Spent the evening at the local PMI meeting. Wonderful speaker from Rally spoke about Agile. Many topics of interest. In particular he indicated that sprint length in order of popularity was 2 weeks, followed by 4 weeks then 3 then 1. No one does 5. My gut is that for distributed teams the sprint length tends to be longer. Distributed teams have more communication overhead as adapt and higher process cost. Hence I believe they need a longer work period to amortize the process cost over the work effort. I wonder how I can validate this gut feeling.

I was also pleased to hear another assertion that the number of people who are in the Agile camp and believe Agile is impossible in a distributed environment. Many of us in the audience supported the position that distributed organizations are a fact of life that we just can't change. And, that is the central question of this Blog. How can we best make Agile work or adapt pure agile values to a distributed environment rather than just saying it doesn't work.

Getting Started

Thanks to prompting from a a friend at a SPIN meeting I've decided to start this blog to capture the many thoughts, frustrations and successes of a journey to agile software development that actually began more than 10 years ago when I read the "coloring book" description of FDD.

My hopes here are to at least get the benefits one achieves by having a personal record my thought processes. Maybe even I'll get lucky and connect with others who are trying many of the same things I am.

Just a small step for tonight. I've decided to start.