Australian Scrum Community

Tobias Mayer is always willing to stir-the-pot and his latest blog post is true to form. Tobias puts forward the argument that “distributed teams” are not teams. The crux of his argument is this:

“Distributed teams are not teams; they are at best a collection of people who communicate regularly. But communication is not collaboration; it is a poor relation, weak and insipid in comparison.”

He then calls for the Agile community to refuse to work with “distributed teams,” in order to speed up their ultimate failure.

“Once the organizations that support it are dead, we can begin building new kinds of companies, democratic companies modeled on true Agile principles: ideal ones, not half-hearted ones.”

This is intoxicating stuff for idealists, such as myself. Tobias presents a good are argument and I enjoy his writing style very much. My only concern is best summed up by Keynes:

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”