Tools for Remote Teams
I attended a virtual lunch with other agile enthusiasts today and many of them had great suggestions on tools they use. Here are some great tools to use for remote teams used by myself and others:
Estimation:
Firepoker.io FirePoker is a virtual estimation tool that comes highly recommended by multiple agile coaches.
Virtual Video Conference: You can host a virtual conference and have everyone agree on sizes/colors/numbers/symbols then have people do the estimation game. You can use thumb voting to verify everyone agrees.
Tech Beacon has some great tips on how they estimate. While not virtual by nature, with facilitation they can be adapted for remote teams: https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/fast-estimation-better-approach-agile-estimation
Games / Virtual Team Building:
Need a virtual Kanban or teamwork exercise, try this one from Scrumban: http://www.getscrumban.com
Play a round of trivia or have a different person post a “trivia question of the day” in your preferred team chat platform or during a virtual meeting
Visit InfoQ for a whole list of games you can adapt for virtual teams: https://www.infoq.com/news/2008/10/agile-games/
Ask your team if they have a game or activity they would like to try! They might surprise you and that activity is a game in itself.
Retrospectives and Feedback:
Ideaboardz does not require special log-ins or setup, making it great for meetings with people internal and external to your group.
Mural.co – Miss your huge whiteboard walls? Mural gives you the freedom of wide open spaces you can organize by questions, topics, whatever. Jason Cyr at Cisco has been putting it to noble use by creating a crowd-sourced home for our hopes, fears and experiences: Observations
Microsoft Teams Whiteboard: Many collaboration tools come with a Whiteboard. You can also fire up a shared PowerPoint or Word Doc people can comment on and add images and text to in real time.
Polly (integrated into MS Teams or Slack) for polls: My team uses this to vote on topics, and you can use it to do “What’s the Weather” type team checkins or virtual thumb voting.
Agile Sparks has collected a lot of different games and has ideas for fun retrospectives.
Planning Boards:
Many of Atlasssian’s popular tools like Trello are currently free!
Microsoft’s Planner tool integrates with SharePoint and Tasks. It is low on features, but also doesn’t bog you down with a lot of options. I use it for my team’s planning board so they can pull tasks and for simple Kanban boards for smaller products.
Mural.co would be a good one here if you want a more loose, whiteboard feel.
Azure DevOps has some nice integrations and tools as well for team.
Credits:
I didn’t compile this list by my lonesome. Big thanks to the Agile Virtual Lunch crew: Michael Burns, Josh Kite, Jeremy Pullen, Tony Drake, Richard Genet, Charlene Woolley, Theresa Cohen, Janine Whiteman, Carla Habeeb, Meaghan Williams Gary, and Russell Miller.