[eterm]

I can't tell if these are mocking or not? (Even down to capitalisation of SCRUM).

Personally I think agile is best thought of as a broad church of methodologies rather than anything concrete to adhere to, and especially I think the sprint approach isn't always suited to business needs.

But a generally agile approach I think is good, and I think daily stand-up meetings are good for communication even without sprints or a maintained backlog.

[kylequest]

It's a pretty big fail when people wait until the daily stand-up to communicate. It's better than not communicating at all, of course :-)

Either way, daily stand-ups are the worst thing about scrum especially when they are hijacked by PMs. I'm yet to meet a develop who'd look forward to stand-ups. I know they exist somewhere :-)

If you are curious about what other people (you don't talk to a lot) are working on then Hubot is a good solution. Hubot has a great plugin to let you share what you are working on without having to deal with stand-ups.

[silverbax88]

I use some aspects of Scrum; but when a development team starts using a daily stand up meeting, you've effectively taken IT and turned into into a charade of nonsense.

[blazespin]

There are different types of communication. Some things need to be communicated to the whole team, something you don't want to be doing more than once a day.

The one thing about stand ups that I find to be a profound waste of time is reporting what you've done. Isn't that what SVN / GIT / JIRA / etc is for?

[kylequest]

Sadly most of the time stand-ups turn into glorified status reports for managers/PMs :-( Stand-ups are meant for developers (carried out for developers by developers). If devs don't get enough value out of them (to offset the "distraction factor" they introduce) they shouldn't exist.

SVN/GIT commit messages and Trello/JIRA notifications sent to Slack/Hipchat/YourInternalIrcServer are a great way to aggregate all that information. You can write a Hubot/YourOtherChatBot plugin to gather and summarize that information to make it even easier to track.

By the way, with Hubot you can just say "What everybody is working on?" and it will show you the status for everybody.

[ajsharma]

How are you using Hubot to do this? Are you using a particular plugin?

[calibraxis]

I think what you're describing is nowadays called "agility", not Agile. The Agile movement I've seen is concrete and cultish, even if it didn't start out that way. (Maybe you see a different facet.)

And if I had to pose as Scrum Master, every incentive would push me to intentionally propagate cultishness. (Better than those unaware they're doing it, because at least I can turn it off on a dime as the situation requires.)