Tuesday, June 2, 2009
SCRUM with offshore: use google docs!
Sharing documents among different people spread around the world is indeed a compex topic. Even more when you are either a small company with very limited IT, or a big company with drastic rules.
When I started using SCRUM with my team in Ukraine, it was difficult to have a shared and up to date sprint backlog. We used excel maintained in subversion, wiki page, but none of this worked. We ended up with a spreadsheet in google docs. I will not claim this is perfect (not as good as being all in the same room), but it does the job! The team can see what the others are doing, the burndown chart is visible, the list of tasks is clear AND FLEXIBLE. Both in terms of "who does what" and "when".
I have create a template for you to see. There's some others things we could discuss based on this spreadsheet (why is there less hours of work planned than actual development time, where is testing, ...). Feel free to ask questions in the comments.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rluhZCnnOt37wjmwjmqlKJQ
When I started using SCRUM with my team in Ukraine, it was difficult to have a shared and up to date sprint backlog. We used excel maintained in subversion, wiki page, but none of this worked. We ended up with a spreadsheet in google docs. I will not claim this is perfect (not as good as being all in the same room), but it does the job! The team can see what the others are doing, the burndown chart is visible, the list of tasks is clear AND FLEXIBLE. Both in terms of "who does what" and "when".
I have create a template for you to see. There's some others things we could discuss based on this spreadsheet (why is there less hours of work planned than actual development time, where is testing, ...). Feel free to ask questions in the comments.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rluhZCnnOt37wjmwjmqlKJQ
Labels: agile, management, scrum
# posted by Nico @ 5:44 AM 
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