An Automated Contextual Collaboration Approach for Distributed Agile Delivery

The Agile way of developing and delivering software systems is gaining mainstream adoption due to the imperatives of a quickly changing technical landscape, business requirements and customer expectations. To truly leverage the power of Agile, big organizations need to be able to utilize distributed teams effectively. However, Agile delivery relies hugely on collaboration among team members and this can become a stumbling block among such geographically dispersed teams. Moreover, in such large projects the development and process layer needs to be monitored for any problematic patterns or events that could potentially cause the Sprints to fail. Here, we describe an automated approach which allows for contextual collaboration in such distributed Agile projects. The approach captures important events from the process and the development environment and uses a rule based approach to then automatically create awareness regarding them to appropriate roles in the project. Every team member receives an actionable feed in a MyContext pane which then leads the team member to navigate to an Activity centric context where collaboration specific to that activity can take place. This approach has been implemented in a process guidance and awareness workbench that we are piloting within our organization.