Clearly the use of scrum with distributed teams is something a lot of people are talking about right now. After last months article on scrum and offshoring, focusing mostly on communication challenges, I have noticed a number of blog postings on the subject. David Myers (a consultant at London based Charteris), in his article on Scrum and Outsourcing, goes into great detail about the challenges with distributed teams. For me, the key points are that basic agile practices of communication, meaningful documentation and continuous integration removes some of the hurdles. However, the manner that the standards / approaches applied have to suit the team.
I’ll leave the last word to David…
For me the most important consideration when employing Scrum with offshore resources is that it should not be employed without modifying and/or tuning some of the practices to be more suited to working with geographically split teams. This tweaking (or lack thereof) can have a fundamental effect on the end result.
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