Agile Development Process for JSR 264

Motivation

There are several reasons why it seems to make sense to switch from the current working model to a more agile process. Currently we're working in a mode where the workload that gets done pretty much depends on the spec lead. He distributes and assigns the tasks between the team member. This is problematic in several ways:

1. The team members do not have a good overview about what tasks need to be done and how they relate to each other. As a result it's not possible for anybody to do something on it's own, without beeing triggered. This takes away a lot of motivation!
2. When a single team member is working on a task, other could be available to help but don't know how and when
3. The spec lead does not have a good visibility who could get something done (time & skill), but is lacking a good description of available tasks.
4. The team does not have any idea how well it is doing to keep it's release schedule
5. The communication tends to be spec-lead centric

Methods

Partly, these problems results from the fact that we are a team that is scattered around the globe. But we can do something about it! In order to address these problems, we have to get a bit more organized - the question is:

What is the bare minimum process, we can get away with?

• OmInstantMessaging - get closer together, see when everybody is available
• OmTeamOverview - know each other better and have name, phone numbers, etc at hand
• OmScrum - an agile process to manage and control development work
• OmContineousIntegration^? -

Lessions Learnt

A summary of what we learned when using agile methods, especially scrum, and how we improved:

• OmLessonsLearned^?

References

• Scrum
  • Excellent explanation of Scrum
  • Short Reference for Scrum
  • Scrum in Wikipedia
  • About Scrum
• Agile in virtual teams
  • Agile Development and Remote Teams: Learning to Love the Phone
  • Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development

-- AndreasEbbertKarroum - 21 Jun 2006