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I disagree here (obviously). Hiding behind agile (in any flavor) as a reason to not allow telecommuting is just that, hiding. I've known plenty of teams who have successfully pair programmed trans-continent.

It can be done. Maybe it is more challenging, but I don't think "agile" automatically rules it out.

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> It can be done. Maybe it is more challenging [...]

The only thing that's challenging about it is that you have to take some time to meet in person so people get a feeling for each others sense of humor, etc. We do this 3-4 times a year--rent a vacation home for a week and work in person for a while just to gel the team. Once you have a team that knows each other it works great.

Completely agree. A lot of MBA types (sorry for the overly broad generalization here) seem to have gotten the idea that every day should be a team building exercise and you can obviously only do those on site where you can take foam bats to each other and have the best ideas rise to the top.

Seriously though, that's what a lot of these arguments sound like to me.

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