Agile Workbench: Tying People, Process, and Tools in Distributed Agile Delivery

Abstract

Agile software development approaches are becoming mainstream as organizations recognize that their delivery methodology has to be nimble and flexible to accommodate new technologies and evolving customer requirements. However, large organizations depend on a global software delivery model wherein software teams are geographically distributed, and such an environment seems unsuited for Agile to succeed. In such scenarios, it is a challenge to be able to bring together the organization's Agile methodology, development environment, and distributed teams together in a standardized way, to be able to implement and govern the distributed delivery process objectively. Here, we present our approach to govern the adoption, usage and progress thereof of a distributed Agile methodology, that ties together the team and tool aspects with it. This becomes a single window to quickly bootstrap distributed Agile delivery projects using specific methods, metrics and dashboards, collaboration and gamification approaches. We have implemented this approach as an interactive Agile Workbench to present the teams and stakeholders with context-rich actionable alerts as well as situational awareness and helps bridge the gaps between cross-functional distributed teams which is essential to successful delivery of agile projects.