Comments on: Virtual Team Member Dolly

By: Lessons Learned since Agile Testing Was Published (#agileTD 2011) | (Agile) Testing

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:09:54 +0000

[...] and he notices if there’s a discussion ongoing he should join. (More on Lisa’s blog: Virtual Team Member Dolly) Virtual Nanda, provided by Lisa Crispin, credits to Mike Thomas [...]

By: Bachan

Bachan — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 07:30:02 +0000

Thanks Lisa for shairing the information

By: Thomas Ponnet

Thomas Ponnet — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:47:01 +0000

Lisa, thanks for the reply, useful info. I’ll try out a new remote working system in the next couple days and will let you know how we get on.

By: lcrispin

lcrispin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:13:34 +0000

Hi Thomas, Skype doesn’t allow video with >1 person on the call, or if it does, we don’t know how to make it work. Yahoo IM works ok for video, I know it works ok for up to 5 people, it isn’t perfect but the other things we’ve tried were worse. I hope to find something better eventually. We have MSN Communicator/Messenger but it is really buggy.

USB headphones work fine for 1 on 1, but the snoball mic allows remote peeps to hear everything going on in the team room or talk to several people at once.

By: Thomas Ponnet

Thomas Ponnet — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:27:00 +0000

We’re currently fitting all testers laptops with USB cameras and headphones as our team is distributed around the country as well. I’d be interested to hear why/when you’re using what software. You wrote:

“If more than one person is working remotely and wants to use the Virtual Nanda, we can’t use Skype for video. We still use it for audio, and use Yahoo IM for the video. ”

Apparently Yahoo IM gives you better performance for video? If so, have you used it with 3,4,5+ people?
The mic seems to be the Blue snowball mic, I take it USB headphones didn’t give you the quality you wanted? Or what was the reason to go for this mic?
Thanks for your help!

By: Yvette Francino

Yvette Francino — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:35:30 +0000

This is really cool, Lisa. As a proponent of distributed agile, I’ll be passing along this post to others, particularly my Beyond Certification network!

By: lcrispin

lcrispin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:41:30 +0000

Our remote guy can VNC to the laptop and call in on it anytime and use the video and audio, but he tends to use it more at meetings and standups, then he hangs out on it after the meeting to talk to people he might need to talk to. He is in India so is 12.5 hours ahead, though he does overlap with most of our morning. I hope over time he will stay on it more, he was used to working all by himself for 2 years before we got this virtual telepresence idea.

When I work from home, I stay on the dolly all day, it makes me feel connected, and enables questions and discussions back and forth. It’s so important to hear the casual conversations that might bring up an important point that nobody remembers to tell the people not in the room at the time.

By: abby, the hacker chick blog

abby, the hacker chick blog — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:07:47 +0000

Thanks for writing about this! I’d been curious since you mentioned it but I wasn’t quite sure how it worked. So is the cam always on? Or just selectively for meetings or just on demand conversations with people?

By: lcrispin

lcrispin — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:46:07 +0000

It’s a Logitech web cam and comes with a control center where you can move the camera ‘eye’ side to side and up and down, plus zoom it in. It’s good enough to read the whiteboard, but can’t pick up all the writing on the task cards on the task board. We experimented with holding up binoculars to it but that didn’t help! So we take hi res still photos of the task board at least once per day and put on the wiki, same with any whiteboard updates.

By: Gerry Kirk

Gerry Kirk — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:35:44 +0000

That’s totally cool you can control the web cam remotely to see what you want to see. How does that work, exactly? Is it just software that comes with the web cam?