Agile 2008 - Part III

So today marks my third day at the conference, and I have been keep pretty busy meeting people and talking agile.

Today's discussions revolved around trouble shooting distributed agile, agile patterns, and success stories with distributed agile.

I also was able to discuss patterns with Keith Braithwaite the author of several papers on distributed XP. You can read the PDFs here and here.

The success stories about distributed agile was also pretty interesting. The first presentation was a joint presentation between a company and the co-inventor of scrum. They had some metrics up that showed how they were able to achieve the mythical "hyper-productive" team. A "hyper-productive" team is defined as a team that has achieved a state of ownership, collaboration, and commitment that allows them to be much more productive in creating value on a consistent basis.

Another interesting metric they had was their 0.5-1.0 defects per thousand lines of code! That is incredible. They defined defects as issues raised during acceptance. They were able to achieve this by creating an impressive suite of unit tests, and automated integration and acceptance tests while still keeping their velocity of over 15 function points per person per month.

One of the other presenters was a small company called Code71. They are a small boutique global IT solutions and services company. They are using a model that is very similar to ours. Their remote office is in Bangladesh.

It is interesting to realize that Macadamian was doing distributed agile way ahead of the curve. When we first started experimenting with this back in 2003, the prevailing school of thought was that this couldn't be done. It is a good thing we didn't realize this :)