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Discussion on: What if we do daily scrum/stand up over Slack?

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Scott Yeatts

There are a lot of specific points that I would like to cover, but that would be an entire blog post by itself! I'm seeing common frustrations for an engineer when dealing with 'organizationally imposed Agile' vs 'team driven Agile'.

Remember, the team is the fundamental unit of a good Scrum implementation. Not the organization and not the individual team-member! This kind of frustration seems to come from broken Agile implementations that start emphasizing "processes and tools" over "individual and interactions" Scrum is a process. Standup is a tool. (I'll just leave this here agilemanifesto.org/ :D)

To echo some things from other commenters and expand on them: 'What I did, What I will do, blockers' by itself will not work. If the entire team comes into the room like robots, mechanically follows a formula and leaves, then you're not getting anything out of that meeting. A highly communicative team probably already KNOWS most of these things about each-other before they enter the room.

Others have mentioned alternative ways of performing the meeting (Task-focused, not individual focused), but like a lot of things in the Agile world, you have to look at the intent of the ceremony, not just the mechanical process.

The intent is to have the team QUICKLY gather together, start a conversation about any work that needs to be talked about and then conclude the meeting, with the ability to continue more in-depth conversations with only the people needed, and let everyone else get to work.

If your standups are taking longer than 15 minutes, then you need to change how the meeting is conducted (side conversations may take longer, but only if needed, and definitely not including the whole team!) If you have 15 team members that gives everyone a full minute to update the team. If you have 15 people in a standup, you probably need to think about splitting up the team and creating a smaller unit anyway!

Another intended aspect is absolutely as a 'kick-off' to the day. A 'Scrum' in rugby is basically a restart where the two teams huddle together and work for possession of the ball. Once possession is established the game continues. The stand-up is establishing 'possession' of the 'ball' for the day, and allows all members of the team to have a chance to break off into teams or have necessary discussions before they get hours into something that would have changed had they known 'X'.

Regarding 'wasted' time. 15 minutes before a meeting is the time to come in, get your computer set up, read emails... all those administrative tasks that might distract you from actually writing code. It may not be coding, but it is part of your work, and a valuable part too. Doing these things before standup, going to standup and then getting into the code-level work feels like a great 'flow' to me, but other teams might feel differently.

Finally: DO WHAT WORKS! That's the beauty of a mature Agile team. If your team has been running like a fine-tuned machine and YOUR TEAM thinks Slack for standup would be better than your current practices, try it (and measure the impact)!

Frameworks are there to facilitate an Agile approach, not enforce it. Once the team has their heads around working together, and you see the signs that you've created a working and high-performing team, changing how you do any of the ceremonies is really just a tweak to your process, with the intent of working more efficiently. There is no one 'sacred ceremony' in Scrum. Once you've mastered the basics, do what works for your team!