In a 2003 InfoWorld story on the globalization of software development I asked Andy Singleton to share his thoughts on distributed software development. He has continued to refine and reflect on his approach, which he says is inspired by the open source, agile, and web 2.0 movements. On this week’s Innovators podcast, Andy summarizes the often counter-intuitive methods that work well for him and his teams. They include:

Don’t interview. Just pay people to join a project, pull a task from the queue, and find out what they can do.

Don’t divide work geographically. You’re not making best use of your distributed team if you impose that artificial constraint.

Don’t do phone conference calls. “I’ve never had someone tell me: ‘I worked on a project with lots of conference calls, and it worked great, so your thesis is disproved.’”

Don’t estimate. It’s just extra work. If you know your tasks and priorities, go after them in order. Estimation won’t help, and will cost 10% of your time.

Pile on developers early. It enables people to self-sort, and yields a stronger and more flexible team at the two-week mark.

Ironically, Andy says, many proponents of agile software development resist the notion of distributed development:

They think everybody should meet once a day. That’s such a cop-out! Since most development nowadays is distributed, they’re saying that 90% of the people who should be taking advantage of agile methodologies can’t do it. What they really should be doing is figuring out how to make distributed teams at least as productive as colocated teams. And in our case, we believe they’re more productive because we’re bringing in better talent.

One of the key enablers of effective distributed work is a common event stream to which everyone can subscribe. To that end, the Assembla website has embraced web hooks. So, for example, the action of committing code to a repository implicitly fires an event. You can make that explicit by wiring the event to an action, like sending a Twitter direct message.

This is a really important idea. Today, most of the services that you’d like to weave together to enhance distributed teamwork don’t export event hooks. But it’s quite simple to do. Here’s how Assembla enables you to relay events to Basecamp:

It takes two to do this tango. The external system, in this case Basecamp, has to be prepared to catch an incoming REST call. And Assembla has to enable its users to wire internal events to outbound REST calls.

Neither requirement is difficult. And the payoff can go way beyond the basic pub/sub notification scenario shown here, as noted in the Web Hooks blog:

Thanks to CGI we got the read-write web, but we also made the web way more useful than it was intended. Suddenly browsing to a URL would run some code. And code…well, code can do anything.

Yes. That said, simple notification is nothing to sneeze at. That alone, widely implemented, would be a game changer.