As most Agile practices are centered around human interactions, I often get asked the question: “How do you do Agile development with a distributed team?”. My answer usually involves a standard lecture on how you should really try to get all your team members together in the same location, at least initially. The reality is that it’ s not always possible. Whether your team is working from home because you are a bootstrapped startup without office, or because you have hired specific talents wherever they happened to be located, it’ s very likely that one or more member of your development team is going to be remote.
Far and Away
When dealing with remote engineers, physical location and time difference are important factors. As such, you need a tool that will provide rich remote presence and also allow for asynchronous communication. For example, the phone is a decent way to bring people in a live conversation but voicemail is terrible as an asynchronous tool. Conversely, e-mail is a great way to communicate asynchronously but lacks fidelity and context.
It should be obvious by now that teams benefit greatly from daily use of collaboration tools such as instant messenger, chat, audio conference calls and video. Throughout the years, I’ ve used countless combination of free and commercial voice conference, instant messengers, chat rooms and screen sharing services. They typically got the job done. Skype potency is that everything is available in a single application.
Disclaimer: I’ m currently consulting for Skype, so my views are somewhat biased. However, Skype employees excel at eating their proverbial own dog food. There are no phones in the office, teams are distributed and the majority of communication is done via Skype. Software development is organized around small agile teams following the SCRUM methodology. In that environment, I’ ve seen first hand what this tool is capable of. It’ s been battle field tested for you.
Features: Check, Check, Check
Here is a list of Skype important features and how they can impact your team's ability to communicate on a daily basis.
Presence
This is an obvious one. We’ ve all experienced a team getting together only to ask the question “Anyone seen Paul? Where is he?”.
Mood Messages
Custom status messages are not new. They can be used to convey the current mood of the person. They can also be a powerful tool to signal a status. For instance set your mood to the story title you’ re working on or update it with your upcoming travel plans so everyone on the team knows your whereabouts.
Persistent Chats
In Skype, chats (one-to-one and multiparty) are persisted by default and messages are queued for offline delivery. This provides an easy way to pick up conversation asynchronously, or synchronously if the other party happens to be on-line.
Multi-person Chat, Audio and Video Calls
One of my favorite feature for SCRUM teams is the multi-person chat room. If you’ ve been on a private IRC or similar chat room you know how it works. With Skype you can easily create and name chat rooms on the fly. You can invite people to participate via text, voice or video. They can be on a computer, mobile device or a regular phone.
A typical usage scenario might look like that.
It’ s Monday morning, Bob, the remote SCRUM master initiates a chat with Paul, one of the engineer on the team.
Bob: “Hey is this time for our daily Scrum?”
Paul: “Yep, let me bring my laptop in the room and gather the troops”
Bob: “Ok”
Paul: “Ok, we’ re all here. Let’ s switch to video call”
Bob: “Ok”
Bob clicks the call button and the video and audio starts up.
Paul (talking): “Hi Bob. Can you add Greg to the call he’ s working from home today.”
Bob (talking): “Sure no problems.”
Bob click on the add participant button and search for Greg. He adds him to the call.
Since there are multiple parties now in the chat, Bob also renames the conversation with a more relevant title: “Sprint 42 Daily Scrum”. The chat room will be persisted at the end of the call and all the invited participants will remain, so it will be easy to initiate another call with the same group for the rest of the week.
Greg (talking): “Hi guys, thanks for patching me in.”
Bob (talking): “Ok, let’ s start with Greg and then go around the room.”
At one point, the team realize that they need some information from Serge, the night owl sysadmin. Serge just woke up an hour ago and now he’ s on his way to the office. He’ s driving and only has his cell with him.
Bob (talking): “Hey, what’ s Serge’ s mobile number?”
Greg (typing into the chat room): “Here you go: +16505551212”
Bob clicks on “add people to the conversation” and paste the number to dial Serge’ s mobile directly.
Serge is now called into the conference call and can answer questions from the team.
This is simple example of what you can do with that. There are many more usage scenario. Whenever your team does not neatly fit together in the same room.
You can create as many “rooms” as needed. For instance you could have a standing room for daily scrum, one for release going live, one for general team discussion, etc. In every instances, once you’ ve invited the relevant people, they are automatically able to participate and read historical messages.
File Sharing
Once you’ ve approved a person in your contact list, you can easily exchange files. No more attachments clogging emails. You can also send a file to multiple participant in a chat room.
Bridge to PSTN
One of the most undiscovered feature of Skype is that you can use it to make call to regular phones. This is a great way to bring in “legacy” participant into a conference call.
Ubiquity of Platforms
Windows, OS X, Linux, iPhone, Android are supported.
Low cost
For the most part, the Skype service is free. Calls to phone are charged at a ridiculously low rate and some advanced feature like group video calls require a premium subscription.
Enterprise Management Tool
One of the biggest drawback of using a consumer tool in a corporate environment is the lack of user management. You might be a small team now, but sooner or later the team will grow, some people will leave the company and you might have to deal with access control to revoke someone's access.
Skype has introduced a new user management system that allows an administrator to manage accounts, create a directory of users and allocated credits to be used by individual for paid features.
Screen Sharing
This is probably Skype's weakest feature at this point. Screen sharing is only available during one-to-on calls, which means you can't share your screen with a group. The feature is essentially using your desktop as a source for video call. The resulting image quality and frame rate is adequate but not great. As long as your other tools for planning (bug tracking, wiki, etc.) are available to everyone, it's not necessarily a problem as each participant can follow along on their own instance. If screen sharing is a big part of your activity, you might want to look for one of the many free option available (Google "free screen sharing").
Try It Out for Yourself
I hope this list has inspired you to try it out for yourself. Download Skype and get started.
