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 :)