Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams

All software projects face the challenges of diverse distances -- temporal, geographical, cultural, lingual, political, historical, and more. Many forms of distance even affect developers in the same room. The goal of this book is to reconcile two mainstays of modern agility: the close collaboration agility relies on, and project teams distributed across different cities, countries, and continents.

In Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Jutta Eckstein asserts that, in fact, agile methods and the constant communication they require are uniquely capable of solving the challenges of distributed projects. Agility is responsiveness to change -- in other words, agile practitioners maintain flexibility to accommodate changing circumstances and results. Iterative development serves the learning curve that global project teams must scale.

This book is not about how to outsource and forget your problems. Rather, Eckstein details how to carefully select development partners and integrate efforts and processes to form a better product than any single contributor could deliver on his or her own. The author de-emphasizes templates and charts and favors topical discussion and exploration. Practitioners share experiences in their own words in short stories throughout the book. Eckstein trains readers to be change agents, to creatively apply the concepts in this book to form a customized distributed project plan for success.

Jutta Eckstein is a consultant, coach, and trainer at IT Communication, based in Braunschweig, Germany. Her know-how in agile processes comes from more than ten years of experience developing object-oriented applications. She has helped teams and organizations all over the world make the transition to an agile approach, and has extensive experience in applying agile processes within medium-sized to large, distributed, mission-critical projects. Eckstein is a member of the Agile Alliance and serves on the program committees of several European and American conferences in the areas of agile development, object-orientation, and patterns.