Scrum standup software for team in different places

Question

Is there any software for assisting with "standup" meetings, when the team is in different places? For example, a place online where everyone has the ability to put something about what s/he was doing, is going to do, what is blocking them...?

Answer 1

We use the free StandUp tool from Assembla. Simple, but gets the job done.

(I'm presuming that audio is not necessary because the team is distributed across different time zones.)

Answer 2

Skype or Tango.

Different time zones is not a problem. A standup in the middle of the day or the end of the day is still valuable. Ideally, it's at the start of the day, but the conversation is more valuable than the nuance of "what I will do today". It can just as easily be "what I will do tomorrow when I get back to the office."

Answer 3

Maybe I'm taking the "stand up" part of this question too seriously, but what about Second Life?

Answer 4

A remote standup meeting sounds absolutely horrible, especially across multiple timezones (assuming they're not just one or two hours apart; that's tolerable). All the usual unpleasantness of a telecon (including all the problems with the guy who just can't get the echo-canceling to work and yet who insists that there is no problem at his end) plus some more from having people want you to do it every day. The thought of having everyone on a project dealing with a daily telecon… it just gives me cold shivers.

Is there any reason why you can't instead have only local – physical presence only – standup meetings and then have the Scrum masters have a separate meeting to reconcile issues? Yes, it's more work for them but it's better for everyone else. (It's also advisable in such situations to work to keep the level of coupling between Scrum teams small so that there's less chance of treading on each others' toes.) One of the good things about Scrum is that it doesn't try to scale up indefinitely; don't ruin that!

And really work to limit the number of telecons that anyone does outside the normal local workday. (I used to do a regular telecon where there were attendees from California, Europe and Japan; someone always got the graveyard shift.)

Answer 5

Scrum is about all day cooperation and communication among team members and Product owner. Being in the same place in the same time is one of the most important requirement to make it work. Scrum with distributed team is not working. Few examples:

• How can Scrum master solves impediments as fast as possible if he is not working on the same site in the same time?
• How can team member get clarification or feedback from Product owner if she is not working on the same site in the same time?
• How can team maintain collective ownership of the code base if they don't discuss the design regulary as they code it?
• How can team members cooperate as a high performance team if they don't have personal relationship.
• How can you clearly show status of the sprint on all sites? Do you want to have scrum board on each site and let team members to synchronize it?
• How can you introduce another agile practices like pair programming which sometimes really helps to solve hard problems?
• And much more ...

You will lose most of Scrum benefits and in the same time you will introduce hardly maintained process which will not be Srcum but will use the fancy name.

Whole question of tool for doing daily standup sounds strange - the only thing you need on standup is answering three questions and listenig to answers of others so anything from conference phone call, skype, windows communicator, messanger to video conference fits this.

Btw. even Scrum coach from Scrum alliance claimed that Scrum doesn't work with distributed team members. The way to go is distributed teams (each team on single site) and doing Scrum of Scrum among teams.

Answer 6

I think Teamviewer would be of some help for this feature. Its pretty awesome and very simple to use!

Answer 7

Google docs + video conferencing is a great combination for remote meetings of all kinds.

Before the meeting you create a doc, and have everyone add everything that they want on the agenda. During the meeting, you walk through the agenda, expand everything with the answer, and sometimes add new things to the agenda and answer them during the meeting. The fact that everyone can view and type into the document at the same time makes it a great way for people to get their important thoughts in when it is not their time to talk.

That makes sure that you get everything, and the document winds up being a record for everyone of what happened. This makes meetings go surprisingly quickly, and is very efficient. (Incidentally Google uses this exact combination of technologies internally for dealing with distributed teams. Which Google has a lot of.)