![\"\"](\"https:\/\/agilityfeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/CostaRicaFeb28-009.jpg\" "\\"CostaRicaFeb28")
<\/a>Initial conversations about a project are best done in person around a whiteboard.<\/p><\/div>\n
For this project, the client sent their Product Owner to San Jose Costa Rica to work with our team.\u00a0 Initial co-location with the Product Owner is an absolutely essential part of our model.<\/p>\n
Many distributed teams get off to a bad start because they don\u2019t have a clear understanding of the product to be developed.\u00a0 Often times the toughest questions need to be asked in person, and the most efficient way to ask those questions and rapidly incorporate feedback is to do it in person.<\/p>\n
As much as we love skype and all the other tools that allow our teams to work efficiently when distributed, there is no substitute for in person communication.\u00a0 Given the relatively low travel costs between the US and Costa Rica, it is well worth it to make sure things get off to a strong start.<\/p>\n
User Experience and Design<\/strong><\/p>\n Our UX lead Mariana works with the client's Product Owner Lindsay on wireframes<\/p><\/div>\n Our teams are not just about development.\u00a0 We also bring user experience and design experts to the table.\u00a0 This serves two purposes.<\/p>\n First, we want to add as much value to our clients as possible at an affordable price.\u00a0 And a successful software product requires a good user interface that is easy to use and attractive.\u00a0 Many companies don\u2019t have user experience experts internally or even graphic design staff and so we provide that with all our teams as a matter of course.<\/p>\n Second, even if your team has graphic designers already, there are big communication benefits to engaging our UX and design team.\u00a0 All of our developers speak English very well, but occasionally something will get lost in the translation.<\/p>\n Our Costa Rican UX and design team members are completely fluent in English and have spent time in the United States.\u00a0 So not only are they helping you to improve on your product vision, they are also ensuring strong communication back to the rest of our team in Costa Rica.<\/p>\n Creation of the backlog<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the important jobs for our UX lead and our project leads is to help you write user stories.\u00a0 This will be a big focus for the project kick off week, so that we have a good understanding of what you need done in the near term.<\/p>\n We also want to establish good agile practices for user stories and acceptance criteria right from the start, since that will help to create common understanding of a feature and reduce any language barriers.<\/p>\n Communicating the project vision and goals<\/strong><\/p>\n Video chat with the client<\/p><\/div>\n One of the most important things we did this week was stepping through the client\u2019s existing application and code, and make sure that everyone understood the current functionality and challenges.\u00a0 This informed the vision and goals for our work together.<\/p>\n It was highly valuable to do this in person, as we were able to iterate through initial technical challenges quickly and we learned things about the code base that were a surprise even to the client.<\/p>\n Team training<\/strong><\/p>\n When necessary we will also provide training to our teams as necessary as part of the initial co-location.\u00a0 For this week\u2019s project kick off, we are ramping up new Ruby on Rails team members.<\/p>\n Dave Haeffner training the team on Cucumber and BDD<\/p><\/div>\n So Dave Haeffner and I delivered a 2 day course to the team on Ruby on Rails, Cucumber (for automated browser testing), and Behavior Driven Development practices.\u00a0 The developers we trained already had strong development experience, but these were new tool sets and so we made sure that the team would be using best practices from the start.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>