Distributed meetings in distributed teams

Abstract

Emails and phone calls are insufficient and most inefficient for distributed communication and meetings. It is impossible to let a team improve by these means. This experience report presents how we dealt with the lack of communication in a distributed Scrum Team in three locations and two different time zones. We created a virtually colocated team by using video conferencing systems even for daily meetings and remote desktop systems for handling documents and tools. With such systems all necessary meetings and practices can be executed. It is even possible to support highly collaborative sessions like planning poker, pair programming, and retrospectives. The necessary budget to set up such systems is outweighed by the obtained effectiveness and efficiency of team communication. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.