What happens when each team-member of your team works from a remote location (possibly from a different time-zone and country).
How do you sync-up in such a team?
Immediate idea which springs up in mind is to come up with a commonly agreed upon overlap time for sync-up.
However this may not work for teams with developers from diverse time zones.
For some well-functioning teams, stand-up becomes waste as either standup provides the information you already know or you need to talk offline anyways.
Also as people pair-up and pass-on the baton quite often, stand-ups become waste.
Question: How does #NoStandup work for a completely remote team?
Answer: Some teams use checking-in and checking-out as the replacement of standup. Sample here:
- If you come to the room, you type “It’s me checkin in. I am ready to get to the work.” With that, someone already working asks for pairing up. If not, you pick a task and start working (explain, what exactly are you going to do) and wait for another pair.
- At the end of the day, you explain what exactly you did or accomplished? This way, people know that you are there and you are working and focusing on something
Question: Interesting. How does the information exchange happen in the absence of daily Scrum?
Answer: Information exchange happens through asynchronous handover of the information through Slack or similar tool.
Question: Daily Scrum helps in assessing where we are in the sprint on daily basis. How does that work in this case?
Answer: Mature remote teams have short (weekly) sprints. So even if you slip, slippage is not that much as feedback cycle is very short.
About this Post
StarterSquad created an online platform Squads which helps you hire completely functional (deliver working functional slices from week 1) and mature remote teams to build your awesome startup idea.
Some StarterSquad project teams have team members working from 7–8 different time-zones.
StarterSquad evolved its minimal set of remote Agile practices which work great for their teams. This post is based on a conversation with StarterSquad’s founder Iwein Fuld
Hey Shrikant,
One of the things that we tried in a distributed team that I was coaching was, we did 2 stand ups on Monday and then on Friday using Sococo, and it works so well.
Rest of the days we have office hours where people need to be online and interact, so that works really well as well. Keeping the story wall updated is another way to move away from stand ups without losing context of what is happening in the teams .
-Pritika
What is story wall? can you please help and how do you avoid stand ups because of these?