5 winner practices that improve your sprint (when remote)

By Davide Passinhas, Senior Manager @ Xpand IT

Leaving the office and making your work-life at home may not change most projects and goals for tech companies. When remote, there are some additional challenges when trying to make sprints work effectively. It’s important to know how to manage work, finish tasks and help your team reach success. Communication with your teammates and the right tools can certainly make a difference when working remotely in a development team.

Let me show you a simple guide in this article for in-person agile teams and highly distributed teams.

Inside a remote team with different roles and tasks is many times easier to just talk one-on-one directly with a developer one to one to discuss requirements/solutions etc. For instance, in a mobile and web project, if I have a web question, I just open the chat with a web developer and ask him directly. However, this will lead to the loss of information within the team.

We should always use the Team Channel available to the full team, creating new channels for different topics and use threads to identify the issues. This allows everyone to be informed about the overall project even if it’s not their direct responsibility and promote the team spirit and helping/discussing channels among team members.

We can make the most of our tools to minimize the gap between remote and office work, for instance:

• Use digital whiteboard tools, like Miro.
• Use camera
• Share screen with Jira, Confluence, etc.
• Do quick videos to demo the progress and validate requirements.

Foster an environment where the team feel comfortable to discuss their ideas and discuss the solution together, for instance, feels comfortable discussing their ideas and discussing the solution together through more tech elaboration meetings to discuss requirements and solutions.

In a remote environment, we lose the coffee/lunch’s breaks and chats with our desk neighbour, so that it can be lonely, and without needed breaks, it easily gets unmotivated with the work. So, foster and keep the team spirit up with:

• Non-work-related chats before starting or at the end of meetings;
• Team virtual lunches or coffee breaks.

Make sure you get the most out of the agile project tools, focusing on the main three we use daily:

Jira:

• Keep the Task / User Stories status up to date;
• Leave comments on the progress done and when you complete a task;
• Do not start multiple Tasks at the same time. You, should focus on one each time, otherwise, we lose track of what is actually being done.

Bitbucket:

• Do small commits, so it’s easier for the team to validate the changes you make;
• Code Review and share comments among the team;
• Get the repo up to date, don’t leave code hanging on your machine.

Confluence:

• Keep the project documentation updated;
• Document the meetings to keep a backlog of decisions, etc. For this, you can also capture the meeting from Teams and share the link to the video to help.

In a remote environment, the key to success is good communication and making sure ensuring that everyone is on the same page, with little effort. By following these guidelines, you will able to achieve this and avoid unnecessary meetings and catch up on the work in progress.

Hope these practices that improve your sprint will help you to work better in a remote environment. If you have any suggestions let me know.