Remote Development Team with Scrum. How to deal with it?

Remote Development Team with Scrum. Yes, We Can!

Working with remote development team could be a challenge in scrum. This situation become using scrum a little more difficult, so we are sharing with you tips to pass through it.

The Communication Problems in Remote Development Team: This is the main problem concerning remote development team. You as a Scrum Master must mitigate it. The Scrum is based on sharing chalenges and experiences accross team members so they can work together to solve this and  achieve the sprint target. Every scrum meeting is a chance to comunicate and share knowledge between team members. So the tips are:

1. Keep making the scrum events, even if it happens remotely. So, you must consider using communication softwares to make it work. Skype is a good tool for it. We can run the daily meeting with it sharing the sprint backlog or the kanban screen for all the team members during the session. At the same way, we can run sprint planning, sprint review and sprint retrospective as well. The key here is give the control and the opportunity to talk for everybody in the meeting.
2. Keep the Product Owner always avaiable for the Developement Team. This is very important in order to avoid misundertand funcionalities Development. So when you work with remote development team considere give then the Product Owner contact phone to garantee that doubts will not grow during the sprint. Concerning this situation, is also important to keep the Product Documentation updated with the answers for these questions, so we keep the decisions documented and avaiable for the future. Sometimes the decisions are remembered, but the purpose or why they were took is not remembered. So working with this level of documentation makes the project always be transparent for all.
3. Keep the Sprint Burndown updated: as you are not working at the same place with the Development team, you must garantee that they are working well and completing the work in a correct velocity.  To make it transparent the Scrum Master must see the Sprint Burning Down and interact with the team if they start to get the wrong path. The ALM Softwares like TFS (Team Foundation Server) have all of this reports and Dashboard. So a software like it is really needed for remote projects.
4. If each Development team member is alocated in a different place, you must make then communicate with each others and make this comunication avaiable for the rest of the team. To do it you can use Slack. This tool is a messaging app for teams and  make everybody write and read about topics concerning the project. It is very helpfull.

And you, have you lived more situations concerning remote development teams using Scrum? How do you deal with then? Please, tell more about it for us commenting this post. We love scrum and to share how it is being praticed all over the world.

We hope you enjoy the tips and that it really helps you on your scrum teams.

Hugs ans Peace for all.
Eduardo Rodrigues Sucena
PSM | PSPO | SPS | MCP | MBA | Business Analyst