How do you make 'scrum' work when participants are 12 time zones apart?

Question

Is it even sensible to try forming a scrum when one of the participants is in India (+05:30), and others are in the US (-06:00 and -08:00)? There isn't a comfortable meeting time for everyone with that.

Answer 1

IMHO no it's not worth it, not just because of the timezone but also the latency

Answer 2

Make the process in such a way that the communication happens through one channel. Have scrum at each place and let them update it on to the Project portal(Wiki) or VSTS or any other single channel. So instead of just one morning scrum let this be two scrums per day so you guys will get the benefit of a 24 hours project running time per day.

Answer 3

You might want to have everyone post status and questions to a wiki daily in addition to the scrum for the US participants. The point is daily communication in the most effective manner.

Answer 4

I've been in this sort of situation, and it really does make project management difficult. One way I've seen this "work" (in quotes because the company eventually went out of business, but it was functional for a while) is to have very clear separation of tasks between the two groups; basically forcing an "interface definition" between the two instances of "developer group". That way, you minimize interdependency while clearly stating the responsibilities of each; and deliverables become simpler. There's still a certain amount of "gawdawful early meeting time", but it gets somewhat minimized.

Answer 5

Actually from experience I feel that working across different time-zones is a blessing in a way. As there is nothing like coming in the morning and seeing stuff has actually progressed and bugs are getting handled, etc... it gives you a warm feeling inside.

Anyways we used mailing lists. Not scrum, but mailing lists, and chats for the emergencies work well enough.

Answer 6

One big purpose of the scrum is to know what people are working on, what they plan on working on, and any roadblocks. That COULD be done with the wiki mentioned above. As long as people do their daily updates to the wiki, it has a similar benefit to the stand up meeting: communication, showing group and individual progress.

Answer 7

Having a single participant on their own in India is pretty much a worst case scenario in my opinion. Tools like wikis and having a second scrum will help but the fact that the team is asymmetric is what will really kill things.

You might also try having someone in the main team "buddy" with your team member in India. Their role is to keep the person in India up to date on stuff they might have missed, that happens outside of meetings everyone does manage to attend.

I wrote a white paper on the whole topic of distributed teams. You might find it helpful.

http://www.ademiller.com/blogs/tech/2008/10/patterns-practices-agile-showcase/

Answer 8

Does a rugby team play together in one field?.. Any project will be more successful when key team members are physically present at the same location. Perhaps at different phases it may not be necessary and perhaps video conferencing will help the most, but its not the same when you can spontaneously interact in personam. I would say that wherever most of the team is located, others should relocate there until the project is completed.