Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams: Staying Agile in a Global World

by Jutta Eckstein

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780932633712
Publisher:	Dorset House Publishing
Publication date:	07/28/2010
Pages:	249
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make an Agile transition. She has a unique experience in applying Agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. Jutta is a member of the Agile Alliance (having served the board of directors from 2003-2007) and a member of the program committee of many different American, Asian, and European conferences, where she has also presented her work. She holds a M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. (MSc.) in Product-Engineering, a B.A. in Education, and is trained as pollution control commissioner on ecological environmentalism.Jutta can be reached @JuttaEckstein