Working from Home - Day 2

Caught up on correspondence this morning. I had a doctor’s appointment this morning. He is not seeing patients at his office during the Covid-19 quarantine so we had to discuss things over a land line instead. While I miss the body language, or maybe the absence of it, I think that strictly verbal communication between people that have know each other for a couple of years is damn close to physical proximity.

Most scrum masters argue that co-located teams excel because all of the physical aspects of communication are present. I have worked in distributed teams before and would argue that teams that use asynchronous communication channels are more productive and resilient. Sickness happens, vacations happen, births happen. If the group knowledge is preserved I can catch up when life’s tribulations permit. Please note: Slack channels are a poor substitute to an organized chat and repository. Think wiki not Twitter.

We did have a mob event in the afternoon. That went pretty well. Google Hangouts works for this task. Maybe we can try other solutions like VS Code Live, that seems to emphasize the coding part. I still like Zoom, especially the ability to point to things on the shared screen.