 I hope everybody's feeling well. One of the fourth questions in the three questions of the Daily Stand-Up is, how are you feeling today? How many people ask that question? This is about Agile and people. And we're all people. I think we're mostly all Agile. It's not about what Agile is. Nuresh once worked at ThoughtWorks, and we worked together. My first Agile class in India was with Nuresh. Thank you, Nuresh, for that experience Maybe each of you would like to, just in one minute, introduce yourselves, rather than my introducing you. And why don't you start, Scott? And we can just pass the mic around. My name is Scott Ambler. I'm the Chief Methodologist for IT at IBM Rational. And I get to go around the world helping people to improve the way that they work and understand what they're doing and hopefully understand the very serious trade-offs that they're making while they're doing all this good stuff. So I get to help a lot of companies to understand and scale Agile and Lean and other stuff. So that's what I do. I'm Nuresh. I'm a struggling startup entrepreneur. And that's what I do. Good morning, friends. I'm Sujata Balakrishnan, heading India operations for Valtek from DeliverySide. And my passion is Agile and people. And definitely we have done a lot of stuff in the last five, six years to really evangelize from traditional to Agile. And it's been working very well. And trust is the one thing which is a one which is driving us to this extent. Hello, everybody. I'm Rebecca Parsons, the CTO of ThoughtWorks. My particular passion is around Agile and the large. What does it really mean to actually have Agile working across an entire enterprise? And there's an entire different set of problems including those wonderful individuals called enterprise architects, as well as standards organizations and such. And so that's where I focus a great deal of my time. My name is Ben George. I am a person who generates the chaos that creates the change that you just heard about how to handle. So I create these problems. So we've got some troublemakers here. We've got some thought leaders. We have people who I've all met at one point in my life and it's a real honor to get to spend some time together tackling some tough questions. So the first question I wanted to ask the panelists is Agile democratic? And in some more detail, what form of government best describes Agile decision-making? Is it democratic, hierarchic, totalitarian, anarchistic? Is it consensus-driven or is it kind of a chaotic, unpredictable process? I'd like each speaker to take about a minute and if a speaker has the same response as one has already spoken, just pass the mic to the other person. We also would like to get questions from you and there are two people who will be helping us with that. If you have questions as time goes by, raise your hand. We won't pass a mic but someone will come to you with a three by five card. You can write the question down and we'll collect them here. And as time permits, we'll ask questions that you've posed. We'd like to start with that question about is Agile democratic? Okay. Well, I actually think in a very real way, decision-making most resembles a benevolent dictatorship. If you're looking at actual existing forms of government and the reason I think that is that although it should be informed decisions and that's where the benevolence comes in, in reality there is an individual or a steering committee that is ultimately making the decisions about how the project will proceed. Now, hopefully that decision is informed properly by all of the inputs from the individuals in the team and I actually think that the input process on a properly functioning Agile team is the most robust but in general you will have some individual or dare I say it and I shudder when I say committee that is actually making the final decisions based on their weighing of the evidence that's been presented to them. Actually, I would agree with what she just said. You need almost a tyrant to make a change in an organization somebody who's going to make that but Womack and Jones talk about it in the book called Lean Thinking that tyrants are always shot and so after the change is in place the person who's probably injected that change will probably need to leave the organization. At that point the change becomes self sustaining where that new higher level of performance and at that point I think a different level of governance comes in place. I'm seeing within companies I work with that we call this anarchy because they basically rule themselves and that seems to be working really well after the change has been injected. I would like to bring in a different perspective when you really look at people on Agile I really bring in customer also into this whole discussion. If you look at customer I think that partially they are democratic because most of the time we think of them as customer asking and you need to do everything whatever they ask and we have very little amount of resistance to say we can't do it. I think from that aspect they have an higher end to really dictate what they want to do and still the Agile team has to do in a collaborative way and deliver research. I think this is my viewpoint on this Agile democratic. So I've worked with startup founders who are extremely dictative about to the detail that the first discussion starts with what algorithm we're gonna implement before even you know what product you're actually making and it's quite interesting because from the background I came from working with Agile teams I always thought that it's extremely democratic everybody gets in the room and we vote and we make the process as far as even deciding people's salary and stuff like that. When I work for some of these startup companies which are extremely successful it just hit me in my head. It's like wow what I was thinking all this while that democratic way of running companies is the best way to do it actually might not always work. So I go back to Steve. Steve is a great example, Steve Jobs by the way. Steve Jobs is a great example of not being really people call him he's the new Hitler in the software world and he's done some amazing things without necessarily having to be really democratic so I would conclude saying that you don't have to be democratic and it really depends on your context. The analogic you use is from Star Trek and because it's from Star Trek you know it must be right and if you remember Star Trek the next generation at the beginning of every episode there'd be some crisis almost always. So the very first thing that would happen is Picard would say to the ready room so the senior staff would all go off to the ready room and they would have some moral discussion about whatever issue they were trying to try to deal with at the time. And the interesting thing about that was that it allowed them to share their ideas to in a respectful manner to and it was interesting because they all had different styles and because Worf would always say we need to blow them out of the sky and Worf was only listened to twice by the way he was listened to but his advice was only acted on twice the entire series and if you wanna really get in trivial and the interesting thing so Picard would listen to all this and then he would say okay now this is what we're gonna do and the entire team would rally around that and it would usually work out but I mean there'd be twists and turns because otherwise you wouldn't have a 60 minute episode but the team would get behind it and sometimes Picard would suggest something that he didn't really hear from everybody you know he pieced the scenario together and they would go forth and do the strategy and things would generally work out because it was Star Trek and everything works out in the 24th century so that I think so keep that in mind if you've never watched Star Trek the next generation then you can download it but anyways go ahead, go ahead, thank you. So I'll answer the question myself I think that there are elements of different kinds of government in Agile but common elements are it's about freedom, empowerment, collaboration, working together better in a collaborative way so it's not about command and control to me it's clear roles and responsibilities so if you practice Scrum the product owner has responsibility to prioritize and provide a budget as Rebecca was mentioning this morning in the business side and the team has responsibility for estimations and for how they're going to do the work and the team is usually working in a collaborative anarchistic or self-organizing way that's not governed there isn't actually a government analogy that applies in the way teams work, in my mind. I think that the next question I'd like to ask the panelists is since I've already write up one thing you should never discuss politics is religion but beginning on a personal level do you feel as a panelist that you're a better person for Agile how have you changed personally? Have you, can you share something if you have something to share about that from kind of a values standpoint an ethics standpoint? I would like to really represent it's not that Agile has brought in these values these were all inherited in our DNA I don't think that we can overnight change the value for example if you really say trust or empowerment or mutual respect these are all in our DNA where we have to really exhibit this only thing what I would really say I come from a traditional waterfall model and when the gentleman who has to come and do the evangelizing to do it at a large level he was just thinking that I will be the first impediment to really go in for this change and he thought that since I come from ISO and CMM background he thought that I'll be the toughest person but I just really think of it seven years back when we started the journey it was very difficult to come from command and control to collaborate with the team and then do it I think it gives us magnificent results and I see we have a lot of potential to learn from our peers and subordinates everybody and especially I would say in fact I really do the transaction even from a personal level at home as well so you really need to learn a lot from everybody around you so that you have a feeling that you're not the ultimate to take a decision on your own and unanimously and then really say that yes I've concluded this is the decision I think it really helped me a lot to really be there to be an agile person what I am today I would say personally when I was quite young I was always right I'm not sure I changed my mind about that but I recognize that when I disagree with somebody now it's usually because we have different backgrounds and now I'm more willing to sort of understand where's our different assumption you're a smart person, I'm a smart person if we're coming to a different conclusion there must be a really reason behind that and I think part of my maturity and agile certainly helped this is let's explore why we disagree on something rather than talk about my position versus your position let's try to get to the root cause of that and I'm much more fluid in doing that I don't get upset when you disagree with me now I probe and I think that's sort of the growth I've got with agile I feel very comfortable probing this environment adding to Fred one thing that's interesting is I always thought it should be one person's way or another person's way and there is no middle ground but what agile personally has given to me is what I call the safe failing experiment mode where because you are working on such tiny pieces you're not making a huge decision and you have to get it right you get into this mindset that let's try this, let's experiment this and either my way or your way does not really matter as far as we can experiment it and adapt and that's something that I think has had a profound impact on the way I try to do things these days one thing that I would like to add to this is in many ways technology can be a solitary business in many organizations they actually talk about a track that someone like me is on as the individual contributor and people are looked at for what they can do by themselves and I think one of the transitions personally that I've made particularly coming from an academic environment into the one that I'm currently in is the extent to which you have to transition your mental model from always relying on yourself and always working by yourself to actually relying on a team and working in the context of a team and it doesn't necessarily have to do with how I do my job differently but just the expectations that I won't be alone in doing what I'm doing I will be doing it with other people who are motivated by the same objectives and we're out as a team to try to achieve something and we will resolve our differences by talking about them and we will resolve our different approaches through looking at what works in experimenting so I think that's been a significant transition for me. I was gonna make pretty much the same observation that Fred had made but I just wanted to tie it back to a story from Star Trek and it's a theme for me now. In the sixth Star Trek movie we saw exactly that when Captain Kirk invited the Klingons onto the ship and they started talking with each other and saw that there was great similarities although some differences as well that they could learn from so I would wanna leave it that. I think it's difficult for some of us to talk about ourselves and to be vulnerable and to talk about how we've changed and what might have not been so good about how we were before and I appreciate the effort that every panelist made. I'm gonna ask the same question again because I'm not really completely satisfied with the answers. I'm gonna ask more clearly if I can. I didn't probably define the acceptance criteria very well. Wasn't being test driven. I wanna know really personally how you have changed and if you feel you're a better person by whatever value system you might choose. I don't wanna impose anything but I felt Rebecca you responded pretty well to that just to name names but feel free to take the mic again and no one's obligated but I just wanted to pose the question again as sort of an advocate for the audience. So I will disagree. I would say I think with Agile I've actually found my emotional home. The one that sort of fits my way of working best. I think that's why I gravitated quite early and don't wanna leave it. So I think it's changed me but it's kind of matched much better what how I choose to work versus processes I grew up with with Waterfall. Am I off the hook since I actually got it right? You're off the hook. Thank you. I don't think that I would say Agile has changed my way of working but it emphasized the collaboration part more and it helped me to really reach out to people to collaborate more and then take consensus based on the voting. So that's a change I would say. I've actually to take it a little further I actually gone a full circle. So when I started I really wanted to collaborate with people but I was working in environments where collaboration was not the thing to do. You would sit by yourself and you would be a hero and you would do stuff and you would get appraisals. So that's how I started. I went into organizations then where collaboration was the way to work and then we really brought in Agile methods to kind of help us do that. And now that I'm a startup founder or struggling guy I'd rather much prefer working by myself than collaborating with other people because I think it's a huge waste of time. Thank you. Anyways, that's an interesting observation that we need to respect. I think Agile has helped me to understand and appreciate the human side of things a lot better than I did before Agile. Very similar to the ongoing struggle that Commander Data and Mr. Spock both had in Star Trek. Excellent, I appreciate that. Thanks everyone for their effort to go a little deeper. I think iterations work well, sprints work well and sometimes doing things repeatedly work well even it may seem a little redundant. I wanna talk a little bit, ask people to talk a little bit now about culture. We're here in India, some of us are from India, some of us are not. I'm from the US, I live in France. I've been living in France for six years. I've worked with India quite a bit and a question in my mind for quite some time has been, is Agile culturally sensitive framework and to the extent that there's a value system in Agile, does it apply equally in all cultures? Does it apply equally in India in the same way or in other countries? So, I'd like to see what you have to say. I think culture is overrated, extremely overrated, especially country culture because there's no such thing called country culture. I'll give you a small example. I used to work for a large sweatshop and, okay, sorry, I didn't mean that. I work for a large sweatshop and the way things would work over there would be, you know, you go in the morning and you do your job and somebody needs help and you just put your head around and you say, oh, I'm really busy now. And I just don't wanna help anybody because I wanna be the hero. I wanna get my stuff done. And I would take the same guys out for, so I used to organize hikes for people. So I would take them on the weekends for treks. So I would take the exact same guys who would not want to collaborate, who would not want to help, who would not move a bone until their managers told them to do so. I would take them for hikes and, you know, somebody runs out of water. Immediately everybody else offers their bottle of water to help people. Somebody slips and falls, you know, without a manager being there, telling them to go help the person. Immediately people help, you know, somebody else. So this kind of struck me really hard that it's the exact same person with the same DNA. Working in a company wouldn't do a single thing unless being told by the manager. And the same person here, completely self-organizing and helping, going out of their way, you know, giving their last drop of water to somebody else when nobody's demanding that. And it's like, what is culture? So I think company cultures do matter a lot or the way the company's structure and value people and the rate people matter a lot, lot more than the ethnic background you come from. I strongly respect diversity, but I think it's overrated. I have totally an opposite view on this. Definitely it is Indian culture. I would really talk about people coming forward to take any responsibility. Primarily if you look at it, they are more attuned to take orders. I'm telling the truth, maybe people those who are sitting here could have changed the whole way of working in terms of making orders. But most of the time we are attuned to really obey the parents, obey the elders, and we have been taught not to say no to anything, even politely. So we have the opportunity to say, for everything which is questioned, we say yes, and then of course, miserably fail. And that's why we are really in this kind of situation in terms of outsourcing some time. So is it a culture barrier? Probably yes, the way we have brought it. And this side thing that slowly things are changing up and giving them the empowerment to really bring in the best out of them. And the second part is that when you really talk about how they would really help, it's nothing to do with the culture, it is a passion. Supposing they are passionate about doing that, they would give the last drop of order or bring some more water and give them also. But when it comes to the question of competition within the job, they really want to be the best. Which is nothing to do with India, it's all over. It's all over. I've had the fortune to work with people in many countries and working in Agile. I do think there is some differences by country. I remember my first time being in India. I was teaching a class. I walk into the class of brand new freshers and they all stood up. And I remember thinking, oh my God, I have to get them to the point where they challenge me and then we'll have valuable employees. That was something that I just completely unexpected. It was very much part of this, trying to show respect. I understand that. But you need to challenge what I'm thinking if you're gonna be a productive employee. It didn't take them too long to learn that, however. This is not something you can not learn, unlearn very quickly. So I think one of the things I've seen particularly in India in the last five to 10 years since I started coming here is the entrepreneurs are starting to come forward. They're starting to make their own decisions. They're not necessarily being driven by their parents to go take a job with a big company and get a big title and get a nice spouse. That's not necessarily the priority as the generation's moving forward. So I think it's something that you start at a cultural point, you're starting there, but it's very, very easy when very short time to move off of that and move it to a more productive environment. I do feel somewhat compelled to challenge the diversity is overrated comment. I'm sure Nuresh, you were expecting that. Because I do agree with you that they're trying to say point blank, you were from India there, for you behave this way, you were from the US there, for you behave that way is a mistake and it's a mistake that is often made. However, I do see that when you combine people from different backgrounds, different countries of origin, different genders, that different things happen, more creative things happen. And so there is something that it's not necessarily country of origin, it's not necessarily background, there are all kinds of things that go into this. But trying to solve a complex problem that nobody understands, it's far easier to do it if you've got a group of people who think differently, trying to attack the problem in different ways rather than a group of people who are all looking at the problem the same way. Because if they don't see it the first time, they're not gonna be able to solve it just continuing to look at it in much the same way. Yeah, culture does count and there are significant differences around the world. So trying to get agile working in California with the surfer dude programming culture is a bit different than trying to get it and running in a central European country that was blessed with Soviet rule for 70 years and with people who had to worry about their neighbors and families selling them out. There's not a lot of trust in those situations still. And those are two extremes, the lone differences between India and China and the Philippines and Canada and even the differences between Canada and the United States can be interesting sometimes. So I think we need to respect that just like on Star Trek, we respect the differences between the Vulcans and the humans and the Klingons. Fantastic. And I think also in Star Trek, which is an important theme, you should, but whenever you go to a world, you should leave it as you shouldn't interfere with its culture. Try not, but they always did. They always did, accidentally. Bastards. So. And it was always 20th century earth somehow. And there are always a lot of beautiful women running around and sitting in terror. So speaking of women, I'm interested in gender differences. So men and women are here together. There's no fighting going on. There's nothing untoward going on that I can see. Everyone's keeping their hands to themselves. But I wanna talk a little bit about gender in the workplace and how agile may affect that. On our panel, we have two strong leaders who are women, who have key roles in the organizations they work in. They've gotten there probably not through an easy pathway. At the beginning of today, we heard a story about women who are horribly, horribly abused. And I think we all know that women have had a hard time culturally in most cultures that we belong to. So I'm interested if agile is a way to make the world better in this sense. Comments, feedback? There's some interesting debates going on in the, around the question of gender diversity, particularly as it applies to women leaders. Do we need to turn into men in order to be effective as leaders? Do we need to be brusque? And do we need to be ice cold and unemotional? And do we need to be different than who we are and to succeed in this quote unquote man's world? And there's actually a lot of research that shows that the most successful women leaders are the ones that stay true to who they are, rather than trying to turn themselves into something that they are not. In the short term, that can be a problem. In the long run though, nobody can play a role that they're not suited for and sustain it over time. I do think one aspect of the emphasis on agile, just the extent to which the role of individuals and people are being paid more attention to is something that does help. In addition, when we look at the history of young girls and young women choosing to go into the software profession, as long as there's the stereotype of the individual who doesn't wash very often and always is working in a basement and never talks to anybody, that's not considered to be a terribly attractive profession. The extent to which how we approach software development now is a whole lot more about talking to people, rather than sitting in a corner with headphones on and perhaps the only light coming from the screen. It has changed the environment. And oh, by the way, I also don't believe all the low stereotypes are true or have been true. That they're certainly individuals, but the vast majority of the software people I know are actually quite nicely functioning human beings. But I do think that one of the things that will help is by emphasizing that this is as much a people problem as a technology problem. It can start to give us some ammunition to say, well, women still aren't suited for math and computer science because they're just too emotional and not logical enough. And unfortunately, I still hear that. I don't think for the gender difference, agile is the solution. But I have a feeling that a female working as a scrum master when they have the ability to collaborate more, I think, from the yester years project management technique with the agile, probably they are much better off in terms of interacting and doing the job well. When you really talk about leadership dimension at a higher level, definitely we have the same set of challenges working with all the male chauvinists. It's tough. It's not that easy. Agile is not the solution. I think, as you said, it's after all people. We interact with people and then get to the level of our competency and then show how we are capable of doing the job what is assigned to us, probably in a much better way with much velocity. And I think that these are the things which is going to really help us to grow as leaders rather than just the agile alone. So I got a degree in 1973 in computer science. Half the class was female. Something happened between then and now that I find actually quite disturbing. But what the silver lining is, I look across this audience, and yes, there are not that many women in here, but there are many, many more than I see when I go to a conference in the U.S. So whatever you guys are doing, keep doing it. Keep encouraging your female colleagues to participate. And perhaps Agile is part of the answer, but perhaps it's something else you guys are doing. By all means, please continue. And tell the rest of the world what it is. You want us to continue with this kind of mix? I want more women too, but for different reasons, yes. And Dorian's would work for me. I'm glad Rebecca started talking about stereotypes because I was really struggling for an analogy. And I think Agile does open up opportunities for us to start breaking stereotypes because we can start working more, we are working more with the business people. We are showing that we are just normal people just like everybody else. And we saw this on Star Trek, the original series, where they had these little opportunities to break stereotypes, such as the first interracial kiss on television, such as the first implied sex scene where somebody didn't have to keep one or their feet on the floor during filming. And these seem like trivial things now, but this was radical stuff in the 60s and early 70s. So at least for the United States. But anyways, so I thought I would share it with you. So Agile helps to break stereotypes and I think that's a very good thing. Back when I just finished my engineering and I was up for campus recruitment, I went in for a company's interview and they had a group discussion during the interview. And the topic of the group discussion was should there be reservation for women? And I was like, boy, that's a really hard topic because I don't have opinion either ways. I don't really have enough experience to comment on it. So basically when my turn came, I said, you know, the lady who was conducting the group discussion, I basically pointed her to say, I think she's here because of her capability and not because of reservation. And I got the job. There's a theme in some of the questions that you've been asking, and I'm gonna synthesize a couple of the questions I've just looked at with the next question. But first I'll respond to the one I just asked as well. I think that Agile as a framework or as a set of values, as a way of being, is respectful, collaborative, and levels the playing field for all people. So whether the discrimination previously was gender, racial, ethnic, or your position in the hierarchy, I believe that Agile helps personally. I wouldn't be doing it. It's a reason I'm passionate about Agile. So I hope at least that it's making things better, but I also appreciated what Rebecca said earlier this morning about realism, about seeing the way things really are, and I think there really are lots of problems that remain interculturally from a gender standpoint. Based on authority. So the other question I wanted to ask, which is based as I say on some questions from the audience, has to do with power distance, as it sometimes described, management structure, hierarchy, and the relationships between people who control one another's destiny to some extent. Managers can hire or fire you, and when you're fired you don't have money, in which case you may not have food. So we heard this morning about a horrible form of slavery, but to some extent organizations may have a diluted version of a similar form of slavery. I don't think that most employees feel that they're prostitutes. On the other hand, they may not feel completely free. They may not feel that they can do exactly what they want. And they're, even in Agile organizations, there are still managers who are probably abusing their position of power. So I'm curious about the questions that have been asked. How do you feel Agile is impacting the upper levels of management and the hierarchy in the organizations that you work with? Do you have examples of improvements or is it the same old, same old? Is Agile not really tackling the difficult problems of hierarchy and authority? I worked for a company where they had a very strong hierarchy and you wouldn't be able to do a thing unless your manager approved it and his manager approved it, or her manager approved it, or whatever. Thank you. So repeating what I said, I worked for a company where the hierarchy was really strong and things wouldn't happen unless you had, you went through the whole chain of approval, the chain of responsibility pattern until final approval from the God would be given. And one thing I noticed is in that company, when they started implementing Agile, things really did not change much, things did not really change much, except people started doing more of lip service saying, you know, we're gonna let self-organization and people are gonna decide, by the way, you're working on this. And this needs to be done yesterday. So that organization, I lost hope, I didn't think they would change at all. But then a strong leader came into the organization and this person, I was surprised, you know, you would be shocked to find him sometimes sitting next to you and actually doing his work. And he was a CEO of a really, really huge company. And just looking at him, I think the whole hierarchy in the organization certainly changed, people are making more decisions on their own. The whole, so what I'm getting at is, again, I think Agile does make a difference, but trying to push Agile does not help change the hierarchy unless you have somebody really strong with a vision who can lead by example rather than lip service. I think oftentimes abuse within an organization occurs because people feel isolated from each other. So one of the things I've seen happen in agile organizations is because we tend to sit together, because we tend to tear the walls down between the cubes, you're working very closely with your colleagues. And so it's very hard to create an abusive situation without everybody noticing it as well. So it may move a little bit quieter, but I've seen situations where teams have fired their project manager because he felt the project manager was too domineering and too pushing, trying to tell them how to do their jobs. The team said, this is not working for us. And as a whole they went forward and got him kicked out. I think the openness associated with Agile, the collaboration associated with Agile, it's gonna make it a little more difficult for the abuse to occur. I do think it will still be occurring in other ways. Thank you. So another question that I have unrelated to religion or politics or gender issues or hierarchy has to do more with physics, space and time. So in particular with respect to space, we're here in India and we're talking about people who are maybe working in other remote locations, the management might be in the US or Europe or it might be local, the team members might be dispersed. Many of us have dealt with working in Agile in a distributed environment. We have different feelings about that and things don't always work the way we'd like. I'm curious about your view on does Agile work in a distributed environment and differentiating dispersed teams from distributed co-located teams. So you could have multiple teams, each one is co-located or a team with members in many locations, the nature of the interaction side of individuals in the Agile manifesto, individuals in their interactions, how are interactions across space and time and ideas that you have to share with the audience that would improve trust, improve results, improve culture based on your experience. I would like to really state here, it's very interesting dimension for us. Most of the time they want Indian teams to be Agile and all probably we work with a lot of French colleagues in French projects, it's very tough. They may not be Agile and leave alone being Agile, they won't even follow even simple scum practices but still they really want India to be up and running in everything in Agile. So I would say that it is a diverse way of working with them in terms of some team in India working in Agile and our expected team in onsite not being Agile. So this was the case and then of course you have a customer element where he is totally not being Agile. This really gave us a lot of issues and that's where as Valtech we really got into the customer location and also with our country colleagues to really go in for Agile and then drive them some of the important practices where they have to really go in and probably after six to nine months it gave us some result but during those six to 10 months it was a real period for India to struggle hard because we were also in the transition stage and people were not able to really understand and more of command and control from French colleagues and it's not an easy way, I'm telling you. So I've always worked on distributed teams, didn't have the opportunity to always be co-located so I've always worked on distributed teams except for few and I would conclude that distributed development in general Agile or not is hard. It's hard for various reasons but the thing that really stands out for me is lack of trust because if I don't know somebody it's very unlikely that I'll trust them and if I don't have trust then all the visibility issues and all the other issues that we talk about start surfacing. Agile again does help in some of those because you're retreating, you get to see faster feedback, you give an opportunity for better collaboration so it improves that trust factor but unless you focus explicitly on building trust distributed development becomes extremely difficult. I did have an opportunity to work for a startup company where we were all co-located and at that point I actually much preferred being distributed. The reason was that I was, so it was four of us who were kind of the next line management after the founder and then we had a whole teams of people and anytime we had an idea if one of us went to the founder he would shoot us down because he was way too smart than any one of us were and what we ended up doing was then four of us would go together and after a while one person is talking the rest three would be thinking what would be the next question? So we could actually keep up with the founder and that also became really hard to keep up so then I basically went back to first writing blogs or writing an email, getting all the feedback out there between the four of us and then basically sending him a link to the blog or the article and say read this I'm about to come and have a discussion about this and five minutes later I would say okay go ahead and implement it so I didn't really have to go to him and I would much prefer being distributed and work with him. Interesting. Need to find better employers dude. You do have a better employer now, you're self-employed. There you go. One of the things that I do I run industry level surveys because I prefer to have fact based discussions as opposed to religion based discussions and one of the great myths of Agile is that we work in co-located teams and this is not the norm. Many of us do without a doubt but this is the minority of Agile teams are truly co-located and particularly when you define co-location as having your key stakeholders in the room with you as well and this is something we need to have more coherent discussions about and because even if you're working in queues you're suddenly distributed and there's a measurable loss of productivity of ability to collaborate effectively of your success rate and this is true regardless of paradigm by the way because I've looked at this issue across paradigms I want to be able to compare paradigms is an interesting question it would be does traditional work better for a distributed team than Agile and the answer is no it does not but it could have who knows right because we didn't really have solid data on that so geographic distributed Agile is far more