The Surprising Truth About XP and Agile in Remote Work Environments

Discover the Strategies and Best Practices That Can Make or Break Your Remote Team’s Success while trying to apply eXtreme Programming and Agile in general.

Photo by Domenico Loia on Unsplash

XP is a great companion of Agile, the other side of the “Agility Software Development” coin: XP is a set of principles and practices that aim to improve the quality and efficiency of software development. It emphasizes the importance of face-to-face communication, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Some key points of Agile and XP might seem incompatible with remote work:

• Agile Manifesto says that gives more value to “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and to “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” — meaning that collaboration and communication among the team and between the team and the customers is fundamental
• Agile Principles also state that “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project” and that “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation”
• finally, XP’s first Primary Practice is “Sit together” — People should work in an open space big enough for the whole team

Each of those points might seem against remote work according to the interpretation of some:

• collaboration and communication must be achieved by working in person in the same place
• in order to work together, developers and business people must be in the same physical place
• a face-to-face conversation is necessarily in person
• “sit together” explicitly means being in the same place

But I disagree.

Read the full article on my blog here!