Posted by Marco Mulder in the early morning: August 18th, 2008
Recently I wrote a blog about the way that we do distributed Agile projects. Martin van Vliet and I have also published an article on InfoQ about one of them. So if you want to know more about one of our bigger distributed Agile projects, here it is: Case study: Distributed Scrum Project for Dutch Railways.
Posted by Jarl Meijer mid-afternoon: August 15th, 2008
Dealing with changing circumstances: The difference between a medal candidate and a medal winner
Imagine: You have trained very hard for the Olympics and are very well prepared. You have an overload of red corpuscles from training in the Himalaya, you have practiced on the Olympic track, you submitted yourself to light therapy to prepare your body for the time zone difference and you have trained in an ill-air conditioned gym to prepare your body for the smog and atmospheric humidity. You are ready for a big performance and you made it through the trials and qualified for the Olympic Games. You passed all medical tests. They examined your hair, blood, sweat and tears, and you are not suspected to have used any kind of stimulating drugs. You definitely are a candidate for an Olympic medal and for eternal fame!
Posted by ShriKant Vashishtha just before lunchtime: August 15th, 2008
When you think of inducting a new developer in existing project, it’s relatively easier to do it in an Agile software development project than in a traditional project. The atmosphere and programming culture is entirely different here compared to any traditional project. Instead of people working in isolation and being responsible for assigned tasks, people here work in a mode where frequent communication across table is necessary. Instead of one person being responsible for assigned tasks, the whole team is responsible to complete it.
The mantra is efficient communication and more interactions. So when a new developer enters the Agile project (Scrum + XP based), pair programming, communication across the table makes a person comfortable with the new project environment. Instead of going through bulk of developer’s handbook and design document, conversations help to bridge the gap. However when you need to really need to refer some documentation, it’s always there. Also new developer continues to develop on top of whatever existing team has built on. So you see, knowledge transfer is seamless and relatively easier compared to any traditional project.
Posted by ShriKant Vashishtha at around evening time: August 14th, 2008
When you think about documentation in Agile software development, most of the times it talks about “just enough” which definitely makes sense considering the thickness of design documents in traditional software development. The Agile mind specifically thinks what actually is required in terms of documentation.
Agile software development also gets translated into efficient communication, collocation and sitting in one room or same table and having conversations whenever there are issues. Some of the XP practices like pair-programming helps a new joinee to come upto the speed when she joins the project.
When you talk about effective communication and resolving issues in a team as and when they arrive, you lead towards a situation in which knowledge resides in the heads. People may not feel the need of documenting in detail as they seem to know everything about the project. You may end up in a situation where a new team doesn’t have “enough” documentation to begin with in maintenance phase. That’s why when one talks about “just enough documentation”, that “enough” word needs to be quantified.
Posted by Marco Mulder in the late evening: August 13th, 2008
I have been a Scrum Master on one of our distributed Agile projects for about a year. I would like to tell you about how we do such projects and share some of my experiences. If you are having a bad time with offshore software development, try not to get too jealous because we are having a great time at it 
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Posted by Barre Dijkstra in the early evening: August 13th, 2008
I was speaking with a colleague today who’s working as a scrum master on a project with another customer. While we were discussing on how we both look at project metrics and related subjects, the subject of tooling was touched. They used ScrumWorks at that project and were quite happy with it.
After walking through the tool and specifically the features that dealt with organising releases, projects, etc. I found the tool lacking on one part, like all the others I’ve seen and/or evaluated; My current client is an enterprise organisation that has hundreds of employees that work on the software development, due to control of the environment works with fixed date releases and has multiple programs and projects running simultaneously.
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Posted by Maarten Winkels terribly early in the morning: August 8th, 2008
Working abroad has been a wish of mine for some time now. Xebia offers me the opportunity to live and work in India. Through this blog series I will keep you informed of the progress and challenges of this project.
“I love it when a plan comes together!” This famous quote expresses what I feel about this project right now. It’s been more than a year now, since I started thinking about moving to India. I’ve slowly brought everybody up to speed and started to make preparations. Now things are coming to a completion. At the moment I’m in India to make the final arrangements.
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Posted by Ran Vijay just before lunchtime: August 7th, 2008
Last month, I was going through Lean software development by the lean software gurus Mary and Tom Poppendieck and I could easily associate most, if not all of its principles with our day to day working in Xebia. It really gets interesting and fun to read about something when you are already practicing it. In the process, it reinforces your beliefs on the principles. Although the book was easy to follow and examples easy to associate with, I could not get a clear idea of the term ‘right people’ mentioned at many places in the book. I always wondered about the definition of ‘right’ the lean-principles talks about. (more…)