Shannon Greywalker's Blog

Confused about how Google is positioning Wave versus Buzz? Me too, until I found this excellent article: Google Buzz Versus Google Wave. Essentially, Wave is for collaboration, while Buzz is for conversation.

You’ve probably heard the opinion that distributed agile teams experience a significant “drag factor” due to the inability to communicate as efficiently as fully collocated teams that are sitting together in the same physical bullpen. However, empirical data from Microsoft shows that this sentiment is unfounded. I can back up Microsoft’s position with my own empirical observations, and I present a 9-minute screencast that demonstrates the “virtual bullpen” that my scrum team has used for the past nine months that enabled us to have zero “communication drag” regardless of where any member was working from on a given day.

Just a few days ago, on Thursday, May 28 at the Day 2 keynote address of Google I/O in San Franciso, Google made history with their 90-minute Google Wave Developer Preview session. Here is a link to the video of that presentation, and in my opinion it will be among the most valuable 90 minutes [...]

American businesspeople have all encountered staff or planning meetings where the group decision making process feels arduous and slow, and some people dominate the meeting while others are largely silent throughout. This common dynamic lies in the gap between high- and low-context communicators. Agile planning and estimating techniques effectively bridge this gap.

This post delves into the challenges of achieving all day real-time collaboration–a “virtual bullpen” among a geographically distributed Scrum team. A concrete example demonstrates why email and forums are not time-efficient enough to enable Scrum, and some promising tools are identified.