What will be the best way to reach consensus on whether/how to have daily standups? It's a pretty important topic, and one that seems to have a fair amount of disagreement so far. Would a meeting be the most efficient way to discuss options? Or perhaps an IRC chat? Or an email thread (like this)? I'm open to whatever the group feels most comfortable with. I'm also open to individuals opting in or out of this discussion, based on your personal interest level.

Daily standups are a core practice of Scrum, and are generally seen as an agile best practice. So if we don't have them, it should be a very conscious decision, and we need to  accomplish their objectives in other ways. The benefits of daily standups that I can think of include:

• Raising blockers (including to the Product Owner and process facilitator[1])
• Helping developers stay focused on priority work
  
• Informing the Product Owner of status from day to day
  
• Team cohesion; daily social connection
  

There are concerns about having daily standups with remotely distributed teams in multiple timezones, but other WMF teams have managed to work around those. Another argument against daily standups is that each sub-team is too small to get much benefit. However, that discounts the importance of frequently sharing information with other stakeholders (notably the PO and process facilitator).

So....how should we proceed?

[1] If we were doing Scrum, this would be the "Scrum Master".

Kevin Smith
Agile Coach
Wikimedia Foundation


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