As I mentioned in an earlier message, I have a freelancer writing an
ABCs of Agile Development for CIO.com. He's handed in the article,
with which I'm very pleased. I've completed all of my edits and
queries... with one issue remaining. I hope I can get input here from
you folks, to tell me what (if anything) needs to be said about the topic.

John's article points out the importance of the teams working closely
together, and emphasizes the need for collaboration. He initially
wrote that distributed teams (i.e. one developer in London, another in
Cleveland) probably won't work well on an agile team; I added
something like "unless you can find a way to get the team members to
get together, using instant messaging, IRC, etc."

John's not sure about including that statement (or something like it),
primarily because John just isn't an IM kind of guy. (He doesn't own a
cell phone, because he thinks they're too intrusive.) OTOH, I can't
imagine getting my own work done without IM; for me, it's the best way
to have an ongoing conversation with my team members *without* any of
us being a pest to one another. (Good thing, too, because I work from
home in Arizona and they're all on the east coast.) And my husband, a
committer on an open source project, has an IRC channel open all day long.

The result is that I'm not sure where IM falls in the pantheon of
agile development. Do you feel that working together is
technology-agnostic; that is, that it doesn't matter if you use IM or
a conference room or smoke signals, as long as all the right people
are participating in the process? Or does the requirement of ongoing
communication mean that everyone _literally_ has to be in the same room?

I rather think that it's the former, but I don't feel as though I can
speak authoritatively on the subject. I am, instead, a grasshopper at
your feet. Can you share the "prevailing wisdom" as well as your own
(even or especially if you disagree)?

Esther
senior online editor, BlogMom, and DeveloperWatcher
CIO.com