RT @mathemagenic: blogged on colocation as blackbox of agile practices making it difficult to go distributed [link to post] -comments? – Posted using Chat Catcher

blogged on co-location as a black box of #Agile practices that makes it difficult to go distributed [link to post] – any comments? – Posted using Chat Catcher

Distributed Agile: the black box of co-located team [link to post] How to make it work – Posted using Chat Catcher

http://bit.ly/6CLQGo

Joshua, do you have any pointers to what are the good practices of using wikis in Agile teams? Would love to read more on it.

Pierluigi, re: double-loop learning – helping teams to understand better where communication doesn’t work and what to do about it is definitely part of our project. In any case, I tend to view research as “holding a mirror” that allows people we work with see their practices in a new light and to improve them.

[Still not done with a presentation on the whole thing for tomorrow, so unfortunately blogging about it will have to wait a little bit.]

Thanks for your post and your interest in researching on this subject: there is still a lot of work to do about agile and dispersed team.

I have to disagree when you say agile was not designed for dispersed team: the principle you mention about face to face being the most effective way of communicating is, in fact, true in all kind of teamwork. The agile movement has simply started to openly talk about the issue – I saw many companies outsourcing their development trading resources offshore one to one without even thinking that there might be a communication penalty involved!

In traditional project management a lot of emphasis is put on documentation as a way to communicate. Some process models like the German V-Model even define interfaces in terms of documents. But in fact, what they are doing in this way is to enforce a low-bandwidth common denominator for the communication which is still more inefficient than a quick phone conversation augmented by a short email summary.

The agile community has spotted the issue and is also trying to solve it through technologies partially already exploited in open source projects. There are a lot of collaboration tools widely used in agile project that address the problem of documenting casual communication (IM, electronic whiteboards, electronic Kanban boards, in-the-code documentation), making disperse teams possible (and an actual reality in several companies), though still suboptimal compared to co-located ones.

On the top of that, if agile is implemented properly – i.e. as an adaptive system through an efficient double-loop learning, for example via retrospective and coaching – communication bottleneck will be identified and addressed. If the adaptation of the process involves a more formal interface through documents, well, let be it!

Be aware there is quite some discussion in the community about the meaning of the “overs” of the manifesto. The summary is that “over” could be read as “is to be improved with higher priority than”.

I’m eager to read your next posts about this!

Pierluigi