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Managing Product Development » What Would a Successful Agile All-Remote Team Look Like?

Aside from sounding like some Agile Awards Team (“And now, your 2009 Agile All-Remote Team!”) Johanna has a good overview of some of the hurdles facing remote teams.

My two most recent perspectives, from today. Earlier, @mhsutton sent out a question over Twitter, asking if anyone uses remote desktop sharing tools to facilitate pair programming. I enthusiastically answered, “YES!”

Two of our DBAs use remote desktop sharing so one of the pair can work remotely a fair portion of the time. They’ve got pair programming down cold, and are a fantastic testament to the advantages of pair programming. It’s a great example of how remote pairing can work, well.

But then, earlier today as we were stressing out about the testing effort we’re undertaking with our outsourced testing team in India (yes, I know. It hurts. Deep, deep hurting) one of that pair exclaimed, “Dammit, it would be so much easier if Mohinder were sitting here, so we could actually see the output of their testing tools!”

So, thinking some more about Johanna’s blog post, I think that one of the things I’ve seen that leads to a successful remote pairing arrangement, and by extension remote teams, is that they need to work co-located for a bit, first.

There’s a natural shorthand that develops between team members. There’s a language of work habits and methods that, when working remotely, you encounter obstacles to developing.

I’m sure that you can develop these habits, only working remotely. It just seems that being co-located, first, allows those habits to develop sooner, and makes working remotely easier, later.

I’m sure there are lots of things I’m forgetting, too. But my brain’s wandering off to how to integrate new team members into a remote team, without bringing the entire team together to indoctrinate the new team member, and that’s a whole other blog post.