I started following a LinkedIn discussion on the ever-popular topic "Can Agile work with geographically dispersed teams?"
Since 80% of all software teams are dispersed or "distributed," working with geographically dispersed teams is not an option. You have to make it work, and we will help you. We’ve been working for years to make distributed teams more agile, and collecting tips and tricks.Last night I pulled together this material and added it to the draft of our upcoming eBook, Unblock: A Guide to the New Continuous Agile.
Sections include:
Three ways to organize, Co-located, Outsourced, Distributed
Communications: A good online ticketing/issue system (like Assembla's) is required. We also recommend chat, online standup report forms, daily or continuous builds, and code review. We do NOT recommend conference calls and other synchronous communication. What do you think?
Do and Do Not: These core recommendations are simple and will save you a lot of time.
High performing teams, in which we explain how teams will become high performing after they succeed in working together, even if the team members have never met each other. This position is supported by research, as well as by our own experience.
I would appreciate it if you check out this draft material and write your comments on the LinkedIn discussion group that we set up for Continuous Agile.
Here are some representative comments in the LinkedIn thread:
Allen Holub writes: "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." "Distributing the team is always a mistake. Have different teams in different locations can work, but you *never* want to split the team up."
Andy's response: A lot of people made the argument that projects can be distributed, but you want to put complete teams in one place. To me, this doesn't match reality, and it uses people poorly, essentially discriminating against people in some locations.
Carleson counters with "The teams must be equal". That's right. You want everyone to participate equally regardless of location. However, he also says "Invest heavily in video equipment", which is wrong. Most teams are just annoyed by video.
However, there were also a lot of people who say they are getting good results with their distributed teams. These people didn't give up. They kept trying things until they found good ways to communicate and collaborate.
We run a distributed team working in 15 countries, with multiple releases per day. This is a common architecture for modern startups. People who say they can't be agile with truly distributed haven't taken the time to learn how to do it. They bring in a lot of assumptions about how teams communicate, and they haven't opened their minds to real behavior in a distributed workplace.
