All software projects face the
challenges of diverse distances -- temporal, geographical, cultural, lingual,
political, historical, and more. Many forms of distance even affect developers
in the same room. The goal of this book is to reconcile two mainstays of modern
agility: the close collaboration agility relies on, and project teams distributed
across different cities, countries, and continents.
In Agile
Software Development with Distributed Teams, Jutta Eckstein asserts that,
in fact, agile methods and the constant communication they require are uniquely
capable of solving the challenges of distributed projects. Agility is responsiveness
to change -- in other words, agile practitioners maintain flexibility to accommodate
changing circumstances and results. Iterative development serves the learning
curve that global project teams must scale.
This book is not
about how to outsource and forget your problems. Rather, Eckstein details how
to carefully select development partners and integrate efforts and processes to
form a better product than any single contributor could deliver on his or her
own. The author de-emphasizes templates and charts and favors topical discussion
and exploration. Practitioners share experiences in their own words in short stories
throughout the book. Eckstein trains readers to be change agents, to creatively
apply the concepts in this book to form a customized distributed project plan
for success.
Topics include:
Understanding Distributed Development
The Productivity Myth
Ensuring
Conceptual Integrity
Trust and Mutual Respect
Iterations and Releases
Using
Features to Steer the Development Effort
Team Velocity
Virtual
Retrospectives
Dispersed Synchronization
Introducing Agility to
Global Projects
and much more
Early
Reviews
"Two software development forces have evolved over the past few years
-- creating software with teams distributed over the world and crafting software
in an agile process. Jutta Eckstein expertly covers the challenges involved where
these two forces meet. She explains in detail how to address the issues, such
as communication between distributed locations and building trust through connections
other than face-to-face get-togethers. She outlines the differences in practices
between a co-located team and a distributed one and how to transition into a distributed
team. She explores many variations of team organization, such as when team and
customer are separated and when the team itself is split. . . . she has covered
the gamut of the common and uncommon challenges that teams encounter. This should
be required reading for anyone involved in distributed agile development."
-- Ken Pugh, author of Prefactoring
"Jutta Eckstein's
new book is packed with practical advice on managing large and distributed agile
projects successfully. A must-read for everyone interested in the subject!"
--
Roman Pichler, Author and Scrum Expert
". . . delves deep into
all that is required to make Agile offshoring a success. Jutta Eckstein shares
her deep understanding of team dynamics in distributed environments. . . . I recommend
it to get you started on this difficult but prosperous journey.
--
Guido Schoonheim, CTO, Xebia Group
"Jutta shares from her enormous
fountain of experiences with agile projects and outsourcing, and presents a long
string of practical advice on how agile can bring success into your global project.
In doing so, Jutta illuminates the core of the agile value system and the challenges
in global projects. This book provides good guidance to agile, and is an invaluable
asset, if you are applying agile in a global context."
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