[AlecM]

Well, I was being figurative there, we actually do use a nerfball but I'm pretty sure it's universally despised. What usually happens is someone is done speaking, holds the ball up and looks around for a taker. No one ever really says, "Me next!" so it's thrown to a random person. At least one or two people will drop it per stand-up and someone else will always go, "Nice one, butterfingers!" and there's the awkward, uncomfortable laugh.

I observed this practice for a couple weeks and came to an average of 2.8 seconds per ball movement. Times that by 29 (amount of passes) and you get 81.2 seconds per day we spend tossing that ball around. At an average salary of about $65K amongst the group, the company spends $42.29 per day on passing a ball around; that's just under a $11,000 a year!

But I digress...

[DanielBMarkham]

Got a better one for you. Start doing the math on how much money you waste thinking you're smart and understand everything and then blow it later on because you missed a key conversation. I'll stack that up against nerf-ball-tossing any day of the week. Or how about useless status reports? (stand-ups are not status reports). Or meetings with required attendance that accomplish nothing?

Communication kills teams. That's why the 30-person team sucks -- communication difficulties expand at an exponential rate. Stand-ups, pair-programming, co-location,and all the rest of that are just feeble attempts to address this problem. If you don't like one of these things, stop it. But that doesn't make the underlying problem go away. Whatever you do, you have to constantly be figuring out ways to solve this problem, not just thinking you've got it nailed because you're doing X.

Agile is very simple. But if you try hard enough, and most teams do, you can screw it up.