Andreas Ebbert-Karroum

If you’re developing software using Scrum or XP (or your individual collection of tools and processes) in multiple teams, make sure that you read this article “Version Control for Multiple Agile Teams” about how version control, trunks, branches and policies could be implemented. This is the depicted summary of the great article.

A key lesson that I took from it is that it’s a must to have feature teams. Spanning features (user stories) over multiple teams immediately breaks the pattern, because you not only need to sync each work branch with the trunk, but also sync all work branches that work on the same feature. Given you have n teams, you see that you multiply the need for synchronization from n to n*(n-1) in the worst case.

A couple of days ago, InfoQ spoke with Joseph Pelrine about Social Complexity Sience. With Josephs background in psychological theory on one hand and software development and management on the other hand, he now tries to lay the theoretical base for answering questions like: “Why does Scrum or XP work?”.

There are a number of interesting thoughts in the interview, plus there’s also a complete transcript available!

When working in a virtual, global team it might be necessary to maintain a virtual wall with many coloured index cards for various purposes - one might be to track your progress during a Sprint, when using Scrum as your iterative development model, and move story cards around, depending on their completness state.

This is now also possible online, with CardMeeting. I don’t have a direct use for it right now, but when I need it, I hope I’ll remember it

Take a look for yourself, and go playing in their Sandbox.