Yahoo! Distributed Agile: Notes from the World Over

In an ideal world, everyone on an Agile team is in the same physical location, fostering cooperation and collaboration all throughout the team’s growth.  Unfortunately the real world doesn’t always work that way. The current trend to cut costs and increase revenue by off-shoring and establishing multiple company campuses around the world for continuous development is inherently anti-Agile.  Does this mean that we cannot do Agile with distributed teams?As Scrum coaches at Yahoo!, we experience challenges with distributed Agile teams on a day-to-day basis.  Some teams have failed miserably, while others have succeeded well – surprising us with their novel solutions in order to make Agile work. Our objective is to highlight successful patterns that we have noticed that significantly helped in making these distributed teams thrive.