Why agile and offshore aren't compatible

Remote collaboration technologies still impose to many limitations and distractions for highly interactive, iterative, informal methodologies to work well with offshore development teams.

Dear Bob ...

In "Why offshore and waterfall go together" (Advice Line, 12/8/2008) you said agile development can't work with time-and-space separation between developers and end-users.

I'd like you to spend more time discussing what about "face-to-face" is so essential to agile, that it can't be dealt with using all the technologies we use for working remotely.

I'm not arguing -- I'm just looking for your perspective. Thanks.

-- Remotely Agile

Dear Remotely ...

First, a clarification. I'm in the habit of using "agile" to refer to a broad family of iterative, high-end-user-interaction, incremental development methodologies. Recently it appears agile is, sadly, turning into the same sort of methodological religiosity that has afflicted many other methodologies (and no, I'm not going to troll by listing any).

In the future I'm going to refer to the broad family as "adaptive methodologies" instead of continuing to refer specifically to agile. So with that in mind ...

I see three challenges with the technologies we use to work remotely: sensory limitations, interface distractions, and time zones.

Sensory limitations: With the possible exception of "telepresence" systems, which claim to replicate face-to-face dynamics (but which cost lots and lots), videoconferencing fails to convey most of the subtleties of face-to-face communication. The human eye has a remarkable zoom capability -- you can look around a conference table and "zoom in" on each person's facial expression without even thinking about it.

In a videoconference, when you show the whole conference table each face is just a few pixels. You have to manually zoom the camera to see one person's face at a time.

This is just an example, of course -- there are lots of other situations in which the sensory limitations of remote collaboration technologies come into play.

Interface distractions: Face to face, in a group meeting, anyone can walk up to the white-board and sketch or write, and everyone else just looks to see what happened. Using collaboration technology you need someone to run the interface, to switch people back and forth between looking at whoever is speaking, looking at other people in the room, and looking at the electronic whiteboard. Or, each person controls their own, which means they can give only partial attention to meeting content.