Agile Communication Area

Summary

Communication is key in an Agile organization. Developing software is a communication problem. Communication needs to flow as fast and clear as possible among all members of the organization. An environment that enables and enforces communication should be built.

Goals

- There is an environment that allows interactions among all members in the organization freely.
- All members of the organization can easily  communicate with each other.
- There is complete transparency to everyone about the goals, status, direction of the project/organization.

Standard Practices

- The office is an open space, where all members share the same information. There are visual radiators in many places of the office that allow members of a project and all members in the organization to understand the status and direction of the different projects.
- Team members in a project interact as much as possible to synchronize and make sure there is a shared understanding of what needs to be built. In Scrum, there are different meetings that enable and enforce this communication: 1) Planning meeting at the beginning of each iteration 2) Daily Standup every day 3) Demo and Retrospection at the end of the iteration. Besides this, practices like pair program or code review sessions push the members to interact even more. Understanding the effectiveness of the different types of communication types helps devise a communication strategy. When is possible, face to face communication is the most effective type of communication but there are situations when the team is distributed geographically and therefore other communication methods should be used. Increasing the communication to its highest level should be the direction in these cases.