Best Practices for Remotely Managing Agile Teams

For those tasked with managing agile software development teams remotely, new challenges arise that are not addressed from standard agile practices derived from the "Agile Manifesto." One of the 12 principles from the manifesto is that, "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." This has resulted in the understanding that co-located teams are the ideal for development work in general, and agile in particular.

As agile practices are now considered mainstream by many, the need for utilizing remote workers on teams has increased in practice. This can result in difficulties when implementing some of the agile principles, depending on the team configuration. What follows are experience-based prescriptions for high bandwidth communication to help keep remote agile teams at peak performance.