The first sign of trouble is the unusually long time it takes for your IDE to start one morning. Maybe you can't access the trouble tickets any more or the team members cannot build their applications or run the automated test suite.

There's a tipping point in our industry: it's happening now and the signs are all around us. The very fundamentals of developing applications are being overhauled, the priorities by which we have set so much store are being turned upside down, the methodologies and technologies we cherish are in flux and the self-evident truths of IT aren't, well, self-evident any more. What is causing this fracture in the plate tectonics of software development? What are the forces that are reshaping the landscape? What pressures are being exerted on the fabric of the industry?

If the "World is Flat" how come we still have bumps in the road of collaboration and communication?

When serendipity taps you on the shoulder I've found it best not to ignore the intrusion. I recently got back from an intense trip to India, speaking at several seminars and to a number of our leading customers. On my return I picked up "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman and this book provided me with a deeper perspective on what I had just learned, face-to-face, with the same groups of people I had just met in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Delhi. And here we are in the second edition of Agile Journal talking about Offshore Agile Development.

Tool integrations are notoriously fragile; how can we fix this problem once and for all?

The first sign of trouble is the unusually long time it takes for your IDE to start one morning. Maybe you can't access the trouble tickets any more or the team members cannot build their applications or run the automated test suite.