Working with distributed teams, such as in outsourcing or offshoring, on one hand, and agile development methods, on the other hand, is common in software development, yet they initially seem to contradict each other: outsourcing and offshoring involve various distances (geographical, linguistic, temporal, cultural, etc.), while agile methods rely on face-to-face communication and close collaboration among all project members.

Contrary to this initial impression, the author has gained positive experiences in several large global projects where development was carried out with distributed teams using agile methods, both in standard software and embedded environments. In these projects, between 70 and 300 team members worked at three to four different locations within Europe, and in some cases, across three different continents.