Lately there has been a lot of buzz about remote Agile teams. What are everyone's thoughts? Can an Agile team be spread across two geographically separate groups and function as well as a collocated team? Besides communication what other challenges arise?
Agile and Distributed teams
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Stephen Conley
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I think this largely depends on whether both sets of people are working with Agile methodologies at the time of coming together.
I've worked on a project where we outsourced to a team in India who are extremely well taught in the ways of Agile and the process was beautiful, they were so committed to communication that the project was a pleasure.
I've also worked on a project where one side were learning to work in an Agile way for the project and it was simply awful. No communication, no ownership of stories, just a lot of throwing things over the wall and passing of the buck. Was always quite painful to hear those people using the word Agile also just because they kept banding around words and phrases like 'playing a story' or 'iteration'.
If both sides are indeed committed to communication then it can be a really nice experience.