Agile Distributed Teams Issues: One Project, Two Teams, QA in one Team

Q. I participate in a project with two development teams. First team located in US (5 people) and another larger team (10 people) in India. We have 5 testers in India and no testers in US. Other people are developers. The product is quite large and we are using iterative development. We are trying to communicate as often as possible using Skype and WebEx sessions, but still we have problems with velocity and RTF. Many user stories planned to iterations are not completed on time and we have problems with testing and quality. Do you have any advices what can be done to improve the situation?

M. If all people working on a single backlog it causes many problems. The main idea is to have two completely autonomous teams that communicate about integration, have separate backlogs and schedule. I think some problems that should be addressed asap are:

1. Project should be divided onto two modules (or sub-projects) and each team should focus on its own sub-project.
2. Testers should present in both teams. QA requires hot communication and you can't have QA in another location in agile development. It will just not work. I think this is the main reason of poor quality.
3. Use web based agile project management software. It will help to coordinate teams effort and manage single product backlog as well as sub-projects' backlogs.
4. The good idea may be to run at least one release together in one location. It may be quite expensive to move 5 developers from US to India for 1-2 months, but the effect may be marvelous. Please consider this possibility!

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