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

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

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 2

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

Answer 3

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 4

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.