Leanpub Header

Skip to main content
Go to Leanpub.comLeanpub

Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams

Staying Agile in a Global World

Jutta Eckstein

"[Eckstein] 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.

Note: This book has first been published in 2010.

The author is letting you choose the price you pay for this book!

Pick Your Price...

Buying multiple copies for your team? See below for a discount!

PDF
EPUB
WEB
286
Pages
About

About

About the Book

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:

  • The Productivity Myth
  • Ensuring Conceptual Integrity
  • Trust and Mutual Respect
  • Virtual Retrospectives

Share this book

Categories

AgileLeadershipProject ManagementTeamworkAgile EnterpriseConsulting

Feedback

Email the author

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Price

Pick Your Price...

Minimum price

$9.99

$15.99

You pay

$15.99

Author earns

$12.79
$

All prices are in US $. You can pay in US $ or in your local currency when you check out.

EU customers: prices exclude VAT, which is added during checkout.

...Or Buy With Credits!

Number of credits (Minimum 1)

1
The author will earn $12.00 from your purchase!
You can get credits monthly with a Reader Membership

Team Discounts

Team Discounts

Get a team discount on this book!

  • Up to 3 members

    Minimum price
    $24.00
    Suggested price
    $39.00

  • Up to 5 members

    Minimum price
    $39.00
    Suggested price
    $63.00

  • Up to 10 members

    Minimum price
    $69.00
    Suggested price
    $111.00

  • Up to 15 members

    Minimum price
    $99.00
    Suggested price
    $159.00

  • Up to 25 members

    Minimum price
    $149.00
    Suggested price
    $239.00

Author

About the Author

Jutta Eckstein

Twenty years of experience in coaching, consulting, training, and development. Main focus on agile processes, patterns, project management, adaptive organizations, and advanced object-oriented design.

Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She holds a M.A. Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. Product-Engineering, and a B.A. in Education. Her know-how in agile processes is based on over fifteen years’ experience in project and product development. She has helped many teams and organizations all over the world to make the transition to an agile approach. She has a unique experience in applying agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. This is also the topic of her books 'Agile Software Development in the Large', 'Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams', and 'Retrospectives for Organizational Change'. She is a member of the Agile Alliance and a member of the program committee of many different European and American conferences in the area of agile development, object-orientation and patterns. At the last election, Jutta has been designated for the Top 100 most important persons of the German IT.

Stay in touch with Jutta:

  • http://linkedin.com/in/juttaeckstein
  • http://jeckstein.com
Leanpub Podcast

Episode 97

An Interview with Jutta Eckstein

Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

1.Getting Started

  1. My Focus
  2. My Intended Audience
  3. My Perspective
  4. 1.1Roadmap to the Book

2.Assessing Agility and Distributed Projects

  1. 2.1Understanding Distributed Development
  2. Working With Several Development Sites
  3. Distributed and Dispersed Teams
  4. Large Projects
  5. Coordinating Companies
  6. Different Sites
  7. Customers and Distance
  8. Centrally Coordinated or Globally Integrated
  9. Overcoming the Distance
  10. 2.2Understanding Agility
  11. Core Value Pair Statements
  12. Systemic Approach
  13. Risk Reduction
  14. The Productivity Myth
  15. More Than Practices
  16. Neither Chaotic Nor Undisciplined
  17. 2.3Agile Principles Influencing Distributed Projects
  18. 2.4Summary

3.Building Teams

  1. 3.1Feature Teams
  2. Single- and Multi-Site Teams
  3. Dispersed Teams
  4. Forging a Team
  5. 3.2Roles
  6. Feature-Team Constellation
  7. Architect and Chief Architect
  8. Coach
  9. Product Owner and Product Manager
  10. Project Manager
  11. Collocate Key Roles with Teams
  12. 3.3Ensuring Conceptual Integrity
  13. Starting Team Provides Model
  14. Technical Service Team
  15. 3.4Summary

4.Establishing Communication and Trust

  1. 4.1Trust and Mutual Respect
  2. Trust Threshold
  3. Changing Meeting Locations
  4. Vocabulary
  5. 4.2Communication
  6. In-Person Team Meetings
  7. Face-to-Face Project Meetings
  8. People Rotation
  9. Communication Costs
  10. Communication Flow
  11. 4.3Cultural Differences
  12. Similarities versus Differences
  13. Culture Fit
  14. Realistic Planning
  15. Workload Responsibility
  16. Problem Reporting
  17. Honest Feedback
  18. Noise
  19. Humor
  20. Communication Media
  21. 4.4Summary

5.Keeping Sites in Touch

  1. 5.1Communication Facilitator
  2. Communication Facilitator as Ombudsman
  3. Technical and Social Prowess
  4. Management By Flying Around
  5. 5.2Ambassador
  6. Site Representation
  7. Characteristics and Competency
  8. Travel Schedule
  9. Concrete Tasks
  10. 5.3Social Connections
  11. Joint Celebration
  12. Picture Power
  13. Everyday Life
  14. Travel Tips
  15. 5.4Tools
  16. Direct Connections
  17. Synchroneity versus Asynchroneity
  18. Audio and Video
  19. Instant Messaging
  20. E-mail
  21. Virtual Space
  22. Common Repository
  23. Wiki and other Collaboration Platforms
  24. 5.5Summary

6.Ensuring Development and Delivery

  1. 6.1Iterations
  2. Iteration Length
  3. Done-Done
  4. Project Heartbeat
  5. Delivery Delay
  6. 6.2Releases
  7. Release Iteration
  8. Release Site
  9. 6.3Integration and Build
  10. Local Success First
  11. Integration Effort
  12. Production Shut-Down
  13. Integration and Build Optimization
  14. 6.4Infrastructure
  15. Build and Integration Process and Tools
  16. Configuration Management
  17. Power
  18. Security
  19. Network Sense
  20. Tools
  21. 6.5Summary

7.Ensuring Business Value

  1. 7.1Steering Through Valuable Features
  2. Real-Customer Awareness
  3. Iteration Preparation
  4. Understanding Requirements
  5. Treating Documentation as Requirements
  6. 7.2Team Velocity
  7. Unknown Velocity
  8. Estimation Unit
  9. Planning Poker
  10. Estimation Parity
  11. Velocity Disparity
  12. 7.3Planning an Iteration
  13. Feature-Planning Integrity
  14. Planning-Meeting Essentials
  15. Planning-Meeting Schedule
  16. Tangible Planning Tools
  17. 7.4Iteration Tracking
  18. Planning and Tracking Tools
  19. Keeping Goals in Focus
  20. 7.5Dealing With Change
  21. Iteration Length Marks Response Time
  22. Change-Request Scheduling
  23. Team-Structure Change
  24. 7.6Overall Project Plan
  25. Release Planning
  26. Forecasting
  27. Release versus Milestone
  28. 7.7Summary

8.Eliciting Feedback and Conducting Retrospectives

  1. 8.1Customer Feedback
  2. Identifying the Customer
  3. Distant Customer
  4. Customer Presentations
  5. 8.2Review Meetings
  6. Iteration Reviews
  7. Review Meetings – Dispersed Individually versus In-Person Jointly
  8. Release Reviews
  9. 8.3Retrospectives
  10. Individual-Feature-Team Retrospectives
  11. Project-Wide Retrospectives
  12. Joint-Site Retrospectives
  13. Retrospective Protocol
  14. Virtual Retrospectives
  15. Attendees
  16. Common Retrospective Mistakes
  17. Facilitation Techniques
  18. 8.4Metrics
  19. Progress Measurement
  20. Estimate-Quality Measurement
  21. Increasing the Test Base
  22. 8.5Summary

9.Honing Practices

  1. 9.1Development Practices
  2. Pair Programming
  3. Unit-Test
  4. Refactoring
  5. Collective Ownership
  6. Common Coding Guideline
  7. Feature Communication via Tests
  8. Out-of-the-Box Practices
  9. 9.2Process Practices
  10. Daily Synchronization (Daily Scrum)
  11. Project-Wide Synchronization (Scrum of Scrums)
  12. Dispersed Synchronization
  13. 9.3Development Culture
  14. Project-Wide Practices
  15. Changing Practices
  16. Different Practices
  17. Process Standards based on CMMI or ISO
  18. Equal Rights
  19. 9.4Summary

10.Introducing Agility to Distributed Projects

  1. 10.1Start Locally, Grow Globally
  2. Collocation and Rotation
  3. Fundamental Iterations
  4. Early-On Iteration
  5. Time-Boxed Project Start
  6. 10.2Growing Teams and Growing Sites
  7. Kick-Off
  8. Project-Culture Transmittal
  9. Cultural Training
  10. Integrating New People
  11. 10.3Introducing Agile Processes to an Existing Project
  12. Gradual versus Project-Wide Change
  13. Team Structure Change
  14. More and/or Better Coaches
  15. Estimation and Velocity
  16. Lone Fighter
  17. 10.4Summary

11.Afterword

Glossary

References

  1. Articles
  2. Books
  3. URLs

About Jutta Eckstein

Other Books by the Author

Get the free sample chapters

Click the buttons to get the free sample in PDF or EPUB, or read the sample online here

Download Sample PDFDownload Sample EPUB

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earned over $14 million writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub