I posted a response to a blog post entitled “Why I hate SCRUM daily standup meetings,” but it’s still awaiting moderation after a couple days. I’m impatient, so here’s my comment:
====== From: @jlangr ======
“On top of this, they need to setup a meeting to learn what my collegues are working on feels so wrong to me.”
Agreed. If you are a good team that already finds ways to get together and talk about what’s important, a formal meeting is a waste of time. Sitting in a common area where this can happen throughout the day can make it even less useful.
Having said that, it’s great starter discipline, and can be useful in environments where it’s not easy to get people together (I’ve been in places where I wasted way too much time trying to track people down or when my attempts to discuss things were rebuffed by people who were “too busy”). I’d start a new team on daily standups, but would push the team to find ways to eliminate the need for them once they got better at working together.
Also, most shops that run daily scrums and don’t get much out of them aren’t collaborating enough. It becomes one person reporting status, while the others worry about what they’re going to say when it’s their turn (because “that stuff” has little to do with what they’re doing). If that’s the case, you may as well revert to people sending an email with their status to the project manager, who gathers and emails a summary of what’s important to the team.
But…that’s not what works best in agile (or lean). See Stories and the Tedium of Daily Standups: What works best is real collaboration, which in turn makes the stand-ups far more useful and engaging. There’s also an Agile in a Flash card for that!
I’d love to hear more positive stories about stand-ups, given that most of the time I hear from people who’ve learned to detest them. Good or bad, how’s your stand-up meeting working for you?
