A fully remote team in Poland delivered one of the best Agile experiences of my career. As the Technical Business Analyst in London, I thought it would work, but I didnโt expect it to be this good. Iโll explain why.
We met in person once per month, sharing the plane trip back and forth. Planning, co-working and social drinks โ it was intense but enjoyable, even if the UK office was decrepit compared to the modern Polish one. At other times, a decent noise-cancelling headset made daily Skype calls very easy, even in the noisiest of conditions.
We collaborated much better than some co-located teams Iโve worked in previously, focusing our efforts on writing well-defined user stories and conducting frequent backlog refinement sessions, usually several times per week but always in advance of each sprint planning session.
Clear definitions for story โreadyโ and โdoneโ gave us a shared understanding and helped us collaborate well across the entire software development lifecycle.
Unsurprisingly, the developers understood the user stories really well by the time they started, and it was incredibly rare for work to become unexpectedly blocked or delayed.
Good remote development demands this level of preparation and diligence.
One drawback of co-located developers Iโve seen time and again, is the temptation not to write really good user stories and regularly cancel backlog refinement sessions. โWe are too busy writing codeโ or โwe will figure it out laterโ are the most commonly heard reasons.
Each time a developer picks up a story, they must say a short prayer to ensure no unexpected show-stoppers emerge to break the sprint goal and trigger the need to down tools and re-plan.
Our developers were never blocked, our sprints never broken.
Remote development teams can deliver knock-out results with the right groundwork. I learned a ton of valuable practices that I still use today, both in remote and face-to-face settings.
And the product? Frigging amazing.