Any tried and tested virtual team bonding tool ?

What joint training have they received to prepare them for agile working?

I have conducted 2 introductory sessions on Scrum. Have emphasized on not working in silos, importance of team work etc. Cannot conduct agile games like ball point game to show the importance of self organization as everyone is doing WFH.

But- what else I can do? Please guide.

I didn't go for games instead I tried doing hackathon kind of activity with the new team. I asked the team to divide into groups. Each group(In our case it was 2 groups) should be divided with members having all skillset(functional, technical, testing etc) if possible. 2 small challenges or ideas(related to the technology or product they will work) were presented to them and asked to solve it in 2hrs of time. So they were using breakout rooms and collaborate each other And I invited a friendly guest to review their results. At the end, I told team this is how they will be working as a team on big problems in sprints. Team told it helped them better to understand the way of working.

But- what else I can do? Please guide.

What else do you need to do, other than to start Sprinting now, and to retrospectively learn by actual experience? Why put empirical process control in delay?

Every Sprint is an opportunity for team members to get to know each other better, and to become more comfortable delivering value now. If that isn't happening it's a problem. 

Thanks Balaji. Liked the activity.

@Ian- Yes, we will be starting sprint from coming Monday. Seems we are good to go once technical debt and benchmarking related discussion is completed today evening.  DOR & DOD are in place.

You could use a WIP limit of half the developers?



Suppose the team has 6 developers: the teams works on 3 Product Backlog Items at a time. So they have to work together. Otherwise it is easy for a developer to just pick a PBI and dissappear for the day.