We've got quite a diverse team for Prism that spans 3 continents.
In Redmond
Adam Calderon (Interknowlodgy), Arun Subramonian Namboothiri (Infosys), Prasad Paluri (Infosys), Francis Cheung, Julian Dominguez (Southworks), Bob Brumfield, Glenn Block, Blaine Wastell, Nelly Delgado, Brian Noyes (iDesign), and Larry Brader
In Buenos Aires And India
Ezequiel Jadib, Mariano Szklanny (Southworks) Gokul Janardhanan (Infosys), Prashant Javiya (Infosys)
Although there's thousands of miles between us, we work as one team not 3, that's how we make it work!
So who does what?
| Area / Role |
Team members |
| Dev |
Francis, Bob, Julian, Adam, Brian |
| Test |
Larry, Prasad, Gokul, Prashant,Arun |
| Docs |
Nelly, Mariano |
| Program / Product Planning / Product Mgmt |
Blaine Wastell, Glenn Block |
How do we work?
Within the client team (and throughout p&p) we adopt a hybrid of XP and Scrum. We are a TDD shop all the way. We do continuous integration, and practice pair programming (as well as pair planning, pair powerpointing and a few other variations :) ) . We have bi-weekly iterations, do daily stand-ups, ip meetings (and pre-ip), and we have a product backlog. We don't have a "Sprint Backlog", but we do stack-rank our priorities for each iteration during pre-ip, and create TFS WorkItems. We also keep burn down charts and the like to continually measure the team velocity.
What's it like being in the team room?
People often ask what it's like working in the team room. If you haven't work in a collaborative environment before, it might sound scary to all be in the same room. After all, everyone likes having their own space right? One of the core tenets of the agile manifesto is "Individuals and interactions over process and tools". In an agile team, breaking down the walls literally, brings real cohesion amongst the team. When you are in the room, it's as if you can hear the teams heartbeat.
Recently thanks to the CodeBetter guys who lent me their Qik phone, I got a chance to stream some live video of one of our iteration planning meetings (much to the dismay of my team that I caught completely off guard). In the video aside from seeing the shocked faces of the team :(, you'll hopefully get a preview of how we work. (click the play buttons if you see them or use the links)
Here I am on the way to "surprise" the team......http://qik.com/video/46805
And then.....http://qik.com/video/46813
I feel fortunate to work in such a great environment with such a terrific team!!! I keep waiting for the day when my manager tells me they discovered the computer glitch and it was all a big mistake....