Being part of a distributed team has its advantages. Here’s a few pics from my “office” today.
At Atlantic Dominion Solutions we’ve been doing globally distributed agile development for a number of years. We have a team we work with in the Philippines, I’m now working from New Ulm, Minnesota for a bit, Justin is in Florida, our design firm Domo is in Seattle, Washington, and we work with contractors throughout the United States and abroad. It’s a model that works very well, and a model I see more companies moving to.
Geography hasn’t been a barrier for sometime. However, I do see two main barriers to distributed agile teams.
First is keeping the communication flowing. However that isn’t too much of a barrier anymore either. We have video conferencing, Skype, instant messenger, online project management systems (like Scrum’d), phones (Vonage is great if you work from home), and many others, making global communication instantaneous and easy. Other forms of communication exist as well to get our code talking, including continuous integration servers and source code repositories. One lesson here is that more documentation does not count as increased communication.
The second barrier is mindset. I know some managers and small business owners that have literally told me that they need to physically see their employees working. For me that’s a trust issue. I’m no psychologist, however I don’t think I’m too off with my assumption. It takes trust to have your people working off-site and allow them to manage their own time. But we’re all adults here aren’t we? We all know the expectations of our employers, and the consequences of not meeting those expectations don’t we?
As Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson said in Rework (a great book I recommend), you want everyone to get together at least 2-3 times per year. Currently there is no solid substitute for face-to-face communication, however we can come pretty darn close and have great relationships with our team members in between face times.
Thank you Internet, for making this possible.
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