Meeting Annoucement 

Event Date and Time: Monday, October 2^nd 2007, 5:30 PM

Location: Greece Conference Room at 2211 Elliott Ave. Seattle 98121

Presentation Topic: Using Agile Practices (SCRUM) With Distributed Teams

Target Audience: IT Managers, Project Managers, Agile Enthusiasts. Seating is limited to conference room capacity. Please RSVP via email to Dragos Dumitriu to confirm seating availability.

Meeting Schedule:

• 5:30: Social networking and pizza
• 6:15: Presentation
• 7:15: Q&A

Topic and Speaker Background:

Jim Benson is the COO of Gray Hill Solutions, a local Seattle software solutions company. Jim will describe successful practices Gray Hill Solutions uses to complete projects as a highly distributed SCRUM team.  The talk will be divided into three parts: 

1. EDUCATION getting your team of hired guns and clueless clients to embrace agile collaboration,
2. EPIPHANY (includes the subsection "OMG! This s*&t really works!"), and
3. EXECUTION - Dancing's better with the same music.

Each of these sections will describe our experiences, tools, techniques, procedures, pain points, and victories.  Most of the presentation will describe a project from Q4 2006, during which not only was our team distributed, but management was also spread between three continents.  This presentation will focus on long-distance scrumming and what needed to happen in order to make it successful.

In December of 2005, Gray Hill Solutions won a large contract from a major transportation hardware company.  The one-year project was supposed to start on January 1, 2006.  There was a four month delay, but the major delivery deadline of January 15, 2007 did not change.  We intended to use a rapid-release agile process and to begin coding right away.  

The client, however, wanted a detailed spec.  We showed them that a spec would take more time than the project could afford.   Instead, we wrote a project plan and a release plan using agile practices.  The clients saw the documents as they were being written and commented in real-time.  In the end, the documents won the  love of the client and served several internal needs beyond merely showing a spec.  

At the end of that process, we had 4 months to do 12 months' of coding.  Our team had members  in Seattle, British Columbia, Ontario, Colorado and Paris.  The project architect was in a Paris café working on his laptop for more than half the coding time. In the middle of the project, the UI lead ended up working in a Hong Kong café.  Utilizing a strong set of development tools, agile coding principles, and constant communication, the development team was able to deliver more than the client expected by the deadline with a very aggressive schedule.