I’ve been working the past several weeks with some highly distributed teams.  Each team requires a way to track their project effectively (when you have people in 6 different states and a few countries cards on the wall no longer work!), collaborate, use planning poker and store things pertinent to the project.  What can you do when co-location is just not a possibility?

It turns out there are many ways to help overcome pieces of the problem.  Unfortunately, the problem also has many pieces!  Below I have broken out some of the tools I have seen used successfully to overcome various issues distributed teams face:

Issue: Lack of high-bandwidth communication

This is probably the biggest problem distributed teams need to solve.  How close can you come to high bandwidth communication?  That should be the question you ask all the time.  Since this is about tools, some that I’ve seen used are video conferencing that is live all the time (cheaper than you think when done over the Internet), extensive use of Skype, instant messaging of various flavors, and a good old fashioned phone call.  For teams that overlap the work day at all, some form of instant messaging is used nearly universally.  I’ve also seen teams use Twitter in “private” mode to share information with each other.  For any of these methods it is vital to have an easy method of storing the critical information which is exchanged. 

Issue: Cannot use “cards on the wall” to track iteration progress

This is the issue that is probably easiest to deal with because it is where most vendors of agile tools have focused.  You basically have 4 choices here:  1) create something of your own to solve this problem, 2) use something like www.cardmeeting.com to still try to simulate cards on the wall, 3) use an Excel spreadsheet for tracking, or 4) use a web-based tool designed for the job.  To me numbers 1 and 3 are not viable solutions.  There are too many problems associated with both of them.  Number 2 is interesting, but only for a short time.  It doesn’t quite have enough flexibility to make it easy to use for this particular type of situation.  That leaves number 4 as the only true option (again, this is my opinion, yours may be different).  In this category are LOTS of tools.  VersionOne, Rally, Pivotal Tracker, TargetProcess, Microsoft TFS and many other applications can do the job.  I have not mentioned any open source tools because I’ve seen too many teams try them, get stuck and have no good place to turn for help. 

The two having the largest market share by far are VersionOne and Rally.  Both have a free version for evaluation and in both cases they also have a free version which can be used by small teams forever.  I know there are lots of other tools out there, but I’ve not personally used them, so I can’t put them in here.

Issue: Cannot play Planning Poker remotely

OK, I lied earlier – THIS is the easiest problem to solve!  Assuming you can get everyone on the web at the same time, www.planningpoker.com will suffice quite nicely.  This site has several different variations of point scales to use, can import stories, has a timer you can use and basically makes playing Planning Poker remotely as simple as possible.  Kudos to Mike Cohn for setting it up and keeping it free for the agile community to use (Mike has also written a couple of books we have listed on our resources page).

Issue: Information storage and sharing is difficult

This is another area with lots of potential answers.  Wikis are very popular and probably the number one choice for taking a stab at this particular issue.  Sharepoint is another option that I’ve seen work well.  Many teams using an agile project management tool like VersionOne (or one of the others mentioned) will create links from the tool to wherever the additional information is stored, thereby allowing them to use any storage medium including something like subversion.

While there are lots of choices in this area, good agile principles tell us to eliminate waste.  This is a huge potential area for waste.  If you can’t find something then it might as well not have been there at all.  It is vitally important for teams to pick a tool and a way of using that tool which allows for easily finding information when necessary!

Other random tools:

www.etherpad.com – real-time collaborative text editing

Google Docs – online document sharing

www.tinychat.com – instantly create and use a chatroom

www.scriblink.com – online whiteboard

www.webex.com and www.gotomeeting.com – online meetings with presentations or sharing a desktop for others to view

As you can see, there are a LOT of tools available for use with distributed teams.  Let the agile process work for you by having the team use one for an iteration and at the iteration retrospective (you do have those, right?) decide whether to continue using it, change how you use it, or decide to try a different tool.  There are far more tools than I’ve listed.  Let Google be your friend and find ones that solve your specific problems.

Until next time my clients will be using many of these tools as they continue Making Agile a Reality™.

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Another short blog entry.  This time it is to announce that we’ll be hosting Rob Myers teaching a great agile testing course using Fit and FitNesse on March 23 and 24.  The course will be held at the Denver PPA Event Center (right across from Invesco Field at Mile Hi).  This course was just given for a local client and the reviews were fantastic.  Get more details at http://realworldfit-bl.eventbrite.com.  There you will also see some of the testimonials from the recent course.

And, just because I like all of you, use discount code EARLYEARLY before February 25 to get an additional 10% discount.

If your organization struggles with getting testing completed within an iteration and you use either C# or Java, this course is a must.  It can mean the difference between agile success and failure.  Is that wor$895?  And, if your organization is interested in sending more than one person (the course works best with tester/developer pairs), contact me and I’ll give an additional discount for the 2nd person (or any beyond that).

Don’t delay, sign up now.  You absolutely don’t want to miss this course.  It gives you the keys to true automated acceptance testing, not the type most companies are doing when they delay automation for an interation or two!

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Exciting news!  Some associates of mine are currently completing work on some new courses Agile For All will be able to offer.  The two courses are Agile Architecture and Agile Testing.  In fact, it is really three courses because Agile Testing has a version that is all about using FIT (Framework for Integrated Testing) and the other is how to do acceptance testing using VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) with FIT.

To me all of these courses are vitally important.  One constant question in the Agile community is “How do we create an architecture that doesn’t break when we change things?”  Another is “How do we do coding and testing in the same iteration?”  These courses are designed to answer those specific questions.  I am very excited by these courses because I know the backgrounds and abilities of the course creators.  I respect their abilities and after many conversations with them I am certain they will hit the mark with the courses.

I already have outlines for the courses, we just haven’t had time to post them on our website yet.  Be looking for more information on each of these (and more!) soon.  Agile For All is devoted to making sure each role within an organization has agile training available.  With these two new courses we can address specific needs of architects, designers and testers.  While there are some courses available in the agile testing arena (mostly for unit-testing rather than acceptance-testing), I have not yet found any that will have the same in-depth approach taken by our new course.  I have only found one agile architecture course and it is a single day course which will simply not be enough time to give students the ability to understand and TRY various techniques.

If you are interested in any of these courses, or anything else that we may not have listed yet, please email info@agileforall.com and I’ll be sure to send you more information.  For me this is Christmas coming a month early because I’ve felt for 2+ years that these courses are needed in the industry!

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There are many well known agile pundits, practitioners and trainers that very specifically believe teams do not need to use any sort of tool to help with the agile process.  I no longer fall into that camp for a variety of reasons.

It is important to recognize successful agile teams are always using some sort of management tool, even if it is Excel or post-it notes on a wall.  Both of those are tools, just not tools specifically created to support an agile process.  Once we understand that all teams are using a tool of some kind, the “no tools are needed for agile” argument really doesn’t make much sense.  Instead the discuss-ment (discussion/argument) should be about whether we want to use caveman era tools or modern tools, and whether the cost of the tool makes sense.

In the past I would recommend teams learn the agile process while using cards on a wall so they focused more on getting the process right than on the specifics of a tool.  However, over the past few years the modern tools have become much more effective and can actually simulate cards on a wall very well.  Now I recommend teams that are considering a tool should do so very early rather than getting “good” with cards on a wall and then changing.  Change always has a cost, even if the change makes you better eventually.  If you fall into one of several categories of teams you should certainly consider using a tool as soon as possible.

There are some situations where a more modern tool is almost a necessity.  For example, if you have a geographically dispersed team it is going to be very difficult to use cards on the wall to track things.  That sort of team could use Excel, but personally I have never found a way to make Excel have all the necessary information stored in a way that made sense and was still shareable.  Perhaps someone has an Excel spreadsheet that works well for this.  If so, send a copy my way!  All the spreadsheets I’ve seen in the past have been too lightweight to do the job (my personal opinion).  In summary, a geographically dispersed team needs to use some sort of shared tool that makes sense.  This usually will imply a modern agile lifecycle management tool of some sort.

When else would a modern tool make a lot of sense?  In my opinion, any enterprise that has more than one product development team would benefit from use of a modern tool.  The ability to run reports, roll-up information, and see status across multiple teams and projects is something that no caveman tool will allow.  I’d rather have an executive get a report with a few mouseclicks than pay someone on each team to generate reports and then pay someone else to roll them together into one final report.  Worse yet, that final report is probably a couple of days out of date by the time the executive sees it.  Modern tools allow real-time reporting or in a worst case the reporting would be from the end of the previous work day.

One final situation I want to mention is the one that affects almost all teams – wanting to do things in a natural way that doesn’t generate waste.  If that is a goal, then a modern tool is what you want.  These tools are built around agile methodologies so the workflow can match the process being used.  They understand iterations and releases.  They understand defects and tracking.  They understand reporting.  In short, they are purpose-built for the job.

Of course money comes into play when making these decisions.  Some questions I like to ask are:

1. How much time will a product champion save by using a modern tool?  What is that worth?
2. How much time will a project manager save by using a modern tool?  What is that worth?
3. How much extraneous paper shuffling and reporting will be done away with?  What is that worth?

By themselves those three items will usually give a decent ROI on a modern tool, but then comes a kicker question – how much time will developers and testers save by working together in a tool that complements their combined workflow?  Modern tools save a LOT of time for developers and testers.  They work together seamlessly.  Delays are avoided.  Mistakes are avoided.  Quality software is created faster.  The cost savings here are substantial.

Since modern tools generally cost less per month than a couple of hours of pay per employee, ask yourself if getting a tool would make the average employee 30 minutes more productive per week.  In most cases the answer is yes, which means the tool is well worth the investment.  Heck, 30 minutes per week could be saved just by not having to walk back and forth to a room containing the cards on the wall (and having the conversations with people that come up while we’re in transit)!  Some tools are less expensive than others and maybe people only need to be 10-15 minutes more productive per week.

Finally, the two tools I generally recommend are VersionOne and Rally.  I believe they are the two most popular tools available today.  There are certainly others like Scrumworks and Target Process, but I am not very familiar with them.  Both VersionOne and Rally do the job and do it well.  Both also have free trial versions or even free permanent versions (with limitations).  I suggest you try both and see which one you prefer.

Even if you don’t fall into one of the categories above it may make sense to look at a modern tool anyway.  The free versions from either VersionOne or Rally may fit your needs, and that price is certainly right!

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