AGILE IN ACTION

For a long time now we have run 2 stand-ups every day, first thing in the morning and first thing after lunch, always at the same times and always around the board.

If you're new to light-touch leadership you may find yourself focusing on the big events (standups, retrospectives, planning games, showcase, beer). However it's the little-noticed gardening work that happens over the course of an iteration that really helps a team work together and deliver effectively. Here's a few examples, some of which may be specific to our environment.

We are creating a family of portals and a publishing system to manage their content. We have two sets of users. There are end users - the people in the public who read the content of these portals, and there are editors - employees in the organization (and its partners) who publish content to the portals. The Editorial Director is our Product Sponsor and the Senior Editor is our Onsite Customer. We're part of a product stream so we're colocated with the editors, our Customer and our Product Sponsor. Consequently collaboration is predominantly conversational, by that I mean it's relaxed and happening all the time. We also have some set pieces that occur throughout the iteration, which also help us collaborate with our Customer, the editorial team and the Product Sponsor.

On the whole our team is pretty good at pair programming. Our promiscuity is ramping up nicely and we're now using the concept of rolling story ownership. It works like this: At the daily standup, when a new story is brought into play, someone will volunteer to own it. Another person will volunteer to pair on that card. They'll work on the story until the next pair-swap at which point the owner moves off the story passing ownership to his partner and a new volunteer steps in to pair. The same thing happens at the next swap and so on. Ownership of the card passes to the partner and a new person comes in to pair. The person owning the story when it's done is responsible for demonstrating the story at the showcase.

Kent Beck replied:

The daily standup meeting or scrum meeting presents the team with a regular opportunity to synchronize development activities with the iteration plan and to check and reflect on the progress of the team's commitments towards the iteration goal.

I couldn't resist adding a third verse (although I'm not entirely sure Haiku have verses) to address the most common problem in daily scrums: