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The purpose of this article is to answer the following question: “How does one deliver high-quality software on schedule with 100+ developers distributed across multiple time zones?” It’s meant to serve as a guide for a technical lead or project manager who is responsible for defining the development workflow in a large-scale, globally-distributed software project. It will help to guide decisions about which processes and tools to choose in order to achieve high-quality software at the highest level of efficiency.
Focus on Bottlenecks
Within most Agile Software Development methodologies, a lot of focus is put on “blockers.” Blockers are called out in daily meetings and retrospectives, and are often escalated rapidly (depending on who has encountered them). While this focus is often warranted, what’s lost in this whirlwind of blockers are the silent killers of productivity: bottlenecks.
With a large-scale distributed team of developers, the identification and elimination of bottlenecks is a massive contributor to overall throughput and even quality (for example, if a quality gate becomes a bottleneck, schedule pressure may force developers to skip it).