Earthling

• We killed our hour-long daily meeting and replaced it with a fifteen-minute stand-up meeting. Our past meetings included the full management team, and we're often focused on discussing high-level business strategy. In the stand-up meeting, each of us tells the rest of the group what we did yesterday, what we're doing today and what's in our way. The focus is completely on tangible development progress. This shift has helped us see and fix problems more quickly and report progress more accurately. It's also helped gel the team, which is tricky when you're split between two coasts.

• We held an excellent in-person sprint planning session in Pasadena with the entire development team. Talking through everything we were setting out to accomplish provided tremendous clarity and surfaced some critical details that I had missed in my planning. It kicked off our sprint on exactly the right note.

• We're maintaining an ever-evolving "product backlog" that the whole team can see. From the beginning of the project, I've had a list of "to-dos" on my own machine, but I much prefer the product backlog format. The main benefit is that everybody can see what's coming down the pipe, and what priority each feature is. In "Getting Things Done," David Allen hammers home the point that until you get all your to-do items out of your head, the nagging feeling that you're forgetting something will keep draining your energy. I hope sharing the to-do list with the whole team will help knock out that nagging feeling.

We're still wrestling with some problems, of course. Due to unexpected bugs and other difficulties, we ended up not completing most of the tasks planned for one of our sprints, which pushed our development timeline back. We ended up shifting most of the work pegged for our second sprint over to our third sprint. In our training session, we ended up talking a lot about building in time for addressing bugs and recognizing potential hold-ups beyond the team's control.

We're also still fighting geographical distance. The focal point of the Scrum process is "the scrum board" where we track our progress on all the tasks we've outlined for the current sprint. In our case, that's a physical marker board (supplemented with moveable notecards) in Pasadena. It's working well for the Pasadena team, but it's functionally invisible right now to the Atlanta team. Pete offered some good thoughts on geographic distance in general. For the next sprint is to develop an online version of the scrum board that we can all see.

One additional issue is we're finding it tricky to work through some of the broader strategy questions when we don't have the whole team together in person. It's impractical for us to all be in the same office every two weeks, so it doesn't work so well to deal with these questions only in the sprint planning sessions. Pete pointed out that we skipped over one of the key Scrum tools: the Release Planning meeting. The basic idea here is that you get together as a group and hash out the broad planning and strategy issues for several sprints at once. Then, when you get into sprint planning, the work is purely breaking everything down into discreet tasks. I expect it will help us keep our momentum and focus.