Agile development and remote teams: learning to love the phone

Abstract

We currently work on a project where we adopted an agile process that integrates elements of extreme programming and agile modelling. Our approach is unconventional however; instead of the team being co-located, we work remotely as the lead developer. The risk of increased communication costs can be mitigated rather easily. However, trust is the most complicated element of team dynamics to establish and maintain. A virtual team must address this issue in order to succeed. Remote teams can work quite well. We have been delivering quality software in a timely manner, within the expectations of management for the last two years. We actually are more efficient and successful with a virtual team than when we were all co-located in the same room.