Posts Tagged daily standup

Rotating Team Roles

Generally there are two schools of thought when it comes to Scrum team facilitation:

1. A dedicated ScrumMaster facilitates each session.
2. Each team member takes a turn facilitating sessions.

I’ll illustrate how I’ve approached the latter and explain below why I’ve seen it work quite well.

Daily Standups
Typically I start out facilitating daily standups using techniques that I’ve spoken about before. I’ve found that it takes 1 or 2 iterations of playing the ScrumMaster role in the daily standup before the team members feel comfortable enough to step in. Once I step back, we rotate through the iteration so that ideally each team member has an opportunity to facilitate at least once.

Daily Standup Rotation

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The Daily Standup Trap

The 15 minute daily standup, or daily scrum, is one of the more widely adopted artifacts of the iterative software movement. Even companies who only dip their toe into Agile practices typically adopt this since it seems so easy to do.
scrumology.net trap

  1. What did you do yesterday?
  2. What will you do today?
  3. What is blocking progress?

While you can certainly take these questions and use them as the basis for your daily standup, you may be surprised at how your team actually responds to them. Some may find these questions laughable and not take them seriously. Some may become defensive, even if they have no reason to be. Some may clam up and provide almost no detail at all, while others ramble on about every minute of their day… [Read More]

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Distributed Video Standup

Distributed Teams need high bandwidth bidirectional communication to succeed, and the organization should provide these tools for collaboration. Luckily for us, Video Chat and Broadband are becoming more and more affordable so this is no longer an unrealistic goal. With a decent Video Chat setup you can teleconference with teams around the world and pick [...]

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What will you do tomorrow?

Distributed Scrum Teams can be a challenge on many different levels. In the past, I’ve attempted to explain this by deep diving into all of their idiosyncrasies while citing Jeff Sutherland’s excellent White Paper on the issue. I’d then draw communication diagrams and illustrate how bi-directional, high bandwidth communication is important instead of using uni-directional, [...]

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