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About the Book

All software projects face the challenges of diverse distances – temporal, geographical, cultural, lingual, political, historical, and more. Many forms of distance even affect developers in the same room. The goal of this book is to reconcile two mainstays of modern agility: the close collaboration agility relies on, and project teams distributed across different cities, countries, and continents.

In Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Jutta Eckstein asserts that, in fact, agile methods and the constant communication they require are uniquely capable of solving the challenges of distributed projects. Agility is responsiveness to change -- in other words, agile practitioners maintain flexibility to accommodate changing circumstances and results. Iterative development serves the learning curve that global project teams must scale.

This book is not about how to outsource and forget your problems. Rather, Eckstein details how to carefully select development partners and integrate efforts and processes to form a better product than any single contributor could deliver on his or her own. The author de-emphasizes templates and charts and favors topical discussion and exploration. Practitioners share experiences in their own words in short stories throughout the book. Eckstein trains readers to be change agents, to creatively apply the concepts in this book to form a customized distributed project plan for success.

Topics include:

• The Productivity Myth
• Ensuring Conceptual Integrity
• Trust and Mutual Respect
• Virtual Retrospectives

About the Author

Jutta Eckstein

@JuttaEckstein

Twenty years of experience in coaching, consulting, training, and development. Main focus on agile processes, patterns, project management, adaptive organizations, and advanced object-oriented design.

Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She holds a M.A. Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. Product-Engineering, and a B.A. in Education. Her know-how in agile processes is based on over fifteen years’ experience in project and product development. She has helped many teams and organizations all over the world to make the transition to an agile approach. She has a unique experience in applying agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. This is also the topic of her books 'Agile Software Development in the Large', 'Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams', and 'Retrospectives for Organizational Change'. She is a member of the Agile Alliance and a member of the program committee of many different European and American conferences in the area of agile development, object-orientation and patterns. At the last election, Jutta has been designated for the Top 100 most important persons of the German IT.

Stay in touch with Jutta:

• @juttaeckstein
• http://linkedin.com/in/juttaeckstein
• http://xing.com/profile/Jutta_Eckstein
• http://jeckstein.com