Overview
The night of December 7th was the coldest night of that winter, at least for those Marines’. The mission was simple; bring about 4,000 of the strongest men northward from the southeastern tip of the reservoir, to secure the exit of the 10,000 Marines trapped in the Chosin Reservoir valley.
However, the situation was soon about to turn dire and chaotic, as the Chinese forces, blew up a crucial bridge over a treacherous mountain pass, cutting off the planned evacuation route. Now the captain had only 2 options. Either retreat and put the entire battalion in jeopardy or bring in the Agility, to thrive in this complex situation whilst accomplishing the mission. What would you do?
The situation of a Scrum Master working with a multi-tech stack, distributed (non-collocated/geographically independent) feature team, is somewhat similar (if not that complex), to the above-mentioned extract from one of the most harrowing battles of the Korean War.
As mentioned in the Agile manifesto ‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools’; agile development was originally imagined for clustered teams, or teams physically located together in the same office. The key idea behind this was that to establish trust and handle effective communication, the team members needed to have a face to face conversation. However, with time & evolving technological improvement plus heavy offshoring strategies; most businesses have a few–or several–distributed teams.
The major advantage being reduced cost, strong and varied talent pool with round the clock project delivery facilities. Depending on how the talent pool is identified, team members can be working on different floors in the same building, working within the same city and different buildings, working in different cities in the same country, or working in different cities around the globe (or a combination of all the above).
Don’t forget that work from home is also a very common option these days. This distributed team also needs to work on a common goal, thereby as a distributed feature team, accountable for implementing a functional necessity, such as a use case or user story, from end-to-end. This is most commonly referred to as implementing a vertical slice of the solution, for a single line of business.
