There are no best practices for creating a productive, global development organization, just a few good ideas to think about and tailor around your particular objectives. Consider three universal issues every organization must grapple with to make a global agile team successful: data considerations, communications needs, and a company's agile readiness. How you handle each of these issues will vary widely, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution for every organization.

Refactoring is one of the cornerstones of the technical agile development practices. It is the mechanism that allows the design and architecture of a system to evolve over time. It is one third of the red-green-refactor loop and the core of test-driven development (TDD). But does it really deliver on its promises?

Michele Sliger uses a simple exercise to exemplify the changes self-organized teams cause in any company, especially with the project manager. In this column, Michele explains how to conduct this exercise and how to review and use the results to improve work relationships and communication. Above all, this exercise should help your whole organization understand how everyone's knowledge of a project's initiatives and goals affects the project's success.

Analyzing a project's interface requirements often starts late and focuses--sometimes exclusively—on creating a snazzy user interface. But failing to conduct interface analysis in a early increases the risk of project delays, overruns, and even failure. In this column, Mary Gorman makes the case for investing in interface analysis by explaining what it is and how it reduces the risk in software projects.