Posted February 10th, 2009, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Technology

Here‘s a really cool Interview from the IT Conversations Podcast.  This is part of Jon Udell‘s awesome series, Interviews with Innovators.

The guest Andy Singleton talks about ‘distributed’ software development teams and some of the common ways they get it wrong.

[Excerpted from IT Conversations:]

Andy Singleton is an entrepreneur who has long studied and practiced the art of distributed software development. Influenced by the open source and agile movements, he has arrived at some startling conclusions about how to manage commercial projects…

A few of the surprising Conclusions Singleton has made [excerpted from Jon Udell's Blog]:

Don’t interview. Just pay people to join a project, pull a task from the queue, and find out what they can do.

Don’t divide work geographically. You’re not making best use of your distributed team if you impose that artificial constraint.

Don’t do phone conference calls. “I’ve never had someone tell me: ‘I worked on a project with lots of conference calls, and it worked great, so your thesis is disproved.’”

Don’t estimate. It’s just extra work. If you know your tasks and priorities, go after them in order. Estimation won’t help, and will cost 10% of your time.

Pile on developers early. It enables people to self-sort, and yields a stronger and more flexible team at the two-week mark.

[Excerpted from IT Conversations:]

In this conversation [Andy Singleton] explains why not to do these things, and what to do instead.