After working with stand-up meetings for a while I feel that this practice acts like a thermometer for an agile team. As a constant status report, it demonstrates how most of the other practices are being applied and how good is the team communication in general.
That’s why I believe is important to be conscious about what happens during them. A stand-up meeting may hide problems if:
- It doesn’t have an exact time to start
- It doesn’t happen because someone is not present
- It’s a trigger for technical discussions
- It’s not focused on to the plan
- It doesn’t contribute to continuous improvement
- It’s a report for a single person, not the team
- People don’t stay close to each other
- It’s frequently interrupted
- It doesn’t include the whole team
- People don’t remember what they did on the last day
- It’s moment where most of the problems are raised
- It takes more than 15 minutes
- It doesn’t happen every day
- It doesn’t feel good
These are all simple issues which can easily be addressed. In fact, most of the items on this list are discussed on Jason Yip’s article about stand-up patterns. The most important thing is that it may as well be the a good starting point to identify and improve other aspects of a project.
On the last April’s fool, Philip Calcado announced that ThoughtWorks was about to start an office in Brazil. At few months later and this message on Martin Fowler’s twitter proves the affirmation was not that far from reality:
“My colleague Sid Pinney is investigating setting up a ThoughtWorks office in Brazil – talk to him at [...]“
The interesting thing about this is not the fact itself, but the reaction it’s causing. Not only dozens of Brazilian developers are forwarding the message, but there are people already asking how they can join the company.
The biggest strength of TW is their ability to attract good developers by having on their staff people who influence the whole software development community. In my opinion that’s the result of a good recruitment process and giving opportunity for employees to publish and work on their own projects.
I really hope they open a company there because, as far as I know, very few companies have this kind of culture in Brazil. Open a company there and they can probably have the best developers around.
The following parable has made me think about the different views on the software development work:
A traveler came across three individuals working with stones. When asked about what he was doing, the first one replied, “I’m a stone cutter. I cut stones because I need the money to support my family“. The traveler then decided to ask the second worker, who answered, “I’m a great stone cutter. I can use all my techniques to produce the best shaped stone“. Surprised by the two distinct responses, the traveler finally asks the third man what he was doing. The worker stopped for a moment and then said, “I’m a stone cutter and I’m building a cathedral” .
Sometimes I have this feeling that we as professionals are frequently trying to be more like the second stone cutter than the the third one. Am I the only one?