My bias is that “high-bandwitdth” communication, like face to face meetings between devs in front of a whiteboard, easily outperforms IRC and bug tracking software. Maybe you’ve experienced something different.

Before that, I used to work with people collaboration via IRC and bug tracking systems plus whiteboard software; while it was harder, especially across timezones, it is still pretty viable.

My experience was that distributed development works, and works pretty well, especially with right tools in place; value of face to face communication for tech work is way, way, no – WAY overrated.
Marketing or PM team, or politically charged organization may have big problems from distributed arrangement, nut bot a good dev team.

I can also think of unmotivated, lazy developers having problems because of lack of managerial oversight – then, this could be solved, and ditto about good teams above.

Anyway, see http://peripateticaxiom.blogspot.com/2008/10/just-work.html for some further thoughts on “just work”

I’ll also note that the open-source projects we contribute to such as GCC and GDB are also developed by very distributed teams, and their success in the relevant markets seems to be in direct counterpoint to this “doesn’t work” claim.

Sure, there are challenges. And being aware of them is useful. But the evidence shows that, when an organization or company fosters communication in ways other than face-to-face meetings, distributed development can in fact work very well.

I step back a little and read the blog again. Is it saying that you should not “Outsource” or is it saying that you should not “Distribute” your team. I think its the latter and so you can have your entire team offshore instead and put your subject matter expert into the team for them to work effectively and efficiently while deriving the benefits of lower cost. Right?

I am myself managing a project where we have team members who are distributed across cities and continents. To add to the complexity, even our customers are distributed.

While we are distributed we try to make up for it by over-collaborating. We make sure that a document is shared over a web conference so that everyone is on the same page and any edits are being observed real-time. We also highly encourage chatting within team members over IMs and over the phone. We record meetings during non-overlap periods to give an opportunity for team members to have a more rich experience of an update. I like it when a team-member says “I saw the video and the customer did not sound very convinced about our plan.” We also leverage audio cues that we observe over the telecons — a deep sigh, a laugh, an exclamation and not to mention silence. We actually thank the individual for that bit of extra dimension in the communication. Sometimes we call upon that individual’s non-verbal feedback — “Wow, you seem very happy to have had this in production, don’t you?”.

For my team, the web-conference is our team-room. We find ourselves having discussions on it several times a day. Developers sometimes do peer programming over it, customers do peer reviews.

This is not to say that we’ve achieved the efficiencies of a co-located team, but we do work very hard to compensate for our distribution.

Conferences and workshops
http://icgse2008.di.uniba.it/
http://seal.ece.ubc.ca/gsd2006/

Or you could’ve just googled:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=global+software+development+&btnG=Search&meta=

You could’ve even searched for work on your topic:
http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=distributed+software+development&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search

But you didn’t, you wrote this uninformed mess and you expect us to take it at face value.

Your opinion is meaningless, worthless and frankly pretty off-kilter. Go look at how IBM, Microsoft and other companies manage this and go look at the current results in research and business. A famous business consultant once said: Once your 50m away from someone you might as well be a continent away.

Hi Sarah,

What I try to do in my blog is to write about my thoughts. The blog’s name used to be Andrés’ Thoughts for a reason. This is my opinion, and nothing else. I do try to read up on things, but the stuff I write about is most of the time so vague that you can’t prove anything either way.

I’m sorry that you think that my “…opinion is meaningless, worthless and frankly pretty off-kilter.” It’s the only opinion I’ve got.

Andrés