Where’s a distributed team pain?
November 19, 2008 – 2:24 am
Recently I’ve read a bunch of posts regarding pain and sub-optimality of a distributed team developing software:
- Distribute the team? Distribute the pain!
- on distributed teams
- New Release: Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices
- Learning and Distributed teams
- Tools for Distributed Teams
Actually we do run all our development with distributed team and I’m not experiencing much pain.
Instead of commuting 1-2 hours (one way) to office, just like a photo below , we work in the comfort of our homes at time we’ve agreed to work. Something in line of the picture above 
Image via Wikipedia
Yes, comparing to an office, we may lack a nonverbal communication. But we compensate it with being 100% present on jabber/skype, reviewing each other code and applying few other techniques to glue together a distributed team.
Nevertheless, each of post, I’ve seen says that collocated team is better.
Why it should, if we might lose, say, 5% in productivity and gain 2-3 additional work hours per day (25-38% increase)?
What I’m doing wrong that I don’t have that pain?
