“Jon Udell”:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/ talks to “Andy Singleton”:http://andy.blogs.assembla.com/ about “building global teams”:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/05/19.html#a1451 .
An interesting ‘listen’ in general, but one of my first comments was on how these teams “wield open source componentary”.
I’ve seen how, over the years, as open source toolkits have matured, the benefits to distributed teams have been immense, and direct. Built without the assumption of co-location, geographically or temporally, they were immediately useful to any kind of distributed teams. Even simple things like how CVS is so much better over a WAN link than most older version control systems. Or that most tools were built with a web interface, making them easier to deploy access over heterogenous networks.
A succint example of what I am talking about is “Collabnet”:http://www.collab.net, which started by packaging and supporting many of these tools in commerical environments
One emerging phenomena in this space is distributed version control systems such as “bazaar-ng”:http://bazaar-vcs.org/ that take these concepts to quite another level. It will be interesting to see how these tools evolve in commercial environments.
But the connections go beyond just tools. To look at how to run a distributed agile project, a good starting point is to see how agile processes map to open source projects. That however, is a topic for another day.