Chaos, confusion, and emotional turmoil are not unusual during major organizational change. Nevertheless, even people at the top sometimes minimize the impact of the change on employees—and on themselves. Worse, they sometimes do so dismissively. It's important not to underestimate the challenge of managing change.

When distributed teams have a conflict, it's easy for one team to place the blame entirely on the other and even start to think of them as disagreeable, incompetent, and worse. This fault-finding can be especially bad when the parties have never met. Face-to-face meetings can make all the difference in improving trust.

If a development team does pair programming, where does testing fit in? You don't have to wait until the programming is done—testers can be part of the whole process, from code design to reviewing changes to production. Pair programming plus a good automation strategy mean quality is built in throughout development.