

Rethinking Agile in an office-less world - mh_
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3641-rethinking-agile-in-an-office-less-world

======
etrain
Perhaps the point of the article was to stir conversation, but I'd prefer it
if they'd actually propose some ideas, rather than saying that it's different
now.

I'm not a huge fan of Agile, but I do think it encourages some good ideas.
That said, I'd love to hear what the analogs are for remote work from the
perspective of a company that really does it.

~~~
warpech
To me, the point of the article is to promote the upcoming book

------
cantbecool
This is just a fluff article to tangentially promote their upcoming book,
Remote. Why this is going to be upvoted is beyond me.

~~~
wiremine
It is getting up voted because it is a real question for people. I've worked
in a 100% remote environment for 5 years, and a part-time remote environment
for another 4 on top of that.

Creating great software in those environments is a challenge, and worth
discussion, regardless of the motivation of the original author.

------
Macsenour
One of the odd misconceptions I've had to deal with, 1/3 of one of my teams is
offsite, is the idea that Daily Stand Up has to be in the morning. We change
the question from "What did I do yesterday?" to "What did I do in the last 24
hours?"

Easy.

The next mountain is to change what is said from status to communication,
which is the point of the meeting in the first place.

------
hackula1
These are largely solved issues. Standups can be done over a web chat, and may
actually be even better with todays screen sharing capabilities, where you can
actually SHOW everyone what you are working on. Tools like tmux have had the
remote pairing issue solved as well. Face to face is good here and there, but
I see no reason why agile cannot be practiced just as effectively remotely.

~~~
kevinmchugh
I believe this is what he means when he says "the hacks that makes that setup
more workable". Your technological solutions assume synchronous work, which
limits the pool of employable people to those with similar preferred workdays,
where DHH would ostensibly like to work with people around the world.

~~~
hackula1
Email or Voxer work for async communication.

~~~
rahoulb
I actually find 37s' Campfire works for both async and synchronous
communication.

It's obviously a chat-room for immediate talking, but the highlighting and
ease of scrollback (without having to have irssi or similar running
constantly) mean you can easily catch up and pick out messages left for you
when you were offline.

Which makes me think the post is just about the upcoming book.

------
tbrownaw
I thought agile was supposed to be a preference for useful flexibility, rather
than a fixed set of practices?

The canonical remote collaboration tools are IRC and mailing lists.

There are various sites that allow some sort of remote pair programming, I'm
not sure if it's just screen sharing plus audio chat or if there's more
structure to it.

At work we have conference calls, often with presenter-to-group screen
sharing. (We use cisco webex, does anyone know an open alternative?)

For larger meetings we've been experimenting with videoconferencing between
meeting rooms in different cities. Since being on video is annoying, maybe
this would be an alternative to stand-up meetings? (I'm pretty sure whatever
we use for this is proprietary as well, what's a good open alternative?)

The point of many Agile practices is to increase communication. How can you
best capture the ease of walking 2 cubes over to have a chat with your
coworker? If everyone's remote you don't have as good a natural indication of
how busy or available everyone is. If you build something to provide that
indication, the boss can monitor it and it will stop working right.

If people are talking in the next cube over, I can ignore it or jump in if I
hear something interesting or that I can help with. But in some cases the
discussions are things that wouldn't be discussed where certain other people
might be able to overhear. How do you capture when communications should be
_available_ to some part of the group without interrupting them (so no
acknowledgement needed from the recipient), but hidden from some other part of
the group? And without requiring the people initiating the communications to
explicitly bother to set this up? This is naturally baked in to physical-world
interactions, is it useful enough to try to duplicate?

I've heard suggestions of a "virtual office" for voice chat, where you have a
grid layout with cubes or conference rooms or whatnot and people have
locations on that grid and can hear eachother (or not) based on how close they
are. Is there anything that actually does this? Is it useful (or if it doesn't
exist, would it be useful to have or is it just gimmicky)?

From what I understand, electronic text-based communications tend to be
archived for a long time for legal reasons. How far does this apply to voice
communications, and does VoIP vs telephones make a difference? How far does
this affect what is or isn't said? I know at work, some conversations only
happen in person or over the phone rather than IM or email. How important is
this effect, and how does it impact getting work done?

~~~
dragonwriter
> I thought agile was supposed to be a preference for useful flexibility,
> rather than a fixed set of practices?

It is. To too many people "Agile" means "Scrum" (or, whatever particular set
of fixed practices they've adopted, but Scrum seems far and away the most
common.)

~~~
sambeau
It is, but the Agile Manifesto isn't, on the face of it, remote-worker
friendly.

    
    
      6. Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
    
      7. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
    

So, I can see why people think there's a need to work out how to do remote
working in an Agile manner or to find a viable alternative.

~~~
dragonwriter
Remote working is always a trade-off sacrificing communication bandwidth for
some other gain. Mitigating that cost -- because the gains to be purchased
with it are often attractive -- has long been an issue in Agile circles, and
its not really a "rethinking" of Agile to address that.

Sure, the Manifesto states that Face-to-face conversation is the best form of
communication -- that doesn't mean you can't use other forms of communication
in an agile process, it means that you need to be aware of the costs and to do
it only as a conscious decision weighing the communication costs against the
benefits, and ideally doing what can be done to mitigate the communication
costs.

------
DanielBMarkham
<rant>This is nerd-bait, and I'm quickly getting my fill of "hey, we need to
rethink things!" without there actually being any rethinking going on.

Yes, we need to rethink things. We constantly need to rethink things.
Introspection is the root of all improvement. I think we've got that by now.

I don't mean to vent, but what the tech community is really interested in is
_results_ , not more bloggers with opinions. Got plenty of these guys already.
So show me you've tried something and it works, I'll collect the details, and
over time and hundreds of experiments, we can start to draw some correlations.
A few stories and an upcoming book ain't going to cut it.

What I'm seeing in the tech community is this rise of, for lack of a better
term, dimestore pundits. Some guy gets a big contract for XCorp, tries working
with people dressed up like chickens. Now he has a website and a book on how
we're all supposed to dress up like chickens when we work.

It's always been like this -- the folks with the megaphones drowning out the
folks who plod along trying to spot patterns and share stories without
becoming dogmatic. But lately people are climbing on this bandwagon where in
order to grow, you should be teaching something. So hell, everybody with a
keyboard is now a teacher. That's not a recipe for helping folks, that's a
recipe for generating widespread cynicism.

I wish the 37Signals the best of luck in these marketing efforts. I understand
they're quite awesome. I just get tired of being baited with half-assed
conjecture sitting on top of a few anecdotes. Things have changed. The world
moves on. We're the tech community. We get that. So show me the startups that
are changing the world with remote teams. Show me the consulting companies
that are killing the competition by using distributed teams. Show me the
companies that are clamoring for distributed and remote teams because they're
finding them so efficient. Show me a bunch of data. Then you can wave your
hands around and we can all have a nice sing-a-long about the brave new world
we're headed into. Otherwise it's just self-gratifying noise.</rant>

~~~
givehimagun
Not nerd-bait...really you bring up some good points.

------
pjmlp
We have being doing Agile in distributed teams since 2006.

This is bit late, no?

~~~
integraton
No. Many people are have a bias against distributed teams, especially in the
case of startups, since they believe that it's harder to collaborate, and
because they prefer the feeling or appearance that comes with having an
office.

~~~
pjmlp
Funny, that you give startups as example.

As stated on my previous comment, I have been doing Agile projects, with
distributed team across the globe, in the enterprise world since 2006.

While it is true, that it had its share of issues while we were discovering
how to apply agile concepts in a distributed manner, I would expect most of
the issues would be quite known in 2013.

Specially in the startup world, which tends to be more flexible in regards to
the enterprises.

The human factor is actually quite important, but in many cases it is not
possible at all to have everyone on the same place.

------
dbg31415
Please stop posting DHH shit. Going to his articles feels like I'm being Rick
Rolled.

