The chatty daily standup…

One of the “ceremonies” of Scrum (man that sounds so culty) is the “Daily Standup”, a daily planning meeting where teams realign and coordinate their efforts for the upcoming day. It’s a concise, no frills no fluff zero waste of time meeting that answers three questions: what have I done, what am I doing and what are my issues, and is generally over quite quickly…but what if it isn’t, what if it degenerates into a technical discussion about the implementation of widget-x or how the build script is not building something correctly or which framework to use to solve some problem…

I’ve found this to happen quite often and all too often I see people coming down on the team with statements like “cut the meeting off at 15 min” and “remind the team to stick to the 3 questions”… all good advice but you’re fixing the wrong problem. I believe this behavior to be an indicator of a dysfunction within the team itself. In a truly collaborative environment teams should be discussing and solving problems constantly and not just at certain points through the sprint (like the daily stand up). If they’re only collaborating around the daily stand up then something is wrong and the team has a dysfunction preventing constant collaboration…