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About the Book

Technology world is changing in a very fast pace. Some of the hardcore businesses are becoming IT shops. Businesses are getting IT driven day by day. Also in last few years, as technology solutions are maturing or have matured, you see IT driven Lean Startup movement.

Instead of focusing on low-level software solutions, people are reusing already created building blocks or are shaping new building blocks based on already existing technology foundation. That’s why you see new technology trends in every few months.

In order to work and use these IT ever evolving technologies you need highly skilled workers who could shape your business in months or weeks. It’s not easy to find those highly skilled people everywhere. That’s the reason, people look for those people outside their company, city or country.

Earlier only large companies having big IT budget used to outsource software development outside. The reason was - initial cost to setup your Offshore Development Centre(ODC) was very high. One could get the dividend of always available IT workforce a little later.

Other reason was, the distributed way working was not very efficient because of all associated overheads, mainly distributed communication. Only way to communicate was through expensive international calls or collocate with the team for some time. That way of communication was not efficient enough.

These days world boundaries are getting blurred because of communication revolution. Almost every person in the country has a personal computer available in form of a smart phone. You can talk to any person on the planet through internet calls free of cost at any point of time. Earlier recording a small video used to consume big memory footprint and was difficult to share because of slow internet speed. These days, millions of videos are getting uploaded every other minute. With that development, video calls are easily available and you can really talk to other person on the other part of planet almost face to face and understand nuances of essential communication like body language.

With this background, you see distributed software development becoming easier and also the necessity of the world.

Many people would like to get their work done with a distributed team. However not everyone comes with necessary experience of working with distributed teams.

Distributed Agile has been in place for last few years. You find some literature on it in tits and bits but if someone has a very simple question - how should I move towards working with a distributed team, it may become difficult to provide answer in one single shot as the case-studies, patterns are practices are scattered in blogs and internet forums.

I am writing this book for the sole objective to help newcomers to distributed Agile world in helping them understand it and know how it works.

There are different ways to implement distributed Agile as far as team structures and their collaboration goes. I consider them as structural patterns as they shape the foundation of the way you are going to create and work with those distributed teams.

Then comes implementation patterns. There are some common distributed Agile implementation patterns which help in solving challenges common to all distributed Agile team structures. However some implementation patterns are specific to a distributed team structure.

In this book, first I define the challenges of each kind of team structure and then I try to solve them with either common implementation patterns applicable to every team or with team-structure specific implementation patterns.

About the Author

ShriKant Vashishtha

@vashishthask

ShriKant Vashishtha is an enterprise Agile Coach and co-founder of Malonus Consulting. He writes blogs on Agile (Scrum, XP), Lean and DevOps at Agile Buddha and has been frequent speaker to various Agile conferences over the years.