Succeeding with Agile

General Advice

Throughout this section we will consider how the twin problems of time and distance affect the four common meetings of a Scrum project—daily scrums, sprint planning, sprint retrospectives, and sprint reviews—and the scrum of scrums meeting used on multi-team projects. First, though, we’ll begin with some general advice applicable to all meetings.

Include Time for Small Talk

Collocated teams have many opportunities for informal, getting-to-know-you conversations. They can afford to let some slip by. Distributed teams need to deliberately take advantage of whatever opportunities for small talk arise. Martin Fowler has observed that “it’s a good habit to start conference calls with chit chat on local news. Recent odd bits of local ...