Posts Tagged distributed scrum

A Mirror for the Team

Posted by David Bland in agile, facilitation, retrospectives, scrum on July 20, 2010

ScrumMaster Lego MirrorAlistair Cockburn once stated that Scrum is a mirror, and that organizations need to look into the Scrum mirror no matter how difficult it may be.

I would take that a step further and say that the ScrumMaster is the mirror for the team.

A team often unintentionally falls back into situations in which they’ve previously committed to improving.

For example, let’s say that in the last iteration retrospective the team decided that they need to expand the ownership of each story. The last iteration was a success, yet it seemed as though they were not collaborating effectively. Each user story had one developer doing most, if not all of the assigned tasks… [Read More]

, , ,

4 Comments

Distributed Video Standup

Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum, tools on November 24, 2009

Distributed Teams need high bandwidth bidirectional communication to succeed, and the organization should provide these tools for collaboration. Luckily for us, Video Chat and Broadband are becoming more and more affordable so this is no longer an unrealistic goal. With a decent Video Chat setup you can teleconference with teams around the world and pick [...]

, ,

4 Comments

What will you do tomorrow?

Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum on November 12, 2009

Distributed Scrum Teams can be a challenge on many different levels. In the past, I’ve attempted to explain this by deep diving into all of their idiosyncrasies while citing Jeff Sutherland’s excellent White Paper on the issue. I’d then draw communication diagrams and illustrate how bi-directional, high bandwidth communication is important instead of using uni-directional, [...]

, ,

3 Comments