I like to chat after work, if I have time. I like to joke, laugh, have idle chatter with co-workers if/when we pair on things. (especially during deploys or compile cycles)
I do not want to be forced to schedule "social time". Social activity is fluid for me, and I can 'fake it' if necessary, but needing to fake it 4/5 days is just silly.
I'm not a cave-dweller either. I was an educator (teenagers, then graduate level), I've spoken at dozens of conferences, I run two active local clubs.
If a company forced "rallies" on me, I would unequivocally leave.
I’ve been working as a team-lead on fully-remote engineering teams for about seven years now, at three different startups. I’m also a fairly strong introvert. Among my failings as a team-lead is that I would often find myself 5 minutes late to our standups (kids, other meetings, etc). But I noticed something: when I’d join the team would be bullshitting, talking about whatever: new tech, sports, tv/movies, etc.
So when I joined, I didn’t start the standup right away. I just let their conversation go on until a lull and then would say, “Ok, let’s do the standup.” Over time I began to be less worried about showing up late — I knew they would be bullshitting, and they seemed to genuinely enjoy it. I also started noticing side-effects: the team was becoming more open and transparent, willing to engage in needed conflict with less prodding. They were coming to trust one another.
I guess you could call this “unscheduled fun”, in the sense that it was unintentional. There was no agenda, no icebreaker, and no goal. But within a few months, during our retro the team debated whether to put what we literally called “bullshitting” before or after the actual standup. We also debated whether it should be 10 minutes or 20 minutes. No one debated stopping it. And these weren’t strong extroverts. They weren’t necessarily friends. But we had stumbled upon something we liked, all because my kids couldn’t get dressed fast enough in the morning, or my boss couldn’t end our 1-on-1 on time.
It kind of reminds me of my time in the military. I made some really close friends (“comrads” might be a better word) with people that I would never have thought I’d be friends with. Many were just really grating as people. But in retrospect, spending so much time with them in so many painful experiences bonded us together, despite our natural aversion for one another.
Like other commenters point out, with the advent of great tooling for backlogs and asynchronous communication, I really don’t see the point of Scrum standups for a team of adults who are disciplined in using those tools
My experiences are just anecdotal, and maybe aren’t generally applicable to other teams in other situations, but that’s why I recommended to Rally that we try bullshitting before doing our standup.
I honestly can’t say that if instead of being late I’d said “let’s try just bullshitting for 5 minutes before we start standup,” that anyone would have kept a straight face. I imagine 7 faces staring at me with mild to severe annoyance. But I’d say if you can figure out how to do an experiment with bullshitting for 5 minutes before standup (with whatever chat platform), you don’t have a lot to lose. And if what I’ve seen is true beyond my own narrow context, there might be a lot to gain.
1. Standup - 10-15m (face time) Monday / Wednesday 2. Async (Slack channel text) Tuesday / Thursday 3. Planning - 30m-1h (face time) Friday 4. A rotating "lead" or "on-call" or "captain" for the week who organizes these things and interfaces with other team's standups
This, in combination with your work queue (ticketing / kanban board / issues / etc) is the most streamlined approach I've seen that works. You can certainly add more ceremonies, but I find the constant retrospectives of other systems too negative and depressing, and too much of a distraction.
"Rally" is not a new take on standups, it's just scrum with a friendly coat of paint on top IMO. One thing that rubs me the wrong way about "Rally" in particular is the forced-socialization ideas. When I'm at work, I'm at work. Sometimes, there's people at work that I'm not friends with, but I am going to work with them because I'm a professional and I get the job done. Don't force people to be friendly. It's kind of toxic, and forces people to hide their opinions and play politics more than is necessary.
Taking 30-60 minutes to do a Rally is, forgive me for being skeptical, worse than a traditional standup in that it takes up more time, and requires everyone to buy in to the idea and that your team comprises of only extroverts - something that a traditional standup already has a problem with.
If your scrum is about tickets and not about people, I think you're missing the point of "keeping the team in sync".
1. Screen sharing does not work without enabling webcam first.
2. Room options are not presented in the room, I had to go back to lobby (e.g. change settings)
3. Video resolution is better than Discord free-tier, though the bandwidth/speed seems slow.
4. How can I invite someone online to my table or room?
5. When I'm out of room or stopped camera, chrome is still occupying my webcam / my macbook cam light is still on.
6. I was hoping there is option to keep room always open.
Awesome work; Keep it up!
“You know how stand ups can feel like a waste of time? What if we made them waste even more time? Managers will love it.”
In the ideal case, if everyone just says "yep, still working on that feature, I see no obstacles, next", standups can last 3 minutes.
In the case where someone says "I'm blocked by a PR by Geoff from Team B" for 2 days straight, the team knows to step in.
