Daily... really??

When I was getting my Scrum Master certification, one of the coaches, Juan Banda, told us a reality about the daily standings...

They are not to talk about work unless its necessary.

Now, I know a lot of you Scrum puritans are screaming at me right now, stay with me for a couple of minutes.

The daily standings are supposed to be used to say, what you did, what are you doing, what are you going to do, and problems if you have any.

Problem with this approach is that it mechanizes the way the team interacts, people start just repeating themselves, especially when working in a game, some days there will be only one task repeated all week (I modelled a lamp, I added some screenshots, I changed the same line of code again).

Instead, this 15 minutes that we have the whole team sharing, should be all about the team sharing, let people talk about whatever they want, if it is about their personal life, let them, let them know this team is the place to be. Usually what happens, is that people are very eager to share what they are working on with their friends, especially if their friends are working with them on this.

So next time you are holding a daily and someone starts complaining about the weather, you should let everyone do so. Exciting things have started with the weather!

*Ben Franklin's Kite may have not been hit by lighting :)

Estimating, estimating team!

Estimations, estimations. When dealing with business folks, one of the most important things they often ask is, how long do you think it's gonna take you. But anything you say (excepting for things you have done over and over again and thus are not new!) will be a complete guess.

But its something you need to learn how to do, and the best way to do so, is not using formulas, is not creating a spreadsheet, is talking with your team.

For us independent developers, this is a must, we can't expect that a producer will have our schedules set up for us so we just fill the blanks, we must be able to self manage, we must be able to know our own abilities and limitations so we can, AS A TEAM, have realistic ideas of when we can get things done.