Think globally, act locally – Build stronger distributed agile teams

Many companies today deliver software developed by teams distributed in multiple geographical locations. There is a real need for it since organizations get more and more global and it should not be avoided.

And how is agile affected by this? Is working in distributed teams anti-agile? In this kind of teams, communication can be a real challenge. Face-to-face communication has no substitute and agile development depends on constant collaboration. We are not able to have a shared whiteboard and truly collaborate together. Bad connections and different time zones are just part of the problem. And culture differences in working and communicating can come as both benefit and a drawback.

In this presentation, we will explore some of the drawbacks as well as benefits of working in a distributed agile team and some of our best tips and methods that helped us to increase team productivity. We would like to share with you some of the real case examples from our experience in being part of distributed agile teams on several international projects over the years. We would like this to be more an interaction between us and the audience, not only us talking to you. That’s why we would like to highlight the challenges that can arise in distributed agile teams, explore some of the strategies to address those challenges, and show you how to turn work in a distributed team in your favor.

This meetup is organized in co-operation with Bosnia Agile (http://agile.ba/en/).

We will organize a game during the meetup and reward the lucky ones with two tickets to Bosnia Agile Day 2017 conference (https://conference.agile.ba/).

About the Lecturers:

Amela Teftedarija is lead QA engineer and team lead at Comtrade with more than 10 years of professional experience in software development industry and proficiency in test automation. She is certified Scrum master and owner of ISTQB Foundation Level Certificate. Currently, she is working on multi-site agile project practicing Scrum. She is a big fan of Scrum framework and its everyday practitioner. She is an active member of Comtrade testing community (QUEST) and one of the organizers of ShareIT Sarajevo meetups.

Darko Nikolic is a motivated and passionate IT professional with more than 5 years of software engineering experience. Currently, he is working on multi-site agile project practicing DevOps as a full-stack web developer in Comtrade. He is a big fan of Agile and Scrum and its everyday practitioner. He is certified Scrum master and one of the organizers of ShareIT Sarajevo meetups.