Distributed agile - start from ‘If PO isn’t in local with team’

A day, I read a topic in a SCRUM Group website. The topic is: ‘If PO isn’t in local with team, how does a SCRUM Team do? The topic looks like a sample question, but if we want to resolve this issue, we need to use a lot of practices and our best agile spirit. The topic doesn’t look like as easy as only PO not in same place with team. The question is if team members are not in same place or time zone, what we do with best Agile and how to use Distributed Agile or how to use Agile in offshore development.

 

有一次在一个SCRUM的讨论组里面，看到这样一个话题。问：“如果PO如果在国外，SCRUM的团队如何工作？”。看似很简单的一个话题，但是在实际操作的过程中会遇到很多的问题。引申的话题是分布式敏捷如何操作，或者在离岸外包中如何使用敏捷？我本身有7年多的离岸软件外包经验，参与Agile的项目也有5年多的时间，也希望能将我们的一些敏捷实践拿出来和大家一起分享。

 

Before we talk about this topic, let’s see why we have this issue or question, the answer is “VALUES”. Obviously, Distributed Agile or offshore development has a lot of values for a company or production. For example: You can find good engineers in the entire world; you can also have several teams in different time zone and build 24 hours not stop delivery production; or save your budget. But if you CANNOT resolve the issue in topic, all of good values maybe change to disasters.

 

在讨论这个话题之前，让我们看看为什么会有这样的问题出现。或者说，为什么会有分布式敏捷/离岸敏捷的出现？答案是在价值上。但这并不是说分布式敏捷或者离岸敏捷能降低成本，提高价值。比如，你可以使用分布式敏捷和不同时区的团队，来构建一个24小时不停运转的项目。这样对于你实现你的商业目标就可能比竞争对手更快，带来更高价值。再比如，分布式敏捷团队，可以让你在全球范围内发现高级人才，完成竞争对手不能完成的项目。而对于中国软件外包，也体现在预算上。但是如果你不能解决话题中的问题，可能这些价值和优势会给你的项目带来难以想象的灾难。

 

I have both several years’ experiences with CMM5i and Agile. CMM5i is good when I was working with a Motorola IEMS project, the project need hundreds people work together. But I and my customers much prefer Agile practices in another projects, because they help our team resolve real issues, we are able to delivery fast or a first version of production. We are able to understand real business logic and provide values to customers. We are able to change customer to a friend.

 

我之前也参与过CMM5i这样的项目。但是后来我和我的客户都比较喜欢Agile这样的工作方式，因为Agile真的帮助我们解决了很多之前遇见的问题，比如快速的提交，甚至发布一个版本让客户去试探市场。同时作为工程师的我们能有机会深入的了解一个业务领域，而给客户带来更高的价值。甚至最后和客户成为了很好的朋友（现在有2个客户，成为了我非常好的朋友）。

 

Sharing is also a very good practice in Agile, so I would like to share some our practices and some tools in this and next several articles. I hope some can read it and make work easily.

 

分享是Agile里面很重要的一个实践之一，第一篇文章看似没什么大用场：）罗嗦+吹牛半天，是给后面的做铺垫。计划拿出2个月的时间将这几年的敏捷实践都拿出来写一写。

转载于:https://www.cnblogs.com/MaYunian/archive/2012/07/19/AgilePractices.html