

Ask HN: What Can Distributed Software Development Teams Learn from FLOSS? - everslick

As a long time free software proponent and team lead of a small development team (10+ ppl) in a midsized company I always try to intercorporate my experiences from both worlds. Lately I was confronted with the need to accept new team members from abroad working on the same codebase and I expect to have even more [http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.helpscout.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;virtual-teams&#x2F; and http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.peter-ivanov.com&#x2F;will-working-virtually-frequently-future&#x2F;] telecommuting people in my team in the future. All this while research suggests that the failure rate of virtual teams could be as high as 70% [http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sherimackey.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;06&#x2F;19&#x2F;virtual-success-the-dark-side-of-virtual-teams&#x2F;].<p>On the other hand many FLOSS projects do not seem to suffer from the same problems (especially premature deaths), despite being developed in a distributed manner more often than not. What can corporations and managers learn from FLOSS to make their distributed teams more successful? Consequently, what FLOSS tools, methods, rules and policies can and should be incorporated into the software development process in a company more often?<p>I&#x27;m interested in the opinion of others especially regarding technical issues like source code ownership and revision control system, but also ways of communication, dealing with cultural differences, ...
======
caw
There was a previous discussion about fully distributed teams here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3976819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3976819)

It sounds as though you're doing a partially distributed team though, which is
hard to do correctly. You basically have to treat the remote workers same as a
remotely-managed multi-site team, except a site has only 1 worker. You have to
worry about any resulting politics and the remote worker(s) getting
marginalized and upper management thinking "If they're not present they must
not be important to the payroll". That decision made informally during free
bagel friday? They haven't heard about it.

One way I've heard it put is that everyone in the office now works in a
corporate branded internet cafe, and should assume they're working fully
remotely. That means more written artifacts about decisions and design.

From my own experiences, similar timezones work best. If you're in the US and
your coworkers 12-13 hour different from you, it's going to be difficult if
you're the only person holding everything together without some working hour
modifications from either side.

For the technical issues, you need a realtime and asynchronous communication
component. Chat and email works fine for this, though you can also do an
audio/video chat.

------
mazeway
Perceived FLOSS success rate may be due to selection bias

