Patterns for Daily Stand-up Meetings Published

I am wondering how the standup meeting idea should be applied with distributed teams over completely different timezones.

In an attempt to keep it simple, and also deal with the timezone "issue", we have used something that we named "email standup", but finally I must confess it hasn't worked very well. So, I would really like to find out how standup should be used in a distributed env.

BR,

./alex
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.w( the_mindstorm )p.

In an attempt to keep it simple, and also deal with the timezone "issue", we have used something that we named "email standup", but finally I must confess it hasn't worked very well. So, I would really like to find out how standup should be used in a distributed env.

We are now working on a distributed project: Timisoara-Romania, Liverpool, UK, Dublin, Northern Ireland and another developer in Wales. The hour diffrence is small (2 hours) however, the company that started the project is working on traditional waterfall methods, which proved quite disatrous: many times two people in two locations were building the same functionality (in real life is very hard to divide the entire work verically) or one developer broke the functionality another built previously. The pressure was increasing , acussations, delays etc.

Then I proposed having a daily meeting on skype, everyone telling what they did yesterday, what they will do today, what is preventing them from doing the job. Standard SCRUM questions. The main benefit I see now is that everyone hears what the others are doing. If for instance developer X will need to start tomorrow to write something that depends on a wizard already built, he can hear who built it, and after the meeting they start talking about it. The manager, finds out what the real problems are, and sees the cause if there are delays. I call it the daily sync meeting since it syncronizes the information on the project on everyone involved. It works great.

With the email standups, I think the main problem would be that people would not read the other people's emails and that would not let the information about the project be syncronized with everyone. Also talking is probably faster then the email meeting, but that works in our case where the time difference, also the cultural difference is small.

Dan, I mostly agree with your points, but as you mention this works in your environment because the team is only 2 hours away. In our case, different team members are even 14 hours away (and the normal distance is 7 hours). A daily Skype call would lead to having these members stay very long after programme or waking up very early. This is definitely not an option.

Another important aspect is that virtual communication is definitely more unproductive than face to face meetings. So, a 15 minutes standup is usually going to take 1 hour, and, as I said, this is completely unproductive.

Now, having this 2 constraints in mind, I would like to hear what agile coaches would suggest ;-).

./alex
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.w( the_mindstorm )p.

Hi Alex,

I see your constraints and as I said understand them. A similar situation to yours seem to have happened in a project described by Jeff Sutherland (scrumalliance.org/index.php/scrum_alliance/for_...), where they had developers in Russia, USA and Canada. Maybe asking on the SCRUM list (scrumdevelopment@yahoogroups.com), could trigger some answers?

Hi Alex. One suggestion I've heard from other coaches is: run two smaller teams (one on either side of the atlantic), and have each team do their own convenient "standup". Then do a "scrum of scrums" pattern across the two teams to synchronize. That does mean that one person needs to get up early or stay late, but since it's only one maybe it can be done from home via Skype?

The advantage of this approach is that each team has the possibility of real-time answers during the day, removing the annoying overnight lag of widely distributed teams.

[...] That does mean that one person needs to get up early or stay late, but since it's only one maybe it can be done from home via Skype?

Maybe asking on the SCRUM list (scrumdevelopment@yahoogroups.com), could trigger some answers?

Hi Alex. We have a couple of articles on distributed Scrum here. :-)