Agile methodology can be considered the most popular software development model nowadays. As well, after Covid 19 pandemic, remote or hybrid working is no longer uncommon. As a result, remote agile team is quite common in software development, especially in the situation of offshore IT outsourcing. Here are some suggestions given by GCT Solution to help you manage your Agile team effectively.
6 Methods To Well Manage Distributed Agile Team Suggested By GCT Solution
- Ensure the visibility of project status
- Evaluate the output of your agile team
- Choose proper communication and cooperation channels
- Assign tasks reasonably
- Keep an eye on code quality
- Enhance your agility
1. Ensure the visibility of project status
In a remote agile team, you must ensure that your project status reports are uploaded and understandable before starting a new sprint cycle.
One of the biggest issues facing an agile team is the lack of insight into the development of the projects. You cannot compromise on the visibility of the project state in an agile environment.
It is the only way to record every action taken throughout a sprint and show where the project stands right now. Due to their agile work environment being spread, project managers have trouble obtaining the right project status.
Agile project management tools like JIRA can be used by agile teams to monitor project progress and ensure increased status visibility.
2. Evaluate the output of your agile team
Productivity is ultimately what matters. By monitoring the output of your agile team, you can see who is working on what task and what needs to be changed to make the procedures more effective.
The following measures must be used to determine how productive your remote agile teams are:
- Velocity: The average story points a team produced across the most recent sprint cycles are measured by velocity. You may gauge how much work your team can complete in forthcoming sprints using a velocity report.
- Sprint Burndown: It gives you a real-time update on how many story points your team has finished in a particular sprint. The easiest method to stay informed about the progress of your project is to use sprint burndowns.
- Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD): With CFD, you can keep track of changes to user stories and project progress across a range of status including- in progress, review, and completed. A jagged curve in CFD implies inefficient resources and bottlenecks, hence the curve should be smooth.
3. Choose proper communication and cooperation channels
Two of the most basic principles of distributed agile teams are effective communication and cooperation. Without appropriately fostering agile values among teams, especially when they operate in different time zones, it is impossible to establish shared common goals and commitment.
Agile was created to help teams respond quickly to change, which is only possible with frequent and effective communication. Daily stand-ups, planning sessions, and sprints are just a few of the ways agile teams keep in touch and collaborate.
To make remote agile teams perform effectively and efficiently, project owners must maintain team collaboration by establishing daily scrums, planning meetings, and virtual discussion.
4. Assign tasks reasonably
You should assign tasks to various agile teams based on your geographic model. If all of your teams work out of the same office, you are already in compliance. The job should be distributed in accordance with the outsourcing and in-house resources.
Given that you are using an offshore IT outsourcing company to complete all of your design and development work. However, you already have product owners. In this situation, you can work closely on planning and strategy with your internal team while delegating execution to the distant team members.
The strategy, planning, and execution are handled by product owners, and other internal resources. However, you can work with a remote IT outsourcing company for full services. Additionally, you must equally divide the burden across your remote agile teams.
5. Keep an eye on code quality
Agile team leaders may find it challenging to evaluate the quality of the code and the state of the project when working in dispersed environments. Until they discuss them over a call or message, the team may not publicly disclose the status of unit test cases, build stability, coverage rates, etc.
The quality of the product suffers the most in such circumstances. The team may cease functioning if they fail to build stability.
Thus, when working in a distributed environment, you must keep an eye on the stability of the code and the progress of the project.
GCT Solution suggests three distributed agile best practices that you may apply to close this gap:
- Use continuous integration tools that offer build automation & continuous monitoring of project quality.
- Pair programming can assist developers in improving code quality and accelerating the development process.
- You should ensure your QA (quality assurance) team is active and reporting unit testing bugs immediately.
6. Enhancing the agility
You must constantly cultivate an agile mindset in both your team and yourself.
A new product may bring with it a new set of issues that cannot be solved in the same way repeatedly. Teams must have agility at its mind in order to respond to such a high level of change. That is why businesses should organize Agile training across departments.
Working with remote agile teams from outside your organization is another way to support the agile procedures. This is a nice opportunity for your agile team to understand how other distributed agile teams collaborate remotely.
Final thought
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