Ham And Eggs

Our team sits in a horse-shoe shape where I work. Some people on the inside and some on the outside. There are no partitions, no borders and people only really put their headphones on when they REALLY want to get in the zone. Communication is key to having an effective scrum team and in this shape, totally co-located (even the DB team are in the horse-shoe and they’re not even part of the scrum team!) means communications is but a chair twhirl or a lean over the desk away.

So, with this much communication going on, is the daily stand up still worth it? Does it provide enough value for the team over and above that value currently being sucked from rich communication throughout the day anyway? It seems to be that the only people who might benefit from the standup, then, are the chickens, who really don’t listen to what we’re saying as they don’t understand it and are just there to wait until the end when they get a chance to say their piece.

Usually, not particularly interesting or worthy.

None-the-less, the stand up does provide a moment of the day at which you can see everyone’s trousers and shoes and feel like a “team”, a group of people all striving for the same goal and not a disparate set of developers hunkered behind a screen waiting for the end of the day.So, then, is the standup merely an ideal? Something that is important only for what it IS and not what it does or provides in the way of value? Perhaps, but I don’t mind either way, either options provides some benefit and some is better than none. Also, I like to look at shoes.