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About the Book
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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
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About the Author
Alexey Krivitsky is a well-known agilist, speaker and trainer originated from Kiev, Ukraine.
Along his carreer starting in 1999, Alexey has worked as an employee and consultant with dozens of outsourcing houses and small offshore setups in the Eastern Europe.
Among Alexey's works is the Manifesto for Software Outsourcing published in 2012-2014 that has become the basis for this book.