Agile Testing on Distributed Teams

Ever since we started teaching Applied Agile Testing we have been asked a lot of questions about distributed agile teams and how they work. Up until now all I could say was, "Sounds like it would be difficult." For the last 6 months I have had the incredible opportunity to work as a tester on a widely distributed agile team and see how teams come together virtually to make it work. There are also a huge number of challenges that we have run into. This is the first in a series of challenges we have seen.

Distributed Agile Teams - Challenge # 1: Daily Stand-ups

Daily stand-ups are paramount to success for agile development teams. My personal preference is to have the standup be a post-it note moving party. Moving the post-its daily gives the whole team a tactile and visual reference of how much we have done and how much we have left to do. However, when your team is distributed over three time zones in two countries and half the team works remotely most of the time it is impossible to have the whole team in the same space.

Luckily there are tools like Rally and WebEx that help us all see the same information, user stories, task breakdowns and burn down charts. Getting everyone on a bridge line at the same time can still be next to impossible.

Our team has about 10 - 15 people logging in to the standup call every morning/afternoon (depending on the time zone). In order for everyone to get through their "What I did yesterday, what I plan to do today, and obstacles" speech in a total of 30 minutes we have whittled it down to using the story or defect number from Rally.

The problem I see, however, is that half the team is working on one system and half the team is working on another. What I often see happen during the stand-up is half the team is checking email on their smart phones while the other half is talking. Neither team seems to be fully listening to the other which makes the meeting feel tedious and unnecessary. While these systems do integrate and both teams need to know what is going on they may not need to know on a daily basis.

In this case, my suggestion has been to split the team into 2 scrum teams, one for each major system. The right size for a scrum team is around 7 plus or minus 2 so we definitely have enough people to split. Both teams will still be distributed, and there are a few resources that would have to split their time between both teams. What we could solve with this is getting the right people in the right meetings at the right times. But, the question from the team is, are 2 stand-up meetings every day necessary?