Distributed Agile Development at Socialtext

Ross Mayfield, Tracy Ruggles and I presented at the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. Ross gave a high level picture of some core social software principles of connected collaboration. Tracy and I talked about how we live those principles every day, using Socialtext tools to do distributed agile product development with Socialtext tools.

Social scientist Valdis Krebs has observed that a healthy social network has a strongly connected core, and a more weakly connected periphery. The densely connected core reflects a well-functioning collaborative process; while the weaker ties to the periphery enable the organization to respond to the the environment and learn.

In the clip, I describe how we use Socialtext’s wiki for tight, fast, iterative collaboration with product management, design, development and QA. The transparency and participative contribution fostered by the Socialtext toolset enables a broader network of weaker ties with customers and customer-facing folk in sales, marketing, support and professional services. The broader network of weaker ties helps Socialtext understand our customer’s needs, and the short development cycle lets the leadership team flexibly prioritize what’s needed for the business. A key principle of agile is adapting your process to the your current processes and needs, and a key principle of Socialtext is a set of tools that let you adapt your processes to be responsive to change.

In a presentation, the most interesting thing is often the questions, which aren’t in the video.

• One product manager asked about having “stories” in development be visible to the whole company, and customer feedback be gathered in view of the whole company. Doesn’t that cause a problem with “too many cooks”? The answer is leadership and signoff. It’s PM’s job to turn the gas cloud of input and goals into a set of stories and roadmap, and ultimately the CEO’s job to make sure we’re going in the right direction.
• One product manager asked a really telling question – how would Socialtext technology help me make the QA people on the team to read the pages in my PM documents? The answer is, that’s the wrong question. At Socialtext, QA folk pro-actively read stories, add corner case tests, and sign off, because they co-own the process. We sometimes have passionate disagreements, but not indifference. Tools can help with collaboration, but the culture needs to create it.

The video and slides are here. The distributed agile process that I talk about is a collaborative creation of the whole Socialtext product development team.

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