Do you have offshore Development/QA team members (which work for a different corp.) as a part of onshore Scrum Team?

Question

Considering the offshore Developers/Testers work for a different company, would you recommend for/against having them in the onshore Scrum (first ever) effort? i.e., Just have the internal developer working with them on a daily bases to represent them onshore or to have all of them (7~9 total developers/QA) become part of the onshore Scrum effort by being treated as a distributed team.

Answer 1

All of the on and offshore team members should be treated as part of the team or you aren't doing scrum. The standup can be a challenge as the phone times are always awkward somewhere.

It's really more important to have the offshore team involved anyways, they are usually the ones where communication is a challenge.

Answer 2

Read Scrum and XP from Trenches by Henrik Kniberg who propose 2 strategies - one common team accross different countries and the second, separated teams.