Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Daily Standup Meeting in a Distributed Agile Team

No Doubt, Agile follower's life is easy and fun with whiteboard, story card, stickies, face2face meeting. But what if they are distributed in different locations, different timezones, different countries? Is their life still the same?. I guess not. Distributed teams, such as us, finds hard to practice agile specially stand up meeting, iteration planning, release planning. We love agile, but agile practices without whiteboard, story card, stickies and face2face meeting, is no fun. Make no mistake, we are determined to follow agile practices especially Scrum and XP combined.
Our daily stand up meeting happens with little difficulty. Our typical daily stand up meeting goes like this. Me, the product owner logs in to a computer using remote admin tool, before which, our agile team gathers. I initiate a conference call, through which the team joins me. Team then logs into Pairworks.com, a web based Agile Project Management Tool and navigate to their project's iteration board, which is similar to white board but available in web, which has the list of user stories and tasks being performed in the current iteration. We then discuss the completed, tasks will be performed next and issues if any. New tasks that come up during our discussion, will be added to the iteration board.
We have been using this approach for our daily stand up meeting for little over a year, though its effective, we are still looking out for a tool that does real time collaboration.
Are you part of a distributed agile team? If so, How do you practice daily stand up meeting?

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