97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 8. Will Scrum Work for Multi-Location Development?

Pete Deemer

(Spoiler alert) Yes! Scrum works great for multi-location development! However, Scrum is not the silver bullet that makes it magically work.

Scrum is a very simple set of practices that, together, produce a high degree of transparency, showing us the reality of our situation more clearly. Scrum creates transparency around what we are able to do in one to four weeks. Scrum enables us to see clearly the quality and rightness of what we produced and the quantity we were able to finish. Scrum confronts us with the effectiveness of our practices, including the patterns of dysfunction and the mistakes we are making. Most importantly of all, Scrum gives us the opportunity to use these insights to improve in the next Sprint. So, the statement, “Scrum works great for multi-location development!” means that Scrum is great at clearly showing us all the dysfunctions and inefficiencies we’re experiencing. And distributed projects tend to have a lot of those!

At its heart, software development is an activity of taking the product of human thought and logical reasoning and making it repeatable in the form of code. For a team to develop software, their ability to commune their thoughts through shared understanding, collaboration, and communication is the key driver of output. In multi-location projects, this activity ...