It’s common knowledge that co-location is key to the success of an agile team. Over the years, I’ve created and observed many ways to make the distribution somewhat less painful, and to reduce the impacts, but make no mistake: there is just no substitute for putting a team into the same physical room. Experienced teams and new teams alike come back to this point over and over again, with the same results. I’m seeing more and more of my clients bringing development teams back together physically, reducing and even eliminating the dispersion of their teams.
Here in the northeast US, we’re experiencing a high number of disruptive winter storms this winter. Even agile teams that are usually co-located find themselves working in a widely dispersed fashion – whether they expect to be or not! Though much is written about distributed Agile teams, there is generally consistent agreement that any distribution of team members – even for a single work at home day — reduces the efficiency of that team. But fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, flexible workplace arrangements are more and more commonplace.
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