Category: daily scrum

How to Survive Multi-Continent Daily Scrums

August 20, 2008 by peterstev

As Scrum, XP and Agile mature, Teams and ScrumMasters are increasingly confronted with the problem of handling multiple distributed teams, telecommuters or nomadic team members who aren't able to just co-locate. For instance, a recent project for the Dutch Railways[1] involved 3 teams with a total of 15 developers and testers from Holland and India. This constellation presents many special challenges in addressing impediments, assuring communication and collaboration despite language and time zone differences, and picking tools and technology.... Given these challenges, how does a distributed team perform the Daily Scrum?

Each project is different and has its own special needs and requirements. Is there a common language? If not, then how can communication over the language barrier be assured? Are there multiple teams at multiple locations or one team with scattered members? Project management is about the art of the possible, so how the Team(s) should organize itself/themselves will depend on their actual situation.

How Does a Scrum Team Deliver its Commitment?

August 13, 2008 by peterstev

Every Sprint, the Team commits to deliver some functionality to the Product Owner. A lot can happen during the course of a Sprint. How does the Team know how much it can commit, and how does the Scrum Master ensure that the Team actually deliver what it committed?