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+====== Arthur Richards - Distributed Agile ======
+====== Premise ======
+Summary
+How the mobile web engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation became a successful Scrum team by embracing geographical distribution.
+Learning Objectives:
+Session attendees will learn:
+  * Best practices and effective tools for fomenting and managing remote collaboration.
+  * Collocation often breeds bad habits and obscures best practices; team distribution, like Scrum or other agile practices, can help highlight those problems.
+  * Feel empowered to embrace rather than fear geographical distribution on an agile team.
+  * Understand the enormous benefits of adopting a 'we are all remote' mindset - freedom, flexibility, diversity, larger hiring pool, resilience, etc.
+  * In addition, session attendees will be asked to think about and discuss the agile principle "the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation".
+====== Summary ======
+  * Content rating (0-no new ideas, 5 - a new ideas/approach, 9-new ideas): 8
+  * Style rating (0-average presentstion, 5 - my level, 9-I learned something about presenting): 5
+====== Action / Learning ======
+  * Present idea that "we are all remote" at some stage and that we'd like to ensure we have resilience to handle this
+  * Present idea that collocation often hides problems in the way the team works and is especially problematic for the remote people - they cannot just ask and so waste time waiting / doing things that aren't important
+  * Take advantage of cadence of scrum
+  * Present sample rules
+  * For decisions - If it didn't happen on the mailing list, then it didn't happen
+  * Single source of truth (eg wiki, Jira)
+  * To reduce arguments - always assume good faith (and if you cannot see good faith then you must resolve it with a video chat)
+  * Rule of 3 - decisions had to involve a rep from each discipline (they had 3 on the team)
+  * Use face-to-face time not for work but for fun to help with social cohesion
+  * Use of video chat
+  * Action - see "we are all remote" PDF - John O'Duinn
+====== Presentation ======
+====== Notes ======
+Wikimedia
+Remote people as afterthoughts in the organization Was in San Fransisco moved to Arizona
+Communication was harder - remote exposes this Use make an opportunity out of crisis
+Workflow tracked on a wiki Poorly described Vague Not in priority order Multiple people work on same thing Multiple people setting priorities Never knew when we were done Endless cycle of context switching
+Never new what to do next
+Only thing that I had changed was that he had gone remote When local could work around the problems with the process Access gone to change Collocation obscures bad practice on the team
+Try agile Agile does not solve problems It helps expose them
+Retrospectives All about communication Lack of facilities to deal with it
+Distribution exposes communication problems
+So what did we do
+Scrum rituals became invaluable Became important as virtual face to face Regularity and predictability helped Helped with remote people as could plan for it
+Looked at the tools All about facilitating good communication
+Task board online Video chat for the team Also relying more text chat as well
+Had to equip all the offices in conference rooms (without having to use someone's laptop)
+Tools helped but retrospective Create norms - all document
+Rules
+If it didn't happen on the mailing list, then it didn't happen That way everyone knows the decisions if all not involved Had side effect of reducing conflicts as a result of different understanding of decisions
+Single source of truth One place where you can go to get your work done. Reduced context switching and thumb fiddling
+Text based comms Meant a lot of arguments broke out Happens things like
+So rule was "Always assume good faith." No matter what you read assume other person is good intention Get on video chat if you have a problem with something you read
+Rule of 3 One discipline has a problem, but others Had to be at least one from each discipline on all important decisions
+Face to face time from time to time Not just working Helps with bonding, compassion, etc Get together once a quarter Eg went to house of air, trampolines, trampoline dodgeball Believe the help make general comms better
+Can be applied to any team
+We are all remote Adopt as a mindset for the team - a Marta Stop 2nd class citizens thinking Helps when you are on vacation, sick, travel, work from home etc Even when team is co-located Anyone can be remote. Minimize disruptions as a result of these things happening Created a sense of resilience. Can handle big disaster - work will still go on Gave team a sense of freedom Increased the hiring pool - not just San Fransisco Increased cultural diversity (important for global product like Wikipedia) Coverage - span timezones
+Team satisfaction = better product Competitive edge
+But agile principles says ...
+Used as justification But lose out on all the benefits
+Don't take out of context
+What do the rules really mean - it's just a principle
+Cost vs benefit
+Lose out on sense of resilience
+Technology has changed - video change
+Summary
+Embrace remoteness Distribution highlights problems
+How daily scrum Experimenting with dedicated chat where everyone contributes to asynchronously - answering questions, and also working issues and making comments
+Action - see "we are all remote" PDF - John O'Duinn
+Arthur@wikimedia.org
+Jobs.wikimedia.org
+{{tag>Culture Distributed Conference}}