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communication in Agile

 
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I read here (http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/agileCriteria.htm) that communication is a key factor of Agile process.

I am confused what special tools "Agile" team use for communication. We use email, chat, phone, web conferencing, meeting etc and we surely don't use Agile process... so how it is different than "Agile communication"?

Thanks.

PS: If you say about effective communication then its subjective term. An �Agile guy� can also misunderstand something like someone who is not using Agile process. How Agile helps here?
 
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Did you take a look at http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/communication.htm ?

The most effective form of communication actually is face to face communication. Agile teams try to get as much of it as possible: the whole team sits in one big room (no cubicles!), they meet daily in a stand up meeting, they have daily direct contact to their customer etc. pp.

Not all teams are able to do all of this, of course. But the more you are doing it, the more effective the team will be.
 
ankur rathi
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Originally posted by Ilja Preuss:
Did you take a look at http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/communication.htm ?

The most effective form of communication actually is face to face communication. Agile teams try to get as much of it as possible:



Isn't it going contradictory to off-shoring?

the whole team sits in one big room (no cubicles!), they meet daily in a stand up meeting,



Agreed. It�ll surely save time.

Thanks.
[ March 28, 2008: Message edited by: ankur rathi ]
 
Ilja Preuss
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Originally posted by ankur rathi:

Isn't it going contradictory to off-shoring?



Yes.

More generally speaking, Agile thinking basically implies a distributed team won't ever be as effective as having the same people collocated.

That doesn't mean, on the other hand, that distributed teams can't try to be as Agile as possible.
 
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I've written about distributed agile teams in detail here in part 1 and here in part 2. I might get part 3 online this weekend.

- Scott
 
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Originally posted by Scott Ambler:
I've written about distributed agile teams in detail here in part 1 and here in part 2.


Scott, in that first blog entry you write:

In a GDD environment you need to work with collaborative multi-site tools such as ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Jazz Rational Team Concert (www.jazz.net) which enable you to share and evolve your work products (i.e. test scripts, code, documents) effectively.

Are you really saying that ClearCase is a good tool for any kind of development? That's quite opposite to every single one of my encounters with ClearCase.

EDIT: I do remember a project with 4 developers a few years back where ClearCase was sort-of acceptable, despite the comparable sluggishness to CVS even with snapshot views.
[ April 13, 2008: Message edited by: Lasse Koskela ]
 
Scott Ambler
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ClearCase is probably overkill for a team of 4 people. But, if you have 400 people, or 4000, spread out across multiple locations around the world then suddenly it makes a lot more sense.

For a distributed team you'll want ClearCase multi-site.

For an agile team you'll likely want the Agile plug-in. I'm not sure what the public facing name is (likely something really obvious like ClearCase for Agile).

- Scott
 
Lasse Koskela
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Originally posted by Scott Ambler:
ClearCase is probably overkill for a team of 4 people. But, if you have 400 people, or 4000, spread out across multiple locations around the world then suddenly it makes a lot more sense.


But it's exactly these multi-site setups that I've never seen work. The small-scale four-developers-and-a-dog type of setup has worked, albeit not as well as with the open source alternatives.

On one multi-site project they cut the build times to one tenth of the original simply by moving from ClearCase to Subversion. Plus, they were no longer losing a whole day of work for 150 people because the ClearCase servers crashed and the administrator can't get them back up. I sure hope the new versions are improving on the performance and stability, especially if they're now selling an "agile" version of it - is there any public information yet about this product?
 
Scott Ambler
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Hmmmm... I've seen CC work fine for very large teams. Perhaps you didn't have it installed correctly?

Anyway, as for the agile plug in the best source would be the developer support page but I don't see it. I'll ping the guy who headed up the effort and see what's what.

- Scott
 
Lasse Koskela
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Thanks, Scott.
 
Scott Ambler
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The plug in is currently being used internally and at a few select customers in beta. It isn't yet available publicly. I don't have an exact date of when it will be available as GA.

- Scott
 
Don't get me started about those stupid light bulbs.
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