iPassion

Scrum agile development as described in my previous article, may sound like something you can only apply in an office where the development team is working physically together.

This is not necessarily the case. At Surgeworks we have remote workers all around the globe, and it’s been some time that our Rails team is successfully applying scrum techniques with developers in USA and Brazil working in the same scrum team.

Personally, I’ve only applied a few of the scrum aspects on our WordPress and Code Igniter projects so far, but in time I plan to apply most of them to all of the projects under my responsibility. I recognize that the principle and techniques of scrum are particularly indicated for remote working teams.

The standup meeting, for instance, is a great way to keep everyone focused, to work out issues as they come up and to eventually bounce around assignments and workload minimizing delivery delays. The fact the customer may participate in such meetings together with the fact those are timeboxed to 15 minutes, allows him to get frequent status updates without doubling the effort of the manager to collect them and then report to the customer — and keeps away distractions during the rest of the work day.

Clearly, when you’re involved in more then a couple of projects, the scrum approach may very well exhaust you because it tends to focus your energy on the tasks and since those are usually 8 to 16 hours tasks, you really feel like you want to complete those for the next daily standup meeting.

Now, the tricky part about remote scrum is that you can actually participate a standup meeting without standing up… Which on a wider perspective means you need to work with people you respect and you can trust — people that have proven to be fully reliable…

The good news is: at Surgeworks we have that.