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.

Most agile methodologies tend to assume that the team is co-located in a single team room. They give little guidance as to how to address team distribution although proven practices are starting to emerge within the community. The Microsoft patterns & practices team has been experimenting with distributed teams for several years, mining proven practices from the community and experimenting them out on numerous agile projects. This talk summarizes those learnings and proven practices and gives examples of their application - both good and bad - within our teams.

Lack of good release planning is endemic. Teams seem caught up in iteration-at-a-time development and not planning for releases. Even those who create initial release plans often fail to keep them current. This approach enables teams to resist request for “spurious” information such as “how much is this project going to cost,” or “how long is this project going to take?”

This session will address why release planning is so important and then cover a series of release planning topics such as value-driven planning and multi-level planning

When it is achieved together, the combined benefits of both Agile and Offshore software development, can be multiples greater than either approach alone. During this interactive session, we will simulate a distributed project with some participants being onsite and the others offshore. With 4 teams of upto 8 people each, this game will draw out learning around the challenges of Distributed Agile and different methods to communicate successfully on such projects. The rules of the game help illustrate how to deal with travel, different timezones, delayed communication and other such hurdles.

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.