The Debate Continues

The most-debated Agile topic at work (at least for me), the Stand Up Meeting, got rousingly discussed once again today in our weekly Feature Lead meeting. This is surely going to prove to be my Agile Achilles' Heel, as I just can't seem to perceive the value in Stand Ups that so many others (inside my company and throughout the Agile community) are seeing. My soon-to-be-ex FT teammates have little or no use for it, and have felt that way since the beginning. I heard one positive statement about it today from within the team: that, over the course of a month long Iteration, our daily Stand Ups brought to light two instances where one person on the team was working on a bug that another person was also working on. That was it. Ten people, times ten to fifteen minutes, times five Stand Ups a week, times four weeks, doesn't seem like a reasonable investment to save a few hours of wasted duplicate effort. The general consensus outside of that one comment has been that the team gets little or no value out of our Stand Ups. And I've missed enough of these meetings - probably a third - that it can't be me removing the value, as the participants don't seem to like them any better even when I'm not there. But I guess it's something the team will work out under their next Feature Lead, since I'm not about to kill the Stand Up in my final few days before moving on.

Maybe I can use some of my time over the next several weeks, though, to be a Chicken at the Stand Ups of various other Feature Teams and see if I can figure out why they're allegedly popular among the other teams. I've tried this once before, and all I saw were people reporting status to their Feature Lead in a very dutiful manner, but possibly things have evolved since then. Like Mulder used to say, I want to believe! But I've just seen so little to believe in thus far.