[brudgers]

Contemporary software development team management practices work because they are fundamentally people centric. As soon as the schedule becomes the goal...and to me this is what an emphasis on "difficulties iterating quickly" begins to imply...then the process begins sliding toward infinite defects methodology. [1]

Different techniques work for different situations. Classic XP isn't really defined in terms that lend themselves to distributed teams. It's hard to make Scrum practical across nine time zones while still focusing on people.

What may make sense is choose a unit of iteration that makes sense for the specific team. There are alternatives to the Sprint [2] as the basic unit. There is no silver bullet.

Good luck.

[1] As described by Spolsky. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

[2] e.g. the feature in feature driven development. http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/fdd.htm