I think it has all and everything to do with the project goal, size and structure. I have never worked in a big corporate distributed project, but I am working in both a (very) small corporate project, and a mid-size open source project, and they are both doing very good.

Actually, I’ve come to think that ‘respect’ is a key factor. You really have to think that your peers are cool people with the cool ideas, that you like (or at least accept) on a personal level. If so, talking to people, sharing ideas and knowledge becomes an act of love.

Actually, maybe ‘love’ is a better word. Love for your peers, love for the project, love for the work and love for the code.

Yeah. Love.

What I get out from it is that you have to see distributed development as a big investment that takes at least a year to get going, and takes considerable amount of work to get to work, and even then, the pay off is not even close to the wage difference.

If you have time, energy and money to invest, and you are already very good at developing software effectively, distributed development might make sense.

Most of the teams I’ve met that want to use distributed development are already struggling with their communication today. Introducing the problems of distributed development there wouldn’t make sense. That is the gist of what I was trying to say. Your mileage might vary.

Here is a concrete experience at odds with Jeff and Guido.
http://blog.jayfields.com/2008/09/is-distributed-development-viable.html

Where does that leave us?

p.s. Hi Andres

I know nothing of Jeff’s experience. Haven’t read any detailed experience reports about it. My own experience points to something else, and I won’t give up that thought just because of a presentation held at Agile 2008.

I have no deep insights regarding distributed development, but a simple reflection is that if the people that for one reason or another (cost, skills, …) are the most suitable to develop something are distributed over the world, then distributed development should make sense. After all, it’s not impossible.

What Jeff and Guido were saying at Agile 2008 was that using the right approach distributed development works so well that you’d be a fool not to do it (given the lower cost and higher availability of off–shore developers) In fact, Jeff pretty much recommends that you look for opportunities to do that. He says “fully distributed Scrum has more value than localised Scrum”

Here’s the difference that I see: you have a compelling theoretical argument that contradicts Jeff’s claims about his actual experience. Something has to give.