3. Building Teams

It is impossible to create joint plans with people who strive for different goals.

—Confucius

The basic idea behind agile development is to provide to the customer, at any point in time, the highest possible business value in terms of working software. Even collocated teams find it challenging to stay focused on this goal, and it is increasingly difficult the more distributed a project is, especially if the global project is very large, with many people working at different sites.

Building a team with a flexible structure is one key to reaching this goal. However, a large, distributed project structured as one single team is likely to be neither manageable nor flexible. For a manageable and flexible project, divide staff into ...

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