'Real World' Distributed Agile: An Oxymoron?

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Topics: Agile

The following assertions are based on my personal observations in different business domains as well as a random, "spot-check" review of some of the distributed project information publicly available.

A prevalent topic in the various agile groups these days is "How To Do Agile Management of Distributed Software Development Projects"--reflecting correspondingly prevalent software development efforts in today's global business workplace.

Can it be done?  
The simple answer is yes--and the "simple solution" is to organize teams so they are colocated to work on separate modules or feature sets for the SW product, so they can proceed on an end-to-end basis with minimal interaction between the teams.

Both organizational culture and economic necessities often work against that "simple solution", however. Few teams on large-scale SW projects have evolved organizationally so they can adopt a sashimi approach, allowing each team member to work across functional areas (Dev, DBA, QA, UI, etc.). Thus we continue to find shared resources time-slicing among multiple teams, or worse, teams with dev members distributed across different time zones.

Accepting that a fundamental principle of agile approaches is to improve the communication flow, this implies that adapting to these realities requires  a robust communication …

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