| Having been a project lead and scrum master in the past, I've found there are a few real purposes to scrum imho. 1. It should be a place were the lead helps people coordinate. Not just work, but their schedules. If dev A will be finishing up widget A on Wed. then dev B knows he needs to hustle, etc. 2. It's a place where QA can get a grip on what's happening in development. Most of the time QA has no idea what's going on in dev, and having the QA guys in scrum helps them. 3. It forces lazy devs (who spend all day on youtube) to actually report status the next day in front of all the other devs. A few more thoughts. 1. It should be around 15 minutes. Too short and it just becomes a round robin. That's great, but a lead should be able to adjust the work and coordinate at scrum. You can't really do that in 3-5 minutes. If it's too long, the devs get cranky because you're killing their dev time. 2. No PMs. Project managers imho should not attend scrums because they speak a different language (it's called powerpoint) and they usually a) don't understand what's being said b) freak out when qa says there's a bug c) like to get on a soapbox about schedules and releases when it's not appropriate. It's far better to have the lead/leads manage the PM separately be delivering separate status reports to him directly (either through email or a formal report-like deliverable). 3. No more than 10 people. I would say around 6 is best, but you can't have a 15 minute scrum, when the number of people is too large. If you have more people, you need to split them into groups of 6-10 and then have a 'superscrum' for the leads. This type of 'superscrum' is great for have the PM join in, because it can focus mainly on resource management and schedules (which is what PMs love to talk about). @OP I've actually have asked for people to report status via email (particularly when I have a bunch of remote guys), and it's really terrible. You end up getting a bunch of emails which you have to respond to. That's great if your a developer and you can put you AD LIB email on a cron job for the lead, but for the lead, the coordination of the team via email will eat up most of your morning. It simply better to call in or show up and everyone be in the same room for 15 minutes. |