Challenges faced distributed development

https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/challenges-faced-distributed-development

Some of my projects face many problems listed here:

Requirements Misunderstanding

Another challenge arising from the distance between the PO/BA and the team is that opportunities to elicit and clarify requirements are rare. This can naturally lead to higher documentation for communicating requirements, and clarifications done over the phone. This poses a huge risk of requirements being misunderstood, especially if there is no common primary language.

Lack of Trust

Building trust between team members is a ‘chicken and egg’ problem. When people are separated by distance, there needs to be greater trust between them, to work collaboratively. And trust cannot be built between people unless people connect in person and spend meaningful time together. Absence of trust leads to a ‘throw over the wall’ mindset and finger pointing when things slip or fail. In this situation, there is a very high risk of negative feedback being given or taken in the wrong spirit.

This is an important challenge when teams are distributed and have a high level of dependencies between them. Imagine a day when a team in Pune (India) leaves behind a broken Build as the other team in San Francisco starts the workday. This will result in loss of productivity for the team in San Francisco. Even if there is every reason to believe that this was an inadvertent slip from the India team, it could cause resentment in the US team, thereby leading to an increase in the trust deficit.

Low Morale

This is typically seen at offshore locations, when onshore has a superiority complex. When onshore team members carry the belief that the work done by the offshore team is relatively of low value as compared to their work, they seldom appreciate the other team members. This can lead to a feeling of being taken for granted and result in low morale.

Lack of Collective Code Ownership

Collective code ownership means that no single member of the team owns a piece of code, it is owned by the entire team. This means that the code is up for refactoring to all team members. Implementing this in a distributed environment poses two major challenges. First, unless appropriate tools and a Version Control System is used, maintaining collective code ownership can be difficult across locations. Second, lack of trust between team members can lead to highly negative consequences like blaming each other.

Risk of Unpleasant Surprises when ‘Everything Comes Together’

When multiple locations are producing work that needs to be integrated at some point, there is a huge risk of things falling apart, unless Continuous Integration is practiced rigorously. Inconsistencies between locations in types of tools used, an unsuitable Version Control System and lack of common quality standards can become major impediments towards achieving ‘surprise-free’ integration.