[dudifordMann]

I agree that there are individuals and companies who have defined such ridged structure and expectation into their Scrum method that they can no longer be considered an agile approach missing two of the key purposes of agile approaches:

* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools * Responding to change over following a plan

Now, I cannot say that Scum abstractly is a bad approach to attempting to be more agile. Many of us have employed some form of it with varying degrees of success, but, the expectations on software developers from a business perspective are more rigid for business development and tracability purposes, which can,on occasion, omit the consideration of resource demands and complexities.

Often, i believe, it is that a lack of understanding the purpose of the agile manifesto and the poor implementation of a method at the top level of the developer and managment ladder which is the underlying cause.

In the post, the author cites 3 hour or more meeting where he feels there are too many people there. This would be an item for the retrospective feeding the next iteration, but he only says "Blergh" about the needed feedback.

He states that the standup is more ritualistic, but the point is to ensure each member understands where the sprint stands, inspire collaboration, but really take ownership of the code. It could be that the team size is too big, or that the team really has not taken ownership of their code.

When all is said and done, you have to buy into the Scrum process, the process has to be flexible, and the stakeholders have to not believe it is a magical development method that fixes all the issues of the software development process.

[Meegul]

His complaint about the standups interrupting productive work rings a bell with me though. I see no reason why a daily status update over the general channel on slack doesn't serve the same purpose as a standup meeting. In fact, make it so there's a loose timeframe, say 30 minutes, and you wouldn't be interrupting people, nor forcing them to stare at a wall.

My team hasn't tried anything like that, but I think it could really be useful. It encourages better communication throughout the day as well, as it gets people using Slack. Plus, it gives managers the ability to keep track of what people say each day.

[cableshaft]

For me, the daily status meeting at my current job has been the only time I can guarantee the team lead will be available to answer questions, as he tends to get pulled into meetings (or is busy marking up tasks or working on code reviews) most of the rest of the day.

At this place, where there are lots of different code bases of various quality and approaches to how the features are implemented has shifted over time, I tend to have questions most days.

I have worked at companies where we're only really working on one thing and I'm familiar enough with it that I really didn't have to ask any questions (they also didn't care much on how it was implemented, either, just that it worked) and daily status meetings were pretty much a waste of our time and ended up becoming more like once every other month.

[humanrebar]

> I see no reason why a daily status update over the general channel on slack doesn't serve the same purpose as a standup meeting.

I haven't used slack in anger. When you need help, how do you tell the difference between a teammate being busy, unavailable, or just too distracted to respond? Part of the point of the in-person standup is to remove ambiguities about this at least once a day.

[nawitus]

We've tried that using Slack (and also IRC in previous projects, perhaps even email at some point). It works well, and I don't remember when I did a face-to-face daily standup the last time.

[coredog64]

In the commentary for a previous story, another user mentioned that they have a "today-I-will" room in Slack. I've been itching for a chance to bring that up with my management.

[camtarn]

"the team size is too big" - this is a very good point. Towards the upper limit of the recommended Scrum team size (3-9) they can get really unwieldy. I've been to a standup with an even larger team, which included a couple of design and marketing folks, and it was unbearable. The recommendation's there for a good reason.