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April 2006

Overseas…

So what happens to the agility when the project is distributed? Well, it suffers… It’s not that it doesn’t work in a distributed context. In fact ThoughtWorks has been doing distributed agile for quite sometime now. We talked about some of the best practices of agile earlier. Let us see what problems distributed agile poses to these principles. Time differenceWhen working across oceans, the first thing that hits the team is the time difference. The typical arrangement renders the team to be in a low cost country like India and the client in the US of A or Europe. The… Read More »Overseas…

Agility…

The key practices of agile software development, known and followed are:1. Face-to-face communication over documentation2. Quick feedback from end users over project phases (as in waterfall) Collective ownership, Pair Programming, use of whiteboard, paper, and most importantly the terrific visual representation of the project health and progress… the wall For an agile team the wall is everything. The action of moving stories & bugs along the columns and the instant snapshot of the project health is fantastic. Here’s how it works… The process : The Business Analyst analyzes the requirement and writes a story and acceptance criteria The developers estimate… Read More »Agility…

Value..

Stories being testable and valuable is as important as them being small and independent. Perhaps more… because these are the two important characteristics which in fact drive the size of the the story. Like we saw that an agile analyst can sometime fool himself by creating independent stories, one can also blunder quite easily when it comes to testability and value of stories. Let’s look at an easy example: Imagine a customer entity in a system with about 50 odd attributes. Creating one story capturing all these attributes will be a real mess. An analyst would (and should) readily want… Read More »Value..