Speaker: Phil Ledgerwood

For more see the table of contents

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Scrum survey

• Asked who doing Scrum – most of room
• Had people sit if no sprint goals – a bunch
• Had people sit whose sprint goal is to complete X stories – a bunch more

Standup pains

• Ghost man – I won’t make standup today, but here’s my update
• Arena – two people debate for 45 minutes and everyone else watches
• Captive Audience – “since we got everyone together, I’d like to talk about something completely different”
• Hunger Games – every week, less people come
• Inquisition – does anyone from business/management have questions for the team
• The Questions Three – did yesterday, today, any blockers – these questions were dropped from the scrum guide

Missing

• Right people – developers (per Scrum Guide). Developers are people doing the work of delivery.
• Right purpose – for Scrum, to inspect progress toward sprint goal and adapt the backlog. On track? What adjustments needed? Adjustments can include cancelling spring because goal no longer relevant. For non Scrum teams, purpose is to review state of work in progress/make appropriate decisions for day.
• Right value proposition – team walks away with plan of action for day that they have come up with themselves

More notes

• Even if not doing Scrum, probably got ideas from there
• Ok for anyone to come to standup but don’t get to participate. Some teams limit for safety, etc
• in Scrum, committing goal not the set of stories (at iteration planning
• Standup timebox is the investment the organization is making towards the goal
• Deliverable of standup is the team’s collaborative plan for the day
• People miss standup because its not valuable to them
• Helps to have a facilitator at beginning

What’s wrong with the three questions

• individual plan
• status report
• don’t orient towards the goal
• more value to people not on team
• reinforces inclination of devs to want to work independently and think about team

Why should devs care?

• furthering own goals
• taking charge of work
• defining “how”
• build trust, established competence, saves management time
• less meddling from others (the more you have a working system, the less people want to change it)

Increase Standup Effectiveness

• Don’t try to spice it up – ex: don’t theme. That doesn’t solve underlying problem
• Establish clear value proposition and make sure everyone knows it
• Structure event around value proposition
• Meeting needs to have a reason for existence beside its existence
• Stop event once accomplished value proposition
• Walk the Board – talk to items. Everyone responsible for item on board should be there to talk to it. Ex: go right to left so talking about items closer to finished first
• Ask are we are on track to meet the sprint goal
• Ask if everyone knows what doing today. Good at end for new people because need to have accomplished this
• Make sure devs talking together and not in sequence
• Think “war room” and not “line for immunizations”

My take

My team hasn’t done the 3 questions in many, many years because it distracted us from the priorities. I still found ideas to take back to our team. Wrote them down for next retro. The Q&A was great. Lots of opinions!