 I have 20 minutes, and so do you, isn't it? So let us see what happens in these 20 minutes. The title distributed agile 10 guiding principles. And what I do is I go around talk in conferences. And in every conference, I try to do something unique. So that keeps me thinking. Sometimes I use presentations where each slide has a picture. So that is what everybody does. That is an outdated style now. Sometimes I did presentations where the video guy is struggling to capture me. So what I did was I used pictures which are not static, but pictures that are having rich animation with no words in each slide. I tried that. It worked well. And I don't repeat the same style twice. So somehow it is working for me. As I have told you all this, next time I can see it only if the audience is going to be different. So with that note, let us start and see what is in store for us. 20 years ago, that was 1994, I was working for one of the largest IT organizations in India. That was National Informatics Center. So there was no Infosys, there was no TCS cognizant. And IT was not an industry those days. And our organization during those days was specializing in networking and trying to connect all the districts in India. A very enriching experience, we learned a lot. We had a lot of senior members. And only one office, which was the headquarters in Delhi, had about 2,000 employees. Otherwise, all other state level, regional level offices, around 200, 300. So if you work in a 200-people organization, that was a large organization for us. And the person who used to head the organization was called the director. So there was no titles like deputy general manager, general manager, assistant vice president, vice president, senior vice president, executive vice president. I can go on and on and fill the 20 minutes. I don't want to do that. So director, very respectable person. He had done his research from TIFR, one of the reputed institutes in India in mathematics. And he was heading. And he was due for retirement that year. So we had a congregation like this. And it is something which I remember even today. And when I was putting together this presentation yesterday, I decided that I should tell you the story. And even I was tempted to ask one of you a question. What did you have for breakfast last Monday? Hard to remember, isn't it? But for all of us, our brain is very powerful. But we keep remembering those memorable incidents. I think such memorable incidents are inside every one of you. And we keep remembering those. So this is one such incident. So it is a senior most highly respectable, capable, well-known person, very approachable person, retiring from an organization. And you know what a government employee takes with him when he retires? Not a lot of money. Of course, he's going to get a lot of pension. He takes away a lot of goodwill. He leaves a lot of youngsters in the organization with a lot of values and qualities and goes away with the belief that they're going to carry it forward. So that was the moment we were sitting together to say goodbye to him. And I continued to stay in touch with him even 10 or 15 years after that, because he was living in the same neighborhood. He was well-known to me. So one thing he said in that meeting reflected in my mind all these years. And when you look at that, it is going to reflect in your mind for a long time. You're not going to forget about it. So let me reveal what that is. He said this. He said, you don't have the right to abuse yourself. This is what he said. He did not ask us to become brilliant programmers. He did not ask us to become customer-centric employees. And he did not ask us to be successful in our lives. He said this. And those days, we were typical mischievous young engineers. When a senior guy is talking and making a comment like this, what would someone sitting in the last row such as Sudeeta comment? What a philosophy. What a principle. And no one ridiculed it. We tried to ridicule it, because that was our habit. Because as youngsters, we try to make fun of things. And we thrive on that. And I have done that many times. Everyone does it. But that day, we believed in this. Yes, it makes sense. We don't have, none of us have the right to abuse ourselves. And that got etched in my mind. Any questions? Yeah, do you abuse yourself? Come ask me. And yeah, tough question. We'll talk about it during tea break. It's a very philosophical question, a great principle that we should remember and carry forward. So now, principles have consequences attached to them. Whenever we talk about principles, there are consequences. If you follow them, you get good consequence. If you don't follow them, that's about it. So you've read a lot of books on principles, articles on principles. And when we follow principles, you get good consequence. When you don't follow, there are going to be bad consequences. There is no other thing about it. You cannot build on that. That's it. How about practices? You don't do pair programming in a project. It's OK. When you don't do test driven development, it's OK. Someone else will do it and get a promotion. Someone else will come and put off the fire and get appreciation. And what the organization or the project wants to deliver will be eventually delivered. But when you violate a principle, something is seriously wrong. It is going to shake the entire system. So this is what this talk is going to be about. Practices are sometimes treated as good practices. Yes, this practice is working well for us. And then you say that these are universal practices. This practice, we should follow in every project in our company. It is applicable to each and every situation. And they become principles. You say that, yes, these are our principles. We should take and live by these principles. And when we violate, there is going to be a consequence. So now, about me, my name, Raja Bhavani, chief architect at MindSeek. And you can read my blogs at SE, Stanford Software Engineering, tautograph.blogspot.com. And last year, we founded a consortium known as Global Distributed Agile Consortium. That is this logo. And you can read the blog posts of Distributed Agile Consortium at this address. And with that introduction, let us move on. There are 10 guiding principles. I have talked about it in my writings. And there was a recent, that is in November 2003, one of the top IT journals called Qatar IT Journal, which is equivalent to Harvard Business Review in the Business World, published my article on this topic, which is available at their website for free download. Download it and read that article. That's a gift for all of you. In addition to that, for this conference, I have written a short paper by condensing that article into three or four pages. That PDF file is available in the conference website. You can go through that as well. So now, looking at the time available, what I am going to do is instead of going to all 10 principles, I'm going to go through four principles and some real life examples. And then share the rest six in a quick view and then move on. That's my plan, a quick time check. So this is number one. Methodology is driven by project. So when you work with geographically distributed themes, you cannot push a methodology on them. You cannot be passionate about a single named methodology and believe that it's going to work for you. Believe in distance. Methodology is driven by project teams. Bring project teams together. Let them know more than one methodology. Let them know many methodologies. Let them know many practices. And put together something that works for them. So do I have a methodology to prepare presentations? Yes, I do have, which I told you at the beginning. So I'm going to tell you what is unique about this presentation today if you have not noticed it so far. Has anyone noticed it so far? I have customized it to the back benches. This presentation is customized to back benches. Because yesterday I noticed that in this room, back benches cannot read anything below this. And they are always standing up or moving their head here and there to read. So now back benches, it is for you. I have customized it for you. Not that I've ignored the front benches. They can read it as well. So that is what this principle is about. Methodology is driven by project teams. So don't believe that you can get 10 people certified in some methodology and scale or execute projects or work with distributed teams. Not going to work. It does not work. And if it has worked, let me know. I'll change my principle. And this is very essential. So you cannot have an external expert coming and dictating a methodology on your teams. You cannot have a master of location from where the project is originating, dictating a methodology on other distributed teams. This is what works. Do this. Let all of them come together and put something that works. Let us move on. So we need an inclusive approach in distributed. Not only in putting together a methodology. Don't expect only one location to conduct demo all the time. Don't expect only one location to find false all the time. Don't think that only one location is entitled to do root cause analysis and find false or blame other locations. Be inclusive. Let everyone be allowed to do everything in a reasonable manner. And that is principle number six, seven. Governance is the backbone of successful distributed. What is governance? Dashboard. That's what people think. Governance is a PowerPoint presentation with jazzy grabs and conclusions, takeaways, what worked, what did not work. Governance is those people who are capable of governance. So when you find those people, the leaders, from every location, they are collaborative, participative. They can appreciate technical issues. They can appreciate domain issues. They know the day-to-day struggles of people on the ground, the developers, the business analysts, the programmers, the testers, and so on. Then you can have true governance. They will give true support. They will provide the necessary ecosystem for the project team to survive. And governance is not a dashboard that lands in somebody's email box all of a sudden. And that person wakes up and says, you know what? I only have 10 minutes. I want to find at least three pointers to ask three difficult questions. Now I'm ready to get into the governance meeting. Let me ask those questions and get out there. That is not governance. And unfortunately, in many organizations, that's not what happens. So governance is the backbone, and we have to put it together very well. Otherwise, projects will collapse. And next, ensuring early success is a collective responsibility. You cannot push something on a team. You cannot say that, you know what, we are unable to find people in one country. So let us find people in another country and let them start developing the toughest of the complex model, which is the building model, or the payment model. If you do that, you're going to fail. So you have to set up the game in such a way that the players are ready to win or see those small wins, step up, progress, and say that, yes, we are confident we can now handle complex things. So ensuring early success is a collective responsibility. So these are the four principles I wanted to share with you. And if you don't understand these principles, and if you violate these principles, I can tell you you're going to have disasters, projects will fail. And the consequences will be severe. So you may put certain actions and pull the project back and deliver, but the consequences are going to be severe. And there are also other six principles, which is about, the second one is about consistent usage of common tools. In many projects, we have this habit of evaluating a tool when the third or fourth sprint is in progress. Yeah, so far we are using Excel C, and we are going to use something else. We do not use any tool for static analysis. We are introducing a new tool. So have you seen a production line in a car manufacturing factory where the tools are not ready, but the production starts? It's impossible. If you have things in place, and you consistently use them again and again, that's your productive use. And infrastructure for communication and coordination is very crucial. In a distributed environment, you cannot ignore that. You cannot say that, you know what, we don't have enough video conference rooms. We do not have enough bandwidth for supporting certain types of communication. Knowledge management is a very key success. And quality is multi-dimensional, which means that it is not just on one team. It is on multiple teams. It is not just on developers. It's on several other people. You have to understand what is the meaning of quality before design, so that you deliver high-quality requirements to get high-quality code. You cannot have one team which is penalized for not checking in code every evening, whereas the other team can go scot-free if they violate that rule. You cannot have double standards. Quality is multi-dimensional. And automation enables sustainable space. When you work with multiple teams, even if they're across the same time zone, same city, there are multiple variables. You cannot do without automation. And one should understand the meaning of, true meaning of technical let, and take checks and balances of what is happening in the project. And have a streamlined way of paying off technical let. So these are the 10 principles. And let me conclude by asking you this. Do you remember what happened 20 years ago? I told you the story. We don't have the right to abuse yourself, which means that many of your managers, many of your senior leaders, many of you are going to be senior leaders. You cannot violate these principles. When you do, you're going to abuse yourself. You're going to abuse your teams. You're going to abuse your customers. And thank you. Any questions?