Communicating With Remote Software Teams
Communication is key when working with remote software teams. Learn how to do it correctly.
http://www.SourceSeek.com --- Get matched with proven software teams for your next project.
The stand-up meeting is a critical piece of the agile teamwork. The fast-paced, low-overhead stand-up meeting style helps to keep a team agile by reducing overhead and minimizing the time spent on meetings. A good standup-meeting gives everyone a chance to provide a quick status and address any obstacles they may have encountered, but is limited to those topics to keep the meeting short and sweet.
When working with an offshore software development team, we need to rethink the way we handle stand-up meetings to make it work in a distributed project. Many clients try to have the whole team, both offshore and domestic, conduct a virtual meeting where everyone gets together in a video conference. This can work, and does for some teams, but if your team is 8 timezones away it becomes more difficult, less efficient, and definitely less agile.
Dave's simple way to handle this is to have two stand-up meetings, one for each location, and then elect one person to act as liaison between the teams. This approach allows both teams to have the standup meeting on their own schedule, at a convenient time, so that they can get that efficiency and speed that a good stand-up meeting needs.
The liaison from each side will sure that everyone across the entire team is made aware of everyone's progress and issues, if any. After each standup meeting, the liaisons send a daily meeting report sent every day by the liaison of each team. With a little effort, the entire team can been kept aware of what everyone is doing at all times.
One shortcoming of this technique is that it doesn't provide that critical face-time for the entire team. An in-person meeting, or even a video conference, is a great team building technique and is important to keep a team acting as a true team. This is easily overcome, however, by scheduling occasional 'all hands' video meetings where everyone can chat and catch up.
SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR MORE OUTSOURCING VIDEO TIPS AND NEWS!
https://www.youtube.com/subscription_...
LET'S CONNECT!
Google+ ► http://google.com/+Sourceseek
Facebook ► / sourceseek
Twitter ► / sourceseek
Linkedin ► / sourceseek
Pinterest ► / sourceseek
SourceSeek ► http://www.sourceseek.com