The Agile Manifesto says face-to-face interaction trumps all other forms of communication and colocated teams are the ideal.
But what to do when a team is distributed across a province, or a country, or internationally?
Mario Lucero shares his solution in “Virtual Retrospectives”.
He suggests using a virtual board and if anyone has had experience with this please leave a comment below. It would be great to read how this has been used with success.
With or without this virtual board, I really think he is on to something. With tact and wisdom, virtual meetings through online forums such as Google Hangouts or Skype can really give the impression of being face-to-face with people.
It provides more visual body-language cues which are missing in phone calls and this is bound to help keep communication among a distributed team much stronger.
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We built ScatterSpoke to be a virtual retrospective board to solve this problem! I like to have the board displayed on one half of the screen and the video displayed on the other half. We often create the new retro at the end of the last so teammates can add cards to the board right when they happen (and we have more time for discussion).