Distributed teams can be just as efficient as collocated teams
You’ve probably heard the opinion that distributed agile teams experience a significant “drag factor” due to the inability to communicate as efficiently as fully collocated teams that are sitting together in the same physical bullpen. This sentiment is held dear by some agile experts, yet when pressed for figures to support this claim they have trouble producing them, and we’re told to trust their experience. To be fair, I would have agreed with this sentiment even as recently as five years ago. But technology can advance quite a bit in five years, so this post is an attempt to convince you to shake off this now obsolete notion.
Unlike the vague hand-waving that I’ve personally witnessed, some companies have managed to track measurable statistics regarding distributed versus collocated teams and their results seem to indicate that the popular sentiment is no longer valid. For example, Microsoft recently published a report in the August 2009 Communications of the ACM demonstrating that their empirical data collected during the course of development for Vista indicates that there is no significant difference in the performance of distributed versus collocated teams, and even more interesting, that there is no difference in the number of defects found in the output of distributed versus collocated teams. (Here is another link to a related announcement.)
I’m here to back up Microsoft’s weighty report with my own empirical observations. The scrum team I worked with for the past 9 months was fully distributed from day one, and within our first two sprints we had managed to find tools and adopt collaboration techniques that reduced the “communication drag” to zero. By the third sprint and beyond, several of us who normally worked together in the physical bullpen often worked from home and the team noticed no “drag” whatsoever. (Two of our members were permanently situated in remote geographic locations.) Not only was there no difference in communication bandwidth regardless of where anyone was working on a given day, but we actually had several occasions to witness that our communication bandwidth was faster than some teams that were fully collocated and did not use the tools and techniques that we did.
How was this possible? Because we had successfully created a “virtual bullpen” at practically no cost. And it worked. Beautifully. The following 9-minute screencast shows you how we did it.
Tip: If you view this screencast in the embedded player above, it will automatically play in high-definition mode. If you watch this from its source page on YouTube, you must manually enable HD mode.
