It’s an uncomfortable feeling: you read a news article describing clandestine organization cells, distributed networks of small teams which are nearly completely unaffected by each other’s operations yet united in their goals and beliefs. Their flat hierarchies mean the loss of one team member, even a leader, has little effect on the cell. The organization’s recruiting techniques focus on identifying disenfranchised yet influential individuals, sympathetic to the cell’s cause, and incorporating them into the group after a thorough vetting process.
After reading this you say to yourself, “That’s where I work, and it’s awesome.”
Learn how running a 200-person (and growing) Agile/XP software consulting company is much like running a clandestine organization, and how your teams can take techniques often associated with negative actions and use them for the good of your projects.
Joe began writing software in the late ’90s at a large insurance company. He soon moved to Evant, a start-up which became an early case study for eXtreme Programming and Agile software development processes. After spending several years as a consultant, Joe joined Pivotal Labs in 2005 as a founding members of Pivotal’s Ruby on Rails practice. Joe has led projects for a wide variety of clients, from one-person start-ups to the world’s largest social networks and search companies. Since moving to Atlanta in 2010 Joe has pair programmed remotely full time with Pivotal Labs coworkers and clients around the country. He also blogs about his his passion, remote pair programming, at http://remotepairprogramming.com.
