Understanding the forces driving and restraining the adoption of Agile in your organization is key to your success. This audience participation workshop creates two teams, the Drivers and the Restrainers and has them present the forces at work in the most original and humorous way possible.

This results in a lot of fun and learning.

The workshop will be led by two experienced coaches to bring out the subtle details of the forces and lead the discussion on how to improve the success given the forces at work.

This tutorial focuses on lessons learned from our experiences in implementing Agile in teams across different time zones in large companies. We will share the pleasure and the pain, ideas that worked as well as ideas that didn’t. We will share what we feel are the critical success factors in making program level implementations successful and sustaining. This is more than an experience report - we share templates, pictures, lessons learned for leveraging technology, managing multiple time zones, recommendations for metrics and reporting, and ideas for future program level success.

Given the size and scope of Google’s code base, and speed of development, typical off-the-shelf continuous integration are unable to meet our needs. So, we decided to create a continuous integration and testing system as a centralized service on an unprecedented scale. When fully completed and operational, it will probably be the world’s largest continuous integration and testing system, running millions of tests every single day.

In this talk, we will report on our experience running such a program in an agile manner and will also describe the basic design and features of the CI system.

The off-shore model for IT services is held up as the most cost effective delivery model. As companies gain experience with the out-sourced model, it is becoming clear that there are serious flaws even using Agile methodologies.
The presenter will directly compare the productivity metrics of off-shore distributed Agile teams with co-located Agile Teams. Co-located teams are far more productive and cost effective even accounting for the relative lower resource cost. Companies should be rediscovering co-located project teams as the paradigm for delivering real value for their IT projects.

One of the challenges global teams are facing, is overcoming cultural differences. Yet, these differences have their origin not only in geography and language, but also in strategies, politics, values and history. A company, no less than the broader society, shapes a culture that influences its employees behavior. A distributed team needs to leverage this and jointly develop a project culture and keep the project history alive for emphasizing the common culture. This session points out techniques that have helped to create a common culture in different global projects I have been working on.

As the world becomes increasingly “flat”, organizations are seeking out operational and cost efficiencies by leveraging distributed teams. These distributed teams are a common constraint on most technology projects today. To continue wide-spread adoption, Agile projects must find ways to thrive in distributed environments. The Ambassador Model is a proven, effective approach to building highly productive distributed and off-shore agile teams. Complementing this model are “carrier pigeons,” a metaphor for tools (technology and practice) used to overcome the challenges of distance.