Configuration Management: Mother´s Little Helper for Global Agile Projects?

There are many good reasons for turning co-located projects distributed, likewise there are many good reasons for turning traditional projects agile. In both cases there are many obstacles to overcome and pitfalls to avoid and the combination of agile and distributed does not make this situation any better. In general Configuration Management works as the infrastructure of any software project and its concepts and principles have to be implemented in different ways depending on the specific context. How to adapt Configuration Management for an agile context is well understood, how to adapt it for distribution is less understood -- and what changes and how to fix that when a co-located agile team goes distributed is unclear. In this position paper, we draw on our experience from academic and industrial agile projects to give our opinions on what to look out for and possibilities for solutions.