Hello Folks, I have been meaning to blog on the subject of Agile and Scrum because most of the material available today focuses on simplistic implementations such as co-located teams. Also they assume a simplistic predefined structure wherein the stakeholders are identified and available at the team’s discretion and dependencies could be worked out within one or more teams within the organisation. 

The complexity is compounded in open source projects because of the varied nature the intermingling of contributors and stakeholders. The team is not only focused on features that were loosely drawn up by the product manager but also works actively on the ones that the community is interested in.

I also hope to address some of the challenges that are unique to working in open source environments, wherein you have to collaborate with not only internal teams but also work with external organisations which sometimes have conflicting interests.

One of the focus areas will be working with globally distributed teams, wherein the team members are spread across different timezones. For example even a simple thing as daily standup becomes challenging due to time zone issues making it impossible for team members to meet at same time.

If you are wondering about the image depicting lightening in a bottle – Well the original expression is “like trying to catch lightning in a bottle”, it describes something that’s extremely difficult, almost bordering on the impossible. That is how I feel, my self imposed assignment would be like, but based on the amount of pain and confusion it can alleviate, the effort will definitely be worth it.

Over the years I have realised that we tend to learn better from short, focused articles rather than elaborate descriptions and detail material. Hopefully, these one-pagers will aid in understanding and adoption of Scrum. 

So, the plan is as follow up with short one pagers, in the context of open source and globally distributed teams.