This posting describes a framework you can use to decide which projects are most suitable for remote development as you progress through different stages of maturity. If you’re starting remote development for the first time, there’s a maturing that happens as your own company learns to manage remote development; but even if your organization has done lots of remote engineering, each new team you bring up will go through a similar (though quicker) maturing cycle.

There’s a tool we’ve developed to help organizations optimize their remote-development journey. We call it the description – execution matrix. The idea is simply this: the best projects for remote development are those that are reasonably large (so the per-project overhead can be amortized) and where the specification is reasonably easy to express.