Adopting some agile practices, like stand-up meetings and yellow notes, is easy. The hard part is handling requirements and estimates, especially in a distributed environment. Describing, refining, communicating and prioritizing requirements is difficult for business developers. Estimating and understanding requirements is difficult for developers. This talk describes a flexible sharing regime, implemented in a distributed in-house development environment, which succeeded in improving requirement handling and estimation.

1. Distributed Requirement Handling Kjetil Moløkken-Østvold – Conceptos Consulting XP2010, 2.-3. June, Trondheim

2. The easy part when implementing agile processes Having some meetings while not sitting down Moving yellow notes around a whiteboard Using strange titles (career as a ScrumMaster anyone?)

3. The hard part when implementing agile processes Developing and prioritizing requirements Providing (accurate) estimates Collaborating between developers and customers

4. The hard part is even harder in a distributed environment

5. The case: Lindorff Lindorff Group Lindorff Group is a leading outsourced receivables management company in Europe and on a global basis Lindorff has approximately 2200 employees Offices in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Russia and Sweden NextLevel Project Developers in Oslo and Bø Testers and business developers in Oslo, Røyken and Trondheim Users/customers in Røyken, Oslo, Trondheim and other areas

6. Internal improvement study Q4 – 2007, findings: Poor routines for communicating and prioritizing requirements Effort overruns Internal collaboration rated as average

7. Describing, refining, prioritizing and communicating requirements is difficult for business people Understanding, estimating and developing requirements is difficult for software developers

8. Problem: inefficient communication

10. Lindorff joined a project financed by Innovation Norway

12. Example features used by Lindorff Live (collaboration) Sharing (to collaborators) Voting/estimation (for requirements/user stories) Conversations (history, replaces mail etc.) Template – default text on notes (requirements/user stories) Tool – reuse settings/templates

13. Results

16. All respondents (IT and business) reported that use of Symphonical had greatly improved how requirements were specified, refined and communicated

17. Estimation

18. About half reported that Symphonical had improved the estimation process

19. The other half reported no discernible impact from Symphonical by itself (though it could have played a role along with other improvements)

21. Thank you! Presentation: http://www.conceptos.no/ Email: Kenny Rogers (The Gambler):“Then somewhere in the darkness, the gambler he broke even. But in his final words I found an ace that I could keep” This research project was funded by Innovation Norway Caveat Emptor: the author of this presentation is a member of the board of directors at Symphonical, and has ownership interests in the company