My employing firm have several branches throughout the world, our office is situated in Odense and the company headquarters are located on Iceland. And increasing number of projects are dependent on geographically distribruted teams.
The largest risk related to the retrospective was the geographical distribution of the participants. We had team members in Iceland and in Denmark in a rough 60/40 spread. To overcome this obstacle we needed tools in two dimensions;
- Copresense; to provide a better feeling of sharing the same meeting space despite the large distance between us.
- Collaboration; to enable us to jointly participate in the retrospective and not let one of the parties is subject to a passive participation.
Prior to this moment we have typically just used voice services for our project meetings, but to get a better sense of copresence we tried connecting the meeting rooms with web cameras through Skype. This worked fairly well, there were stream drops from time to time, but on an overall basis the experience was positive. Here on the Odense side we could optimize the placement of web cam and screens to give a sense of immersion.
To enable participation of team members in both locations, we used parallel tangible tools such as pens and paper, but also IT network tools. Prior to the retrospective various collaboration tools were evaluated. Initially Cardmeeting was the prime candidate for evaluating brainstorming results, but due to is lack of zoom/font capabilities we ended up using a shared whiteboard provided by dabbleboard.com. This tool worked well in displaying the many brainstorming items, and provided color coding support. Unfortunately it showed serious problems with multiple user interaction. So for future retrospectives we should seek out another tool that supports this.