Distributed Agile Development: A Survey of Challenges and Solutions

Global market, constant pressure, and global talent are major powers that lead to distributed teams. But this is not an easy task; companies have to deal with several nontrivial geo-political constraints, such as the willingness of their employees to relocate, the costs of such relocations, procedural constraints such as work permit issues, and others. To circumvent this, companies set up their offices in multiple locations and hire local employees who work with their colleagues at different geographical locations. Agility at Scale 2012 survey found that 57% of the respondents were having geographically dispersed teams. Having your resources in different locations may make implementing certain agile processes harder. However, there are ways of working around it. This paper is investigates the challenges faced by distributed agile teams and proposes solutions to address these issues through an exploratory literature review. The proposed solutions will help to build successful agile teams.