A big thank you to Mike Hansen and Mark Kilby at Sonatype for hosting our first customer webinar. They shared the Sonatype story and how the team tackles agile development on a daily basis with a completely distributed team. Our customers are what make Atlassian awesome, and we love hearing their success stories. Here’s a link to watch the webinar again and share with your team. Keep reading for the top 10 questions and answers. Enjoy! Mike & Mark’s Q&A Top Ten: Q1: You mentioned that product managers are not responsible for the management of the project resources. Who is responsible for managing the sprint objectives and the resources? A1: There is a collaboration between product management, the product owner, and the sprint teams. The team is responsible for organizing to get the sprint objectives they’ve committed to complete within the sprint. (We do not have project-based work.) We have a number of product-specific workflows which have a general static team assigned. Product management decides priorities, and the development team estimates size and commits to what can be delivered. As the nature of overall work changes (e.g. strategic investment priorities are changed), resource allocation changes. This is handled by overall engineering management with help from many people across engineering to maintain an effective balance of disciplines overall. Q2: What resources did you utilize when integrating the agile process into your organization? A2: We leveraged a few experienced individuals to help get the process in place. We arguably had elements of agile already, though we’ve certainly become more disciplined the past few years. Having strong agile coaching expertise contributing to such an initiative is definitely going to better ensure success. Q3: Do you have dedicated QA for each team or are they shared resources? A3: We have extensive automated testing (unit, functional, integration), primarily driven by the developers. We have very limited dedicated QA, though generally that is focused on driving the overall quality discipline working with developers in crafting effective tests. Q4: What “variations” to scrum & agile do you have due to your distributed nature? A4: We continue to iterate on what we have and so things have evolved over a period of years. That said, we do have a basic scrum framework, based on two week sprints, with routine backlog management and grooming and classic sprint planning, daily standups etc. We didn’t do anything specifically because we are a fully distributed organization, but we’ve undoubtedly converged on certain practices that have helped us because of this. Q5: How do you introduce new team members and get them familiar with your tool stack? A5: We have generally hired people with a decent amount of experience, so getting people up to speed has not been a limitation. For example, when we initially began ramping, I expected it would take several months to get to a productive state. That turned out to be a matter of weeks. We have reasonable onboarding materials and a bunch of people who are eager to help others when […]
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