Today on an internal agile alias, a discussion came up about simulating agile team rooms for disbursed teams. I've played around with this for years and had some suggestions for them:

It can be simulated, but it is hard and requires extra discipline by the team. A few key things:

1. Think about how to simulate the “in the room” experience where you can overhear and participate in conversations going on around you? Team void chat software like Ventrilo, Team Speak or our own Corporate Conference Calling system can work. Can you have an “open mic” in the team room? You also can give up on audio and use team room chat software like IRC. I’ve used them all. There are plusses and minuses to each.
2. Think about the changes you may need to make to development practices. Do you use Pair-Programming and TDD? If so, you may want to take a look at Micro-pairing as a technique for coordinating the TDD/Pair handoffs. (Micro-pairing was actually created in response this exact scenario. I was pairing with another developer who was remote.)
3. In addition to practice changes, think about how to deal with remote desktop sharing. Live Meeting works, but can be a bit heavy. Virtual Server and the standalone Virtual Server client actually let two people connect to the same desktop. I know that VNC, an open source remoting tool, also allows this, but I would recommend you to be cautious with that tool. It has some known security bugs and your network admins may not allow it. Check with them first.
4. Make sure everyone on the team has all the necessary access they need to be a full team member. Access to version control, portals, file shares, email aliases, etc. all must be available.
5. Think carefully about how you do your team meetings. When you have only 1 or 2 people who are remote and the rest of the team is in a room, the person on the far side WILL feel out of the loop unless you run the meeting as if everyone were remote. One thing I’ve heard of is to actually have everyone go into their individual offices and dial-in to the meeting so everyone is on an equal footing.
6. Drastic time zone differences can make this very very hard on some team members. Ultimately this can be make-or-break for successful disbursed teaming. If people are 8 hours apart, when do you schedule standups and IP meetings? My rule of thumb is that more than 3-4 hours apart will kill you and you should split it into two teams that are closer in time to each other.

These are based on 3-4 years of playing around with these concepts at P&P. YMMV.

We all totally forgot to blog about this before it happened, but we can at least point you to the recorded version of the talk. Here’s the abstract:

Join this patterns & practices webcast with the Enterprise Library development team to learn about their experiences doing agile development in a collaborative forum. Experts will share lessons learned, what works best, and what not to do. Hear how patterns & practices distributed teams work with contributors all over the world and the techniques they found most effective for staying together as an agile team.

Brad Wilson, Brian Button, Darrell Snow and I got together and gave an “agile talk on agility” where even though we had a slide deck of candidate topics, we bounced around instead, answering questions from the audience. It was a very fun talk for us to give and hopefully it was valuable to our audience.

You can download the WMV of this talk here.

The patterns & practices Summits are starting again. Up next is the USA West event here in Redmond with keynotes by Alan Cooper, Anders Hejlsberg and GotDotNet CodeSlam with Chris Sell.

This time around I’m involved in two presentations, one with Brad Wilson and one with Brian Button:

Agile Development in the patterns & practices "war room" - Peter Provost & Brad Wilson

Learn how the p&p collaborative "war room" used an agile development process to create CAB and Enterprise Library. Discover how the p&p distributed teams work with contributors all over the world, and the techniques used to stay together as an "agile team". You will hear about the lessons learned, what works best, and what not to do.

Build your own Enterprise Library - Peter Provost & Brian Button

Organizations typically need to create their own enterprise application framework. This session describes how to build this framework using the latest Enterprise Library. You will learn how to how to customize EntLib, how to "factor out" functionality you don't require, how to integrate your own code and existing framework, how to package it to work well together, and how to version manage it going forward.

I’m really looking forward to these talks. I always have fun presenting with both of these guys.

For more information, registration information, presenter bios, schedules, etc. please see the patterns & practices Summit web site.

Hope to see you there!