SUCCEEDING OVER DISTANCE

<work in progress>

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 Intro

2 Principles

2.1 Treat all sites equally

2.2 Strive for site independency

2.3 Align continuously and on all levels

2.4 The manifesto we are missing

2.5 Do the key things right

• Ongoing onboarding
• Humanized ecosystem
• Seeding engineering culture
• Designing self-sufficiency
• Mastering alignment
• Crafting product ownership

3 Practices

3.1 Onboarding new locations, teams and people

• try starting collocated with short projects
• try boot camps and hackathons
• try onsite kick-offs
• try story mapping for release planning
• avoid fighting the culture change
• try seeding teams around "culture holders"
• try limiting your growth

3.2 Shared online ecosystem

• try single source code
• try common intranet
• try distributed / local IT support
• try shared doc repository like GoogleDrive or DropBox
• avoid desktop solutions
• try be ready for multi-platform heterogeneous clients
• avoid email in favour of Skype, HangOut, HipChat and Slack
• try voice/video chats instead of plain text

3.3 Distributed yet shared engineering culture

• try sharing entire code-base
• avoid blocking someone's contribution
• try keeping component guardians
• try standardize continuous integration
• try jenkins for all
• try green builds on site/shift boundaries
• avoid remote DevOps

3.4 Self-sufficient and self-serving sites

• try matching sites with product lines
• avoid component-oriented sites
• master alignment on all levels
• avoid subordinating between teams in different locations
• try architects onsite
• avoid outsourced QA
• try support is everyone's job
• try scrum team-level meetings locally, joined multi-team scrum meetings remotely
• avoid remote ScrumMasters
• instead consider remote mentorship/coaching for local ScrumMasters
• avoid crowded teleconferencing at all costs
• instead consider splitting meetings in face-to-face and joined parts
• avoid multi-site long-term projects
• try fostering single-site experiments (and sharing results back)

3.5 Staying aligned in the face of high independence

• try designing user personas to share common understanding of key user needs
• try cross-site communities of practice
• try cross-site trainings, workshops and un-conferences
• try fly in for pairing
• try ambassadors
• try weekly town hall meetings to reconnect to company goals and mission
• try flying executives

3.6 Product ownership that spans timezones

• try Product Owner focused on one site
• avoid Product Owner mixing onsite and offsite teams
• avoid Product Owner substitutes
• try Product Owner visits monthly
• try Product Owner moves onsite

</work in progress>