My current scrum team is distributed in three locations: Location A: developers only Location B: testers and the product owner Location C: testers, developers, and the scrum master In this situation we have to deal with some lack of communication. Location A is in a different time zone, 5 hours away, which makes communication even more complicated. We can't use a simple task board everyone can easily work with on a daily basis. Electronic documents are used to substitute most sprint artifacts. How do we succeed with all those sprint meetings we have to perform? Daily scrums, sprint review, product demonstration, sprint retrospective, sprint planning. These are quite hard to do with emails and phone calls only. In fact it simply is not possible to ...
Implementing agile methods like Scrum relies on broad communication. With a distributed team there's a need for much more heavy communication. Unfortunately the distributedness of a team complicates easy communication. In most cases the common ways to send and receive information is one-to-one/many by email: the most anonymous distributed communication from one person to a group of people. Advantage: ability to spread complete and detailed information. Disadvantage: uncertainty of the message being read and understood. one-to-one by phone: the most direct distributed communication between two persons. Advantage: direct feedback is possible. Disadvantage: not useful for team communication. one-to-many by phone (phone conference): mostly uni-directional communication from one person to a group of people. Advantage: team communication is limited but possible. Disadvantage: direct feedback ...
