Colossal, Scattered, and Chaotic (Planning with a Large Distributed Team)

If planning for a large co-located 30-plus development team is not enough to make you want to pull your hair out then try a 30-plus development team located across several time zones, in places with different cultures and languages. Now, youpsilave reached a level in the Agile planning game that would send most product owners running home to their mommies. Planning in Agile Projects requires enabling the team to have a continuous conversation with the customer. How can you have meaningful, continuous conversation and feedback when your team is scattered across several time zones, cultures and languages? This paper describes our experience of how one of our largest teams in Sabre Airline Solutions was able to make changes that allowed the continuous conversations to take place. The paper is written from the perspective of both development locations the main office in Dallas, Texas and the "remote" office in Krakow, Poland. The team successfully overcame many obstacles while rapidly growing a small co-located development team into a large globally distributed team that was able to efficiently deliver customer valued, quality code and customer satisfaction with each one-week iteration. It attributed this success to three main Agile areas: evolving the Agile Customer Role, making our meetings valuable and efficient for everyone involved, and good coordination across the sub teams.

1. Introduction

Sabre Airline Solutions has a real-time data management application to manage critical processes for an airline which the cost of maintaining the technology and support was becoming prohibitive while impacting the ability to enhance the tool. The product was supported predominantly by manual tests, which made the task of continuous refactoring a challenge. Looking at all options, the decision was made to do a product refresh from technology perspective. Although Airline Solutions had many successful small to medium-size projects that used Agile values and principles from the beginning, this would be Airline Solutions’ first opportunity to implement a large-scale project following an Agile Methodology starting day one.