Matthew Chadwick My Life as an Expat: Distributed Agile in Action

Travel by plane from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Bangalore, India takes approximately 24 hours. Travel by network packet can take as little as 150 milliseconds. Never have 11 1/2 time zones seemed so small. Soon, if not already, you will have an opportunity to be a part of a distributed team. Perhaps it will start with an open source project. Perhaps your company will move a portion of its operations outside of the United States to save money, compress a project schedule, or because they are having trouble hiring enough local talent. Are you ready?

Come explore the typical routine of a distributed agile team. This presentation will walk through a hypothetical scenario in which a Minnesota developer travels to India to meet, live, and work with her faraway teammates. We will examine personal anxieties, cultural differences, and the professional aspects of the journey, emphasizing distributed process lessons learned from US-India teams. After this talk you may not be ready to pack your bags, but you will better understand the impact of distance on software development, whether that distance is across the hall or across the ocean.

Matthew Chadwick is a Software Engineer at ThoughtWorks. He is just returning to Minneapolis after spending the last 18 months on distributed agile teams in Bangalore and London. Matt received his bachelor's degree from Luther College in 2000 in Mathematics and Computer Science and his Masters of Science in Software Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2004.