Question

To reduce costs and the environmental impact of commuting, your software company decides to close a number of offices and enable staff to work from home. However, the senior management team who introduced the policy is unaware that your team is using agile methods, which rely on the co-location of teams and pair programming.

Required:
Discuss the difficulties that this new policy might cause and how you might get around these problems?

Answer 1

The problem with this new policy and solutions on how to tackle them have been given in two separate headings below.

Step-by-step explanation:

Problems of the introduced new policy

Major difficulty faced with the teams, who rely on agile methods, is that they won't be able to conduct face to face meetings. This might create communication gap, slow decision makings, resolving & detecting errors and lack of team building.

Solutions with regard to the new policy

These above mentioned issues can tackled by merging some of the offices already running with those that have been closed down.

Another way is to set up communication mechanism online by providing all the required equipment such as webcams, microphones, laptops, video calling software (such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams etc.) and internet. Moreover, if there is issue of background noise such as some employees might have children and no such quiet place is available in the house then setting up room for attending meetings can also be provided.