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Rushing The Tool: Sprint Planning with Distributed Teams
Agile practices, including Scrum sprint planning, were originally developed with co-located teams in mind. While bringing the team together to plan is ideal, it is not always practical. We have recently experienced sprint planning with teams that were widely dispersed where we were able to leverage technology to create effective sprint planning sessions. An interesting technique that evolved from these sessions is something that one team dubbed “Rushing the Tool.”
Prior to these sprint planning sessions, we would advise our clients with distributed teams to leverage technology for communication (i.e. use video-conferencing and Web-based collaboration tools like NetMeeting), but not to try to plan directly into whatever tools they were using to manage the backlog. We had tried that before and found it to be deadly dull, and painfully lengthy.
Even when the team is co-located in one room, having one person with a keyboard and projecting while they typed as the rest of the team sat around the table was a sure-fire way to kill the collaborative process that sprint planning should be; when the team was dispersed across various locations, that technique was even more painful.
No, we would tell them, it’s much better to have a joint start to the planning session, use video-conferencing and collaboration tools like NetMeeting to …
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