System Integration across geographically distributed Scrum teams Main Author Name & Designation Ayushi Jain – Sr. Member Technical Srinivas Thantapureddy- Test Consultant ADP Logo of your organization

Abstract Today businesses are shifting to emerging economies due to reduced business operations cost and an easily available workforce. Thus the need for better managing such teams, using the right tools and processes, is becoming increasingly critical for any enterprise company. Designing QA strategy for distributed scrum teams will have access to a larger pool of skilled people with lower development costs that will eventually result in quicker time to market.

Introduction: Today businesses are shifting to emerging economies (Russia, China, India, the Philippines, etc.) due to reduced business operations cost and an easily available workforce. Precisely, tomorrow's business will be more virtual and distributed, with "distributed" as its key element. Thus the need for better managing such teams, using the right tools and processes, is becoming increasingly critical for any enterprise companies

Reasons for the shift and need for having distributed Agile teams: Globally distributed teams reduce costs. They can reach the market more quickly with a "follow the sun" model. Distributed teams expand access to new markets. Acquisitions as a result of consolidation results in companies working together to integrate their businesses. Expansion can aid innovation and thought leadership. Telecommuting gives options for communicating with teams effectively. Collaboration tools -- improved tools for distributed communications and server-based, multiuser tools for product development -- are removing barriers, and more teams view distributed collaboration as an alternative.

Potential Benefits of Geographic Distribution Access to a larger pool of skilled people. Many organizations struggle to staff their IT departments solely with local people, particularly when specific skills are needed. Lower development costs. On the surface savings are the result of the wage differential between countries and sometimes even cities within the same country.  However, these savings can be quickly lost due to the increased overhead associated with geographic distribution – you must consider total cost of ownership (TCO), not just hourly programmer costs, when calculating the cost savings.  It is still possible to gain cost savings, but you must be sufficiently disciplined to earn them. Quicker time to market. The opportunity for quicker delivery times exist when your team is disciplined enough to take a “follow the sun” approach.  The basic idea is that a globally distributed sub-team will do their work during their day time, then hand-off the work to a team that is several time zones away.  This team will then do some work, then hand it off to the next team.  This is very difficult to make work in practice, requiring a solid architecture, high quality code, development standards, automated regression tests, and sophisticated configuration management.  We’ve seen it done successfully, often with either 2 or 3 teams in the overall cycle, although most organizations struggle to make this strategy work in practice.   However, one of the challenges is access to a Product Owner (or a proxy Product Owner) as the “single source of truth” twenty-four hours a day

Risks Associated with Geographic Distribution Communication challenges.  The most effective means of communication between two or more people is face-to-face around a shared sketching space such as a whiteboard or piece of paper.  Of course, this requires you to be in the same room together.  As you become more distributed you begin to rely on less effective communication strategies, but which provide better persistence of the captured information.  When you’re not face-to-face you are unable to observe body language which embodies a lot of valuable communication cues. Temporal challenges.  When people are in different time zones it becomes harder to find common working times, increasing the communication challenges.  To combat these challenges you will find that you need to create more documentation than you normally would. Cultural challenges.  As the team becomes more distributed the cultural challenges between sites often increases.  Different cultures have different work ethics, treat intellectual property differently, have different ideas about commitment, may be less inclined to embrace self-organization, have different holidays, different approaches to things, and so on. Something as “simple” as what it means when someone says “yes” can be very challenging in practice.

How to reduce Risks Build a Positive Team Culture Get the Key Team Members Together at the Beginning Do a Bit More Up-Front Modeling The Explore the Initial Scope process goal. The Identify Initial Technical Strategy process goal. Do a Bit More Up-Front Planning Integrate Regularly Recognize that Communication is Critical Have Daily Coordination Meetings Have Ambassadors Travelling Between Far-Located Sites Regularly Have Boundary Spanners at Each Site

References & Appendix A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum The Great Scrum Master The Enterprise and Scrum

Author Biography Ayushi Jain : Working as a Sr. Member technical in ADP and has 4.5 years of experience in IT, have contributed on agile mythologies in team. Also an Artist and an Author, have conducted many national and international painting exhibitions and have written 2016 best seller - “Unofficially Yours”.

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