Managing Drupal development for distributed teams

Early January 2015, the website for the European Year of Development went live. The site is now steadily filling up with content. The launch is the result of a joint consultancy effort by Namahn and Amplexor Belgium & Amplexor Romania. We would like to share with you how we have worked together on this project in a distributed team with people located in more than 5 different locations, to make it a success:

• The rush start at the end of June 2014, with just a two weeks to do user research, set-up an information architecture and create a draft design.
• The peculiarities of working for the Commission (the core team was a mix of Scandinavian, Greek, Rumanian and German persons).
• The challenges of multilingualism at the Commission: a site in 23 languages; the choice for an asymmetrical site (not the same content in every language); a search across content in different languages while retaining one interface language; etc.
• A project in two phases: an analysis and design track in which Namahn took the lead, and a build track in which Amplexor took the lead.
• How a UX designer fits in an agile development track (6 sprints), and how a front-end coder (subcontracted by Namahn) forms an important bridge between design team and development team.