Agile software development is about team code ownership, collaboration, and sharing ideas to get stuff done.  You want to ride the Agile wave, but half your team is in one city and the rest are in another.  How can you get your guys and gals to collaborate over the wire?  Recently I’ve been working on a project like this and I’ve found a few things that can make your team efficient, collaborative, and successful in an Agile environment.

Take Down Your Task Board

If you really believe in eliminating waste, and your team is not co-located, the scrum board in your war room is nothing but waste.  The original purpose was for information to be accessible to the team.  You should be able to look at it and know immediately what your comrades are up to.  If you are co-located, you’d have to ask someone to go update the board for you.  That slows both of you down, which isn’t so lean.  This leads me to my next point.

Invest in an online storyboard and make it your homepage

There are a lot of good ones out there.  I prefer Rally (shameless plug for our new partner).  It gives us all the basics — stories, defects, test cases, a burndown chart, as well as a lot of really helpful plugins.

I know what you’re thinking — this is starting to feel like the old project management style.  What’s to keep Rally from becoming the new rigid project plan?  Like any tool, it can be abused, but consider the benefits:

• One story board for everyone to see, even if they’re in your Maui office.
• Team views that show you what your teammates are working on, so you can offer to help if someone is falling behind
• Sprint burndown and velocities to help you plan for the future

And heck, if you’re only happy with a story board on the wall, you could adapt what these guys are doing.

Invest in collaboration software

So we’ve got iteration tracking covered; how do we collaborate?  We’ve all been there when the guy you need to look at your broken code is working from home or sits at the other office.  Checking in questionable code is never a good idea, and you may be using centralized source control so you can’t use the wonders of Git and Mercurial to let your buddy pull in your changes and show you where you you went wrong with your NHibernate cascade.

Every distributed team needs, at a minimum:

• Screen sharing software — Webex, Join.Me, Skype, take your pick.  You need to be able to share your screen so you can see what’s going on.  Encourage pair programming over the wire to get people comfortable with the tool and getting to know each other’s style.
• Chat software (no investment there) — It’s quick, easy, simple, and most of all, quiet.  Nothing disturbs the development room more than a noisy phone conversation.
• Reliable internet access — It seems obvious, make sure all your guys have a strong connection.  Nothing slows collaboration down more than a code review Webex that keeps flaking out.
• Phone conferencing lines available to anyone, at the ready.  There are even some free ones out there — my team has used FreeConferenceCall with a lot of success.

Stick to the Agile Basics

If your team sticks to the agile basics, they are 90% of the way there to a strong development experience, even if they aren’t co-located.  A few things to remember:

• The team owns the code — collaborate and work together to find the best solution.
• Communicate progress and blocks — no one benefits if you don’t ask for help when you’re stumped, when you don’t want to be pushy about a block, or when you hide progress for fear of being assigned more work.  Communicate more and you’ll do more.  Just don’t communicate so much that no one else gets anything done…  :)
• Eliminate waste and ask questions about process — if you think something doesn’t have much benefit, speak up.  Maybe you’re right, or maybe you’ll learn something in the process.  Many of you are familiar with Seth Godin’s TED talk on this subject.  If you aren’t, go watch it.  You’ll like it.

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