Distributed Agile – Daily Standup

So I was looking at the long list of agile tools and found TweetScrum specifically to manage the daily standup.   For distributed teams this is a nice way to get off the phone and document online the meeting in real time.    Funny that on my last project there was a team member that had this idea as well.   Proves my point that if you have an idea, likely there are 10 others with the same idea and if you have a short window of time to act on it or someone will beat you to the punch.   Which is a good case to do agile development.

Tweeting your daily standup in my mind has a few challenges:

• Statusing 140 characters at a time.
• Conversation / clarification is a bit disjointed
• Still need to get folks together to resolve blockers

So here is what I would use, Skype.   Skype is free and the Scrum Master or Cycle Advocate can define private chat rooms (invite,kick control) for team members.   I would define chat rooms as the following:

• <project name> – Standup
• <project name> – Deployment
• <project name> – Watercooler

The standup would be just that, standup status:

• What did I complete
• What am I working on today
• Do I have any blockers?

Deployment chat room would note the weekly deployments to a new environment and the watercooler can be for general discussion, cool links, general questions.

The beauty of Skype chat rooms is they will hold the messages for you until you login so you never miss a conversation.   You can setup seperate chats to work on particular blockers that come from the standup meeting or other collaboration.    You can do Skype to Skype voice calling and share your desktop screen to pair up on a particular problem.

While TweetScurm is a nice idea there are better tools for distributed collaboration out there in the wild.    What tools have you found that help with distributed teams?   I’d love to hear some other success stories!

[Cross posted from GeoffCorey.Posterous.com]