IBM and several academic researchers recently worked together on a research project designed to determine whether agile development methodologies can really work when developers are located on different continents. For the experiment, they had five masters level computer science students from New York, Delhi, and Dakar work together to create a mobile educational app for young children using the Scrum framework.
The team ran into a number of challenges related to collaborating across such a distance and was unable to complete the piece of software during their nine-week timeframe. In short, the researchers found that “the developers did not work as one team, but as three smaller separate teams.”
