Speaker: Stanislav Vasilyev
Talk: “Scrum or Scrum overseas. Making it all work with not collocated team”

Stanislav Vasilyev
Estonia, @Aqris Software

When I think about software development I remember the very first course on how the software should be developed. I immediately compare it to the way I was programming for myself. Then I question myself, where did all the fun go? Why this has to be that strict and unnatural? I am really fond of making things simpler and just work.

I have worked in several companies that have used different approaches to achieve similar goal – deliver best software product. The most joyful experience I have got is from the organizations and projects that accepted “change” as a motivator for progress instead of constantly fighting it. To my mind Lean software development and Scrum provide possibility to work in more natural way instead of keeping the process alive. And of course not to lose all the fun while creating knowledge.

This is something I strongly believe in and try to send that message to my students at the university. I hold Master Degree at Tallinn University of Technology in Computer Science and currently I am a doctorate student at the same place.

Talk: “Scrum or Scrum overseas. Making it all work with not collocated team”.

New trends in software development require teams to react to changes fast. That presumes teams can make decisions and are collocated to minimize the time latency. It was so easy before – follow predefined  rules, create a bunch of documents and think that you are achieving a lot in a most productive way. It was  easier to divide the work onto several locations where each location has to do some amount of known  beforehand steps. Today we want to focus on the requirements that matter now. We want to deliver  features as fast as they are completed. Customer is not isolated from the process, but is a vital part of the process. Does that mean that sharing the work with several non‐collocated teams is now impossible?

We look at the team that is currently separated four by four people between Tallinn Estonia and Helsinki Finland. Team does Scrum for three years and is able to release after each sprint. Majority of the work is automated. Team size has not always been constant, but team embraced changes and adapted to difficulties. It was a long way to get there. We will look at the time when the team was created. What  difficulties it had to go through right from the beginning and what has been done to make it all work.

All‐in‐all, the key to success is not the process, but people and their desire to make a difference. Having right people right there is more important than having a team of technical geniuses that cannot work  together. Building the sense of a team and team‐spirit with half a team being in a different country is the biggest challenge. The goal is to make people understand and promote lean approach in daily routine.  Difficulties that are taken for granted to be impossible to avoid with distributed teams would be solved seamlessly.

Similarly to collocated teams the distributed team constantly improves. And that is where it can reach its limits. Although, non‐collocated teams can perform well, they cannot perform as most productive collocated teams. Keeping the flow of information high to have everyone involved is a hard work that cannot be automated or delegated to “wiki”. People working together in one room are still faster and communication between team members is less troublesome. However, pursuit of perfection and super‐performance can be very costly and violate the simplest agile principle – be “good enough”.