Working with Agile Teams Remotely: Planning and Backlog Grooming

The team I am currently coaching follows Lean Software Development and uses Kanban. For us the weekly planning meeting involves discussing the Product Backlog Items (PBIs) we have ready for implementation, and agreeing on what we think we can get done for the week. We hold backlog grooming meetings as needed, when there are PBIs to be estimated by the team. At the least we have a grooming meeting once per week. On this second blog for the “Working with Agile Teams Remotely” series I am writing, I will share what it is like for us to do planning and grooming meetings.

The Tools

We use Zoom for our online meeting. Sharing your video is encouraged but not required. Screen sharing is done as needed, usually it is the Product Owner who is sharing his screen as he explains details of PBIs. As I said in my previous post, we do not experience any issues in audio quality while we are doing screen sharing so it really helps in having a good understanding of what is being discussed in the meeting. Sometimes we would record the meeting so that team members can review it when they need to refresh their memory on what has been discussed. Zoom has a nice feature which allows you to record the meeting on the cloud. This way it is readily available to the team to view it and you don’t have to bother with uploading / downloading a video file.

Our Kanban board is on our instance of LeanKit. It is expected that everyone in the planning meeting is looking at the board on LeanKit as needed. Information about the PBI is stored on the card representing it on our Kanban board. This substitutes for being able to stand in front of a physical board, discussing the plan for the week.

For estimating PBIs we play Planning Poker.  We do this on planningpoker.com which is easy to use and easy to customize according to your needs. You only need an account for the moderator of the game and the rest of the players just have to click on a link to join a game. The tool has all the features you need to play a proper Planning Poker game with a team.

Challenges

One of the main challenges in doing planning and grooming meetings with a remote team is maintaining the focus of the members. It is easy to get distracted and get disengaged from the meeting, especially if you are not sharing video. Ideally when you meet in person, the attendees of the meeting would not bring their laptops to the meeting and you can easily see if they are paying attention to what is being discussed. If you are in an online meeting, the attendees may be viewing something else on their own screens or maybe getting distracted and spacing out because of other distractions in their home offices.

You may also get challenged by looping discussions. Sometimes expressing ideas in online meetings can be more difficult compared to in-person meetings. You lack the visual cues which can help you in explaining. There is also no easy way of breaking up a conversation. When you are in the same room, a simple gesture like raising your hand can signal the need to break the discussion. In an online meeting you have no choice but to speak up and break up the conversation as politely and as nicely as you can.

These challenges do get easier as you gain more experience in holding this kind of meetings with remote teams. It’s part of the growth of the team, the more meetings you do with them, the better the next ones will be.

 

Working with Agile Teams Remotely: Meetings

What is it like to be Agile while working remotely? I am an Agile Coach working at home and I work with teams having members who also work from their homes.  I have been working on this kind of environment and working setup for 8 years. In my current job, I am on my fourth year of being an Agile Coach. I have also worked as a Scrum Master for co-located teams so I have some experience working in an office setting.  In the early years of my professional career, I have worked as a software engineer, as part of a development team in an office setting.

When you are used to applying Agile principles and following Agile frameworks, I think that gives you the versatility to work in any environment and be successful. I would like to share my perspective on what it is like to be Agile while working with remote teams.  On this first blog for this series, I’ll talk about meetings in general.

Meetings

For me, scheduling a meeting involves creating a Google calendar event and inviting people to that event.  Google Calendar has nice features which helps you pick a good time for the meeting you are creating.  You can see the appointments people have on their calendars and you can even ask the app to find a good time slot for a meeting by telling it who you want to invite.  The app allows you to schedule recurring meetings and this is what I do for standups, retrospectives, and planning meetings.  I also make sure to set the correct timezone as I work with people in different countries.

We use Zoom for our online meetings.  Instead of reserving a meeting room, I would just create a Zoom meeting instance.  Going in the meeting room is done by clicking on a Zoom meeting URL.  I would usually post the link on the Skype group chat of the team two minutes before the start of the meeting.  I also post the Zoom URL on the Google Calendar event for the meeting so the attendees can access the link from there as well.

I am impressed with Zoom’s implementation on streaming video, voice and screen share during meetings.  Internet speed is not great here in the Philippines but somehow on Zoom meetings we get great quality for voice.  Greater still is that with Zoom, we can share video and do screen sharing without lags and problems with audio. This really helps in overcoming the challenges of communicating with your colleagues. It brings you closer to how the meeting would be if you are all in a room together. We would share video so that we can see each other rather than just hearing the voices of people we work with. Screen sharing is used to enhance discussions.  In Zoom you can view a gallery of the video of participants and see the screen share at the same time, it’s like being in a room and having something presented via a projector.

Daily Standups

When we have the daily standups, we are actually just sitting down in our own home offices. Hahaha! We use Zoom for the meeting. Instead of looking at a physical board, we have our virtual Kanban board on our LeanKit instance. LeanKit allows us to coordinate our work and represent it on a Kanban board that we can all access and use.

What’s Next?

On my next blog post for this series, I’ll share more about retrospectives and how we do it remotely.