this role in a future blog posting) and the program manager (also a topic for a future blog posting).3. Train them in business analysis skills. The person(s) in the POC role need good business analysis skills. If fact, it's common for people who were formerly BAs for traditional teams to step into the POC role, particularly with BAs who originally come from the business side of your organization. This strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. As a BA they've likely got solid business knowledge but their instincts may motivate them to take a documentation-driven approach to providing information to the development team instead of a collaboration-based approach. Be careful.4. Consider the full system development lifecycle. There's far more to the POC role than supporting the development team during Construction iterations. During "Iteration 0", the Inception phase for an Agile RUP project or the warm-up phase for an Eclipse Way project, the POC(s) will often lead the initial requirements envisioning efforts. The product backlog, or better yet your work item list, needs to come from somewhere after all. During the release iteration(s), the Transition phase for RUP or the End-Game phase for Eclipse Way, the POC(s) will focus on communicating the upcoming release to the stakeholder community, will be actively involved with any final user acceptance testing (UAT), and may even be involved with training end users.

In my January 2008 column in Dr Dobb's Journal, posted at http://www.ddj.com/architect/204801134 , I provide detailed advice about how to scale the way that you work with stakeholders on Agile projects by applying the practices of Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD). There's no magic solution, you just need to choose to organize yourself effectively. The good news is that you can easily work with stakeholders at scale.[Read More]

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding around the topic of "Agile RUP", so I thought I'd put in my $0.02 on the subject. I suspect that some of the misunderstanding stems from lack of knowledge about RUP, either because the person either hasn't looked at RUP and is simply parroting the misinformation they heard from other people or because they've seen or been involved with questionable implmentations of RUP in the past. For the first problem I suggest reading "Agility and Discipline Made Easy" by Per Kroll and Bruce MacIsaac because it gives a pretty good overview of applying RUP in an Agile manner.

The second problem is a bit more challenging to overcome because of the very nature of RUP. RUP isn't a software process, it's actually a software process framework from which you instantiate software processes. Big difference. You select, and tailor where appropriate, the process elements appropriate to your situation. Unfortunately many organizations appear to have struggled with this concept. A common anti-pattern which are organizations that look at the RUP and say "there's a lot of really good stuff here" (absolutely true) and then conclude "we need to do it all" (yikes). That's the equivalent of going to a buffet and trying to eat all of the food in it, very clearly a bad dietary strategy. Just like you need to pick and choose only the food that you should eat, hopefully being mature enough to choose food that is good for you, you need to pick the appropriate process elements which are good for you. This requires significant experience and process knowledge to do effectively because software development is a complex endeavor and the best approach for one situation may be completely different for another situation. A second anti-pattern is when organizations assign their existing process engineers, who are often used to document-heavy serial processes, and ask them to tailor the RUP. It isn't surprising that they often produce a document-heavy and serial version of the RUP (at that point I would argue that it's no longer RUP).

The point is that these problems are self-inflicted, that these organizations could just as easily have chosen to instantiate the RUP in a light and effective manner, and better yet in a truly agile manner. In practice the RUP can be as agile as you want it to be, but you need to choose to work this way.

Some important observations:1. RUP socialized many of the concepts that Agile was built on. Although the concept of iterative development was around long before RUP, for many organizations RUP made the concept palatable through its mature approach (particularly when compared to some of the RAD/Spiral strategies at the time). In many organizations RUP also socialized testing throughout the entire lifecycle, delivery of working software each iteration, and collaborating closely with stakeholders throughout the project (to name but a few). These ideas seem straightfoward today, and they've been taken to even greater extremes in some cases , but back in the mid-90s this was pretty heady stuff for the vast majority of practitioners within the IT community. 2. RUP has adopted many of the "new" agile techniques. RUP is a process framework containing a wealth of IT practices, including both agile and traditional practices (and a lot in between). RUP continues to evolve, capturing industry best practices from many sources. So naturally RUP has adopted many agile concepts such as test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration, embracing change, and others. Check it out and see for yourself.3. RUP is as agile, or non-agile, as you want to make it. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- the RUP is a process framework from which you instantiate processes. You've got complete control over how agile the RUP is.4. RUP contains many of critical techniques for scaling agile. In a previous blog posting I overviewed the issues around scaling, not only is team size an issue but so is geographical distribution, regulatory compliance, application complexity, legacy systems/policies, governance, and organizational distribution.

I'm sure some people are reading this and thinking to themselves "of course this is what Scott is going to say, that's his job." Well, think what you want, but I was writing about how to take an agile approach several years before joining IBM. In fact, I believe that I'm the first to do so, writing about it in print in my Software Development column back in 2001 and more importantly in my book Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for XP and UP in 2002. And, if you go poking around the web a bit, you'll see a lot other have written about this too, including Craig Larman, Ivar Jacobson, Bob Martin, Gary Evans, Doug Rosenberg and many more.

I'd like to leave you with a sound bite: "The RUP done right is Agile. The RUP done wrong is just plain wrong."[Read More]

Test-driven development (TDD) is a common agile programming technique which has both specification and validation aspects. With TDD, you specify your software in detail on a just-in-time (JIT) basis via executable tests that are run in a regression manner to confirm that the system works to your current understanding of what your stakeholders require.

TDD is the combination of test-first development (TFD) and refactoring. With TFD, you write a single test (at either the requirements level with customer/acceptance tests or the design level with developer tests) and then you write just enough software to fulfill that test. Refactoring is a technique where you make a small change to your existing code to improve its design without changing its semantics.

TDD offers several benefits:1. It enables you to take small, safe steps during development, increasing programmer productivity.2. It increases quality. Agile developers are doing more testing, and doing it more often, than ever before. We're also fixing the problems that we find right on the spot.3. It helps to push validation activities early in the lifecycle, decreasing the average cost to fix defects (which rises exponentially the longer it takes you to detect them).4. Through single sourcing information, by treating tests as both specifications and as tests, we reduce the work required, increasing productivity.5. We leave behind valuable, up-to-date, detailed specifications for the people who come after us. Have you ever met a maintenance programmer who wouldn't want a full regression test suite for the code that they're working with?

But TDD isn't perfect. Although TDD is great at specifying code at a fine-grain level, tests simply don't scale to address higher level business process and architectural issues. Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD) enables you to scale TDD through initial envisioning of the requirements and architecture as well as just-in-time (JIT) modeling at the beginning and during construction iterations. To scale requirements-level TDD, you must recognize that customer tests are very good at specifying the details, but not so good at providing overall context. High-level business process models, conceptual domain models, and use cases are good at doing so, and these work products are often created as part of your initial requirements envisioning and iteration modeling activities. Similarly, to scale design-level TDD you must recognize that developer tests are very finely grained but once again do not provide overall context. High-level architecture sketches created during envisioning activities help set your initial technical direction. During each construction iteration, you'll do more detailed design modeling to think through critical issues before you implement them via TDD.

You also need to scale the validation aspects of TDD. TDD is in effect an approach to confirmatory testing where you validate the system to the level of your understanding of the requirements. The fundamental challenge with confirmatory testing, and hence TDD, is that it assumes that stakeholders actually know and can describe their requirements. Therefore you need to add investigative testing practices which explore issues that your stakeholders may not have thought of, such as usability issues, system integration issues, production performance issues, security issues, and a multitude of others.

For further reading, I suggest:1. My article "Introduction to TFD/TDD" at http://www.agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html which overviews TDD.2. My February 2008 column in Dr. Dobb's Journal entitled "Scaling TDD" at http://www.ddj.com/architect/205207998 which explores this issue in detail. 3. Andrew Glover's article "In pursuit of code quality: Adventures in behavior-driven development" at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-cq09187/ which describes a new-and-improved take on TDD called BDD.[Read More]

During 2007 Per Kroll and myself invested a significant amount of time development a framework for lean development governance. This effort resulted in a series of three articles that were published in Rational Edge and a recently published white paper. The articles go into the various practices in detail whereas the paper provides an overview aimed at executives. I also recently did a webcast which is now available online. The URLs are at the bottom of this blog posting.

Development governance isn’t a sexy topic, but it critical to the success of any IT department. I like to compare traditional, command-and-control approaches to governance to herding cats – you do a bunch of busy work which seems like a great idea in theory, but in the end the cats will ignore your efforts and stay in the room. Yet getting cats out of a room is easy to accomplish, as long as you know what motivates cats. Simply wave some fish in front of their noses and you’ll find that you can lead them out of the room with no effort at all. Effective governance for lean development isn’t about command and control. Instead, the focus is on enabling the right behaviors and practices through collaborative and supportive techniques. It is far more effective to motivate people to do the right thing than it is to try to force them to do so.

This framework is based on the philosophical foundation provided by the 7 principles proposed in the book “Lean Software Development” by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. The 7 principles are:1. Eliminate Waste. The three biggest sources of waste in software development are the addition of extra features, churn, and crossing organizational boundaries. Crossing organizational boundaries can increase costs by 25% or more because they create buffers which slow down response time and interfere with communication. It is critical that development teams are allowed to organize themselves, and run themselves, in a manner which reflects the work that they’re trying to accomplish. 2. Build Quality In. If you routinely find problems with your verification process then your process must be defective. When it comes to governance, if you regularly find that developers are doing things that you don’t want them to do or are not doing things that they should be then your approach to governance must be at fault. The strategy is not to make governance yet another set of activities that you layer on top of your software process but instead should embed into your process to make it as easy as possible for developers to do the right thing. 3. Create Knowledge. Planning is useful, but learning is essential. 4. Defer Commitment. You do not need to start software development by defining a complete specification, but instead work iteratively. You can support the business effectively through flexible architectures that are change tolerant and by scheduling irreversible decisions to the last possible moment. This also requires the ability to closely couple end-to-end business scenarios to capabilities developed in potentially several different applications by different projects. 5. Deliver Fast. It is possible to deliver high-quality systems fast and in a timely manner. By limiting the work of a team to their capacity, by not trying to force them to do more than they are capable but instead ask them to self-organize and thereby determine what they can accomplish, you can establish a reliable and repeatable flow of work. 6. Respect People. Sustainable advantage is gained from engaged, thinking people. The implication is that you need a human resources strategy which is specific to IT, that you need to focus on enabling teams not on controlling them. 7. Optimize the Whole. If you want to govern your development efforts effectively you must look at the bigger picture, not just individual project teams. You need to understand the high-level business process which the individual systems support, processes which often cross multiple systems. You need to manage programs of interrelated systems so that you can deliver a complete product to your stakeholders. Measurements should address how well you’re delivering business value, because that is the raison d’etre of your IT department.

Based on our experiences, and guided by the 7 principles, Per Kroll and I identified 18 practices of lean development governance. We've organized these practices into 6 categories:1. The Roles & Responsibilities category: - Promote Self-Organizing Teams. The best people for planning work are the ones who are going to do it. - Align Team Structure With Architecture. The organization of your project team should reflect the desired architectural structure of the system you are building to streamline the activities of the team.

2. The Organization category: - Align HR Policies With IT Values. Hiring, retaining, and promoting technical staff requires different strategies compared to non-technical staff. - Align Stakeholder Policies With IT Values. Your stakeholders may not understand the implications of the decisions that they make, for example that requiring an “accurate” estimate at the beginning of a project can dramatically increase project risk instead of decrease it as intended.

3. The Processes category: - Adapt the Process. Because teams vary in size, distribution, purpose, criticality, need for oversight, and member skillset you must tailor the process to meet a team’s exact needs. - Continuous Improvement. You should strive to identify and act on lessons learned throughout the project, not just at the end. - Embedded Compliance. It is better to build compliance into your day-to-day process, instead of having a separate compliance process that often results in unnecessary overhead. - Iterative Development. An iterative approach to software delivery allows progressive development and disclosure of software components, with a reduction of overall failure risk, and provides an ability to make fine-grained adjustment and correction with minimal lost time for rework. - Risk-Based Milestones. You want to mitigate the risks of your project, in particular business and technical risks, early in the lifecycle. You do this by having throughout your project several milestones that teams work toward.

4. The Measures category: - Simple and Relevant Metrics. You should automate metrics collection as much as possible, minimize the number of metrics collected, and know why you’re collecting them. - Continuous Project Monitoring. Automated metrics gathering enables you to monitor projects and thereby identify potential issues so that you can collaborate closely with the project team to resolve problems early.

5. The Mission & Principles category: - Business-Driven Project Pipeline. You should invest in the projects that are well-aligned to the business direction, return definable value, and match well with the priorities of the enterprise. - Pragmatic Governance Body. Effective governance bodies focus on enabling development teams in a cost-effective and timely manner. They typically have a small core staff with a majority of members being representatives from the governed organizations. - Staged Program Delivery. Programs, which are collections of related projects, should be rolled out in increments over time. Instead of holding back a release to wait for a subproject, each individual subprojects must sign up to predetermined release date. If the subproject misses it skips to the next release, minimizing the impact to the customers of the program. - Scenario-Driven Development. By taking a scenario-driven approach, you can understand how people will actually use your system, thereby enabling you to build something that meets their actual needs. The whole cannot be defined without understanding the parts, and the parts cannot be defined in detail without understanding the whole.

6. The Polices & Standards category: - Valued Corporate Assets. Guidance, such as programming guidelines or database design conventions, and reusable assets such as frameworks and components, will be adopted if they are perceived to add value to developers. You want to make it as easy as possible for developers to comply to, and more importantly take advantage of, your corporate IT infrastructure. - Flexible Architectures. Architectures that are service-oriented, component-based, or object-oriented and implement common architectural and design patterns lend themselves to greater levels of consistency, reuse, enhanceability, and adaptability. - Integrated Lifecycle Environment. Automate as much of the “drudge work”, such as metrics gathering and system build, as possible. Your tools and processes should fit together effectively throughout the lifecycle.

The URLs for the 3 articles:Principles and Organizations: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/jun07/kroll/Processes and Measures: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/jul07/kroll_ambler/Roles and Policies: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/aug07/ambler_kroll/

The URL for the white paper:https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_US&source=swg-ldg

The URL for the webcast:https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_US&source=dw-c-wcsdpr&S_PKG=112907C[Read More]

A common question that I keep running into with customers is whether you can take an agile approach to service oriented architecture (SOA). The quick answer is yes, because Agile is orthogonal to the implementation technologies used. You can take an agile approach developing COBOL applications running on mainframes, fat-client Java applications, multi-tier J2EE applications, and yes, even services. Granted, it's easier to do with some technologies than others, either because of the nature of the technology or because of the supporting tools.

The long answer is "yes, but". You don't adopt an SOA approach for the sheer joy of doing so, instead you very likely want to improve the level of reuse within your organization. To succeed at SOA-driven reuse you need an enterprise focus, something that doesn't appear to be very common on many agile teams. Therein lies the challenge. Several strategies for improving your chances with Agile SOA, and SOA in general, follows:1. Invest in some initial enterprise architecture modeling. You don't need to identify all of the details up front, that would take too long and actually put the effort at risk, but you do need to set a starting point to guide development teams. Identifying the technical architecture is critical, and identifying a few basic services which would provide immediate business value to one or more teams is critical. Involve people from several application project teams to ensure that you get a wide range of input. See http://www.agiledata.org/essays/enterpriseArchitecture.html for a streamlined approach to enterprise architecture modeling. Creating big, detailed models often proves to be a waste of time because development teams are rarely motivated to read mounds of documentation.2. Build out the initial infrastructure on a real application development project. This proves that your SOA strategy actually works and puts the technical foundation in place for future teams. During this period you'll be tempted to try to support several development teams, which is feasible but dramatically increases your risk. It's also tempting to focus simply on getting the infrastructure in place without delivering any business functionality, but this risks producing an ivory-tower architecture that nobody is interested in.3. Spread the service architects out onto application development teams. The people that formulated and then proved your SOA should be actively involved on the development teams that are working with it to ensure that the teams use it appropriately and to ensure that the architects get concrete feedback which they can use to evolve the architecture. When working on agile teams, these people will need to work in a collaborative and evolutionary approach just like other team members.4. Fund reuse separately. I've lost track of the number of organizations that I've run into that fail at reuse because their development teams never have the resources to develop reusable assets. That's simply the nature of the beast -- project teams will always be more interested in addressing their own specific requirements than they are in investing the time and effort to make something reusable. The real problem here is that you expect them to act differently. A better strategy is to have a separate reuse engineering team that has the resources to monitor existing projects to look for potentially reusable assets. When they find said assets this team does the work to harvest the asset, to reengineer it to make it reusable, and then to integrate back into the original source project. The goal is to make it as painless as possible to produce reusable assets such as services. If you expect project teams to do this work out of the goodness of their hearts then you're effectively punishing them when they do the right thing. That's not a very good governance strategy, IMHO.5. The reuse team now owns the asset. Any reusable asset, including services, will need to be maintained, evolved over time, and supported. This isn't free nor is it viable for project teams to do so.

If you're interested, I provide agile strategies for both enterprise architecture and strategic reuse in the book "Enterprise Unified Process". Although written under the assumption that you're taking a RUP-based approach to development, the reality is that the EUP can extend any evolutionary/agile software development process so that it addresses the larger-scale needs of modern IT organizations.

- Scott[Read More]

The explicit phases of the Unified Process -- Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition -- and their milestones are important strategies for scaling agile software development to meet the real-world needs of modern organizations. Yes, I realize that this is heresy for hard-core agilists who can expound upon the evils of serial development, yet these very same people also take a phased approach to development although are loathe to admit it. The issue is that the UP phases are like seasons of a project: although you'll do the same types of activities all throughout a project, the extent to which you do them and the way in which you do them change depending on your goals. For example, at the beginning of a development project if you want to be effective you need to do basic things like identify the scope of the project, identify a viable architecture strategy, start putting together your team, and obtain support for the project. Towards the end of a project your focus is on the activities surrounding the deployment of your system into production, including end-of-lifecycle testing efforts, training, cleaning up of documentation, piloting the system with a subset of users, and so on. In between you focus on building the system, including analysis, design, testing, and coding of it. Your project clearly progresses through different phases, or call them seasons if the term phase doesn't suit you, whether your team is agile or not.

The UP defines four phases, each of which address a different kind of risk:1. Inception. This phase focuses on addressing business risk by having you drive to scope concurrence amongst your stakeholders. Most projects have a wide range of stakeholdres, and if they don't agree to the scope of the project and recognize that others have conflicting or higher priority needs you project risks getting mired in political infighting. In the Eclipse Way this is called the "Warm Up" iteration and in other agile processes "Iteration 0".2. Elaboration. The goal of this phase is to address technical risk by proving the architecture through code. You do this by building and end-to-end skeleton of your system which implements the highest-risk requirements. Some people will say that this approach isn't agile, that your stakeholders should by the only ones to prioritize requirements. Yes, I agree with that, but I also recognize that there are a wide range of stakeholders, including operations people and enterprise architects who are interested in the technical viability of your approach. I've also noticed that the high-risk requirements are often the high-business-value ones anyway, so you usually need to do very little reorganization of your requirements stack.3. Construction. This phase focuses on implementation risk, addressing it through the creation of working software each iteration. This phase is where you put the flesh onto the skeleton.4. Transition. The goal of this phase is to address deployment risk. There is usually a lot more to deploying software than simply copying a few files onto a server, as I indicated above. Deployment is often a complex and difficult task, one which you often need good guidance to succeed at.

Each phase ends with a milestone review, which could be as simple as a short meeting, where you meet with prime stakeholders who will make a "go/no-go" decision regarding your project. They should consider whether the project still makes sense, perhaps the situation has changed, and that you're addressing the project risks appropriately. This is important for "agile in the small" but also for "agile in the large" because at scale your risks are often much greater. Your prime stakeholders should also verify that you have in fact met the criteria for exiting the phase. For example, if you don't have an end-to-end working skeleton of your system then you're not ready to enter the Construction phase. Holding these sorts of milestone reviews improves your IT governance efforts by giving senior management valuable visibility at the level that they actually need: when you have dozens or hundreds of projects underway, you can't attend all of the daily stand up meetings of each team, nor do you even want to read summary status reports.

These milestone reviews enable you to lower project risk. Last Autumn I ran a survey via Dr. Dobb's Journal (www.ddj.com) which explore how people actually define success for IT projects and how successful we really were. We found that when people define success in their own terms that Agile has a 71% success rate compared with 63% for traditional approaches. Although it's nice to that Agile appears to be lower risk than traditional approaches, a 71% success rate still implies a 29% failure rate. The point is that it behooves us to actively monitor development projects to determine if they're on track, and if not either help them to get back on track or cancel them as soon as we possibly can. Hence the importance of occasional milestone reviews where you make go/no-go decisions. If you're interested in the details behind the project, they can be found at http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/success2007.html .

Done right, phases are critical to your project success, particularly at scale. Yes, the traditional community seems to have gone overboard with phase-based approaches, but that doesn't mean that we need to make the same mistakes. Let's keep the benefit without the cost of needless bureaucracy.[Read More]

A common misunderstanding about agile software development is that it’s only for co-located teams. Things are definitely easier for co-located teams, and as I found with both the Dr. Dobb’s 2007 and 2008 Agile Adoption surveys (www.ambysoft.com/surveys/) co-located agile teams appear to have a higher success rate than distributed teams, Having said that, many organizations are in fact succeeding at distributed agile development.

I’d like to share some strategies that I’m seeing work in practice, and in this blog posting summarizes generic strategies for distributed teams whether or not they’re agile. These strategies are:1. Do some up front planning. Distributed development is higher risk than co-located development, and one way to address that risk is to think things through. That doesn’t mean that you need to create a monolithic, 1000+ task Gantt chart, but it does mean that you should identify your major dependencies and milestone dates. Effective teams do this planning with the distributed developers actively involved (they are part of the team after all), they strive to consider all associated costs, and in particular they don’t overlook the low probability/high impact risks which often prove to be project killers.

2. Organize the team effectively. Once of the practices of Lean Development Governance (https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_US&source=swg-ldg) is to organize your team structure around either your architecture or the lines of business (LOB) supported by the programme that you’re working on. Ideally each sub-team should be responsible for one or more subsystems or modules, something that can be difficult if some of your team works alone from home, to reduce the amount of information sharing and collaboration required between disparate teams. In other words, maximize the responsibilities of the “offshore” team(s) as much as possible. A very common mistake is to organize the subteams around job specialties – for example the architects are in Toronto, the developers in Mumbai, and the testers in Singapore – because to support this team structure you have to create a phenomenal amount of documentation to support communication between the teams.

3. Do some up front modeling. The implication of organizing your team around the architecture (or LOB) is that you also need to do a bit of architecture envisioning up front. Your architecture efforts should provide guidance regarding the shared infrastructure as well as critical development conventions such as coding guidelines and data naming conventions. Architecture envisioning is also a good idea for co-located agile teams too. See http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/initialArchitectureModeling.htm for strategies to get the benefits of architecture modeling without the costs of needless documentation.

4. Recognize that communication is critical. GDD puts many barriers to communication in place, increasing overall project risk. To overcome these risks you will first need to be aware of them and act accordingly, and second, you’ll need to write more documentation than you would likely prefer. The risks associated with long-distance communication include cultural differences, time-zone differences, and the challenges with written documentation (which is the least effective way to communicate information). I make it a habit of asking open-ended questions so that I can determine whether or not the other people understand the topic under conversation. Particularly I will never ask a yes/no style of question because the simple answer of yes can mean a range of things depending on the culture. It may mean “Yes, I heard you”, “Yes, I understand what you’re saying”, or “Yes, I understand and agree with you”. When you’re dealing with people at other locations it’s good practice to ask them to summarize the conversation in writing, in particular to identify key action items and ownership of them, to ensure that everyone agrees with what was discussed. A good approach is to have the team lead on other end to do the summary so that they own it going forward.

5. Put a good technical infrastructure in place. Automate, automate, automate. In a GDD environment you need to work with collaborative multi-site tools such as ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Jazz Rational Team Concert (www.jazz.net) which enable you to share and evolve your work products (i.e. test scripts, code, documents) effectively.

In my next posting I'll describe a collection of agile-specific strategies for distributed software development teams.[Read More]

In my previous blog posting, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/ambler?entry=strategies_for_distributed_agile_teams , I overviewed several strategies for improving your effectiveness at geographically distributed development (GDD). Those strategies were fairly generic and directly applicable to both traditional and agile development teams. In this posting I focus on strategies which are more agile in nature, although they could also be applied to more traditional approaches as well. These strategies are:

1. Get the whole team together at the beginning of the project. Your goals are to build rapport amongst the team, to get to know the people that you’re working with to facilitate communication later on, and to better understand the situation on the ground. The implication is that you will need to fly some people around, increasing your initial expenses, an investment that many organizations balk at. The reality is that you will eventually end up paying for travel anyway, either because you actually flew people around or because your communication costs are higher throughout the project. In short, don’t be penny wise and pound foolish.

2. Organize your team around the system architecture. The most effective way to organize a distributed team is around the architecture of the system that you are building, not around the job functions of the people involved. In other words, if your team is in Toronto, Rome, and Bangalore then each subteam should be responsible for one or more subsystems. It would be a mistake to organize the teams around job function, for example to have the architects and analysts in Toronto, the developers in Rome, and the testers in Bangalore because this structure would require significantly more documentation and other forms of communication to coordinate the teams, increasing both cost and risk. As I mentioned in my previous blog posting you will need to invest in some initial architecture envisioning at the beginning of a project to identify the subsystems and their public interfaces, and that to do that you’ll also need to do some initial requirements envisioning to drive this architecture effort. I suggest that you take an Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD) approach to this to enable you to gain the value from modeling without the costs and risks associated with up-front comprehensive modeling and documentation that get many traditional project teams in trouble.

3. Have “daily stand-up meetings”. A common practice on co-located agile teams is to have daily stand-up meetings where people share the status of what they did yesterday, what they intend to do today, and whether they’re running into any problems. These short meetings enable team coordination. Distributed teams can do this as well, the people in a given geographical location can hold local stand-up meetings and then representatives from each location can hold a shared meeting to coordinate the subteams. Whereas local stand-up meetings are held first thing in the morning, distributed daily stand-up meetings may need to be held at unusual times so as to include people at distant locations.

4. Have Ambassadors. Ambassadors are people who travel between sites, often technically senior people or senior business experts, to share information between the subteams. Getting the team together at the beginning of the project sets the foundation for communication, but without continual investment in maintaining effective collaboration between teams you run the risk of your subteams deviating from the overall strategy. These are typically short engagements, a week or two in length, because of the pressures it puts on the people doing the actual traveling. The implication is that you’ll have several people flying between sites at any given time on a reasonable rotation schedule. Because you’ll have some people flying around, your local team rooms should accommodate visitors by having one or more desks available for them to use when they’re visiting.

5. Have Boundary Spanners. A boundary spanner is someone who is located on site who focuses on enabling communication between subteams as well as within their subteam. On large distributed teams you’ll find that you have three flavors of boundary spanners – team leaders who take on project management responsibilities on the subteam, product owners who are responsible for representing the business within the subteam, and architecture owners responsible for technical direction on the team. These boundary spanners will work closely with their peers, having regular coordination meetings across all subteams as well as impromptu one-on-one meetings to deal with specific issues between individual subteams.

6. Ensure that the global team gets the credit it deserves. In both offshoring and nearshoring environments it’s common to see small teams in North America or Europe driving the efforts of significantly larger teams in another country. Yet, at the end of the project it always seems as if the smaller team, often because they work for the direct customer, gets the lion’s share of the credit – unless of course the project failed, then the subcontracting team often seems to get virtually all of the “credit”. This clearly isn’t fair, and it clearly doesn’t promote effective teamwork between the subteams in the future.

7. Take a lean approach to development governance. As I’ve written in the past, effective governance is based on enablement and collaboration instead of the traditional approaches of management and control. Good governance measures progress through regular delivery of working software, not through status reports or delivery of detailed specifications. Good governance is based on the idea of having a living process which changes to reflect lessons learned as your project progresses. In a previous blog posting at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/ambler?entry=lean_development_governance I’ve discussed lean development governance in greater detail.

The strategies that I’ve described are clearly nothing more than common sense, something that can be said of all agile strategies. Sadly, as Mark Twain lamented, common sense isn’t very common in practice.[Read More]

I just wanted to round out my discussion about agile approaches to geographically distributed development (GDD) with a few important words of advice:1. Get some experience. Worry less about enterprise adoption and instead get started with a small project, or better yet a series of increasingly more complex projects. There will be learning experiences as you build a relationship with the offshore service provider. This advice is applicable whether you’re working with your own offshore division or with an independent service provider.2. Have a long-term staffing strategy. It may be great in the short term to have work done in a lower cost country, but how are you going to transfer the necessary skills to the maintenance and support team. Outsourcing that work is also an option, but it can be a risky one as you would need to build up expertise in “your” systems if you ever decide to insource that work again.3. Be concerned about intellectual property (IP). The rules are different around the world, and you may inadvertently be financing the creation of a new international competitor if you don’t have a clear division of ownership. And yes, this may mean that some components of your systems are still built internally by your own organization.4. Show off locally before you go global. GDD makes things harder to manage, so if you’re struggling to manage local teams you’re really going to struggle managing teams at a distance. Make sure you have local success first and are good at agile development in general. Furthermore, if your agile GDD projects run into trouble, don’t end your local agile adoption just because of difficulties with distributed projects.5. Let your offshore partners lead. The offshore partner likely has more experience than you at successful distributed development, and this is particularly true when you’re dealing with an established service provider.6. Do some reading. There’s a great IBM Redbook entitled “Global Development and Delivery in Practice: Experiences of the IBM Rational India Lab” which can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247424.html7. Do some viewing. We recorded a Rational Chat a few months ago entitled "Being Agile in a Global Development Environment" which is posted at https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/reg/acceptSignup.do?lang=en_US&source=dw-c-wcsdpr&S_PKG=120607&S_TACT=105AGX23&S_CMP=TALKS&cp=UTF-8 . I also gave a keynote on Agile approaches to GDD at Software Development Practices 2007 held in Boston in the Autumn of 2007. The video can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.life20.net/video/scottambler.mov .[Read More]