The Ideal Daily Scrum
The Scrum Master enables the Daily Scrum meeting. His work is to gather the team and Product Owner together, and derive from each team member three pieces of information:
• Tasks done since previous Daily Scrum
• Tasks planned to be done before the next Daily Scrum
• What are the hurdles faced which requires assistance?
The purpose of this meeting is not to solve issues but to familiarise the team with the current situation in the project and also to request for collaboration to handle the issues. Resolving issues would be discussed after the meeting, when the team involved in the project are brought together for this purpose.
The Daily scrum meeting is time boxed to 15 minutes.
Daily Scrum Meetings for Distributed Teams
These daily scrum meetings are very tedious to arrange when team members are not located in the same place. In such cases, meetings can be arranged using teleconference facilities, web conference and video conference.
Coping with Time-Zone Differences
Teams that stay in different time zones have more difficulty in arranging for a Scrum Daily stand up meeting. Below are few useful ways of handling a scrum daily stand up in different time zones:
• Arrange for daily stand ups such as selecting one site with fewest members which face some inconvenience with the time.
• You can try daily scrum for different sites which the Scrum Master records.
• Instead of short scrum meetings, you can have a weekly twice meetings.
The above mentioned methods do have their pros and cons. But again there is no one suitable way of collaborating with people who work in different time zones. It would be better to find a common ground between teams located in different time zones.
Coping with Language Differences
When teams are working across many geographies, having daily scrum maybe difficult when they don’t share any common language.
Tips for handling language differences include:
• Hiring a local facilitator who speaks both languages who can also guide or interpret as necessary
• All team members submitting their information by writing in advance, for review and discussion at the meeting
Above discussed methods help in conducting the daily scrum in a widely distributed world.
