Survival is fitness by definition!


standupThe word “Agile” corresponds to agility, responsiveness and adaptability of a software development methodology.
The invention of word “Agile” came out of desperation where people in community never liked the term “Light Weight” which had no descriptive or marketable value.
Agile as a term and concept sat really nicely since, and it was truly a brilliant choice. In fact in general, that is how languages or any evolutionary processes work. If it fits it stays.
Scrum, one of the most successful agile methodologies brought the concept of stand-up meetings which plays a very effective role in catalyzing team communication and adds a lot of other intangible values to running an agile project on top of that.
Most of these stand-up meetings however are unfortunately quite long and they are contradictory to the fact that first of all it is supposed to be “Agile” and it is also called stand-up which means it is expected to be short.
A very common process during stand-up meetings is that people on top of talking about what they are working on are also asked to discuss if they have encountered any blockers. The answer to blocker question most of the time is a simple “No, nothing I can think of” or something to that effect.
In a relatively sane working environment, as a team member if someone encounters any blocker, he/she will immediately take any action required in order to resolve the issue. People are not going to wait until next stand-up meeting to bring up an issue that has seriously hindered their progress.
All I’m saying here is that I believe not only that “Any blockers?” question is insulting to the intelligence of team members it also wastes everybody’s time.
I wish everybody a short and effective stand-up meeting next time around:)

No Comments Yet

Leave a Reply

