Posts Tagged daily standup

Daily scrum token

Posted by Jorg Hollenberg in scrum on August 3rd, 2009

In my team I introduced a toy football as a token in the daily standups. The ball is intended for energizing the daily standup. The teammember who receives the ball should answer the 3 questions:

  • What did you accomplish yesterday?
  • What are going to do today?
  • Any problems, bottlenecks, impediments?

And pass the ball on the next member of, you should really pay attention, you might be the next to get the ball!

scrumball620

Bruised and battered,  I left it with the team to take care of it. In retrospective:

  • age: 24 months
  • cost: $ 3
  • served in 2 internal en 2 customer teams
  • thrown by 35 people (didn’t count vandals trying to steal the ball)
  • number of throws (est.) : 6620 x
  • rescued from the bin (overactive facility department): 2 x
  • misused by 1 Software architect and 1 engineer (don’t ask me what they did with it, it makes me cry)

Now I am in search for a new token….any ideas out there?

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Issue driven kanban standup

Posted by Jorg Hollenberg in Development Process, kanban on June 14th, 2009

Our daily standup is in need of refactoring…recent standup meetings are kind of boring. Each team member does his or her daily blah blah. Time for a change. To tackle this problem, one of the “try this” ideas resulting from our retrospective was to have an issue driven standup. Recently we switched to a more kanban-like process with focus on issues. Therefore the amount of WIP is limited, so going through the work should be doable within the 15m time box we usually need for the standup.

We tried this:

The last question Q3: “when will the issue move to the next lane?”,  is important for the member working in the next column. i.e. a system tester. The tester will know what to expect in his column and he can anticipate on this.

The team reacted enthusiastically to the new style.  Another positive effect was that some blocked issues were picked up and finished rapidly. A fresh approach! Maybe we need to change the  standup pattern every couple of iterations, just to keep the juice flowing.

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