Developing a conversational agent with a globally distributed team: an experience report

In this experience report, we discuss the development of a solution that enables conflict-affected youth to discover and access relevant learning content. A team of individuals from a not-for-profit, a large multi-national technology company, and an academic institution, collaborated to develop that solution as a conversational agent named Hakeem. We provide a brief motivation and product description before outlining our design and development process including forming a distributed virtual team, engaging in user-centred design with conflict-affected youth in Lebanon, and using a minimum viable product approach while adapting Scrum for distributed development. We end this report with a reflection on the lessons learned thus far.