Bamboo Blog

Our Daily Scrums were taking over fifteen minutes. Even for eight people, that's excessive; it wasted two whole developer-hours and meant that the day started at low energy.

We tried rephrasing the questions - "Of what you did yesterday, what gotchas do the rest of the team need to know about?".

We tried aggressively intercepting conversations that should be taken offline, using postit notes as placeholders.

We tried 'just trying to hurry'.

It turns out that all we needed was a ticking bomb. As the team's scrum master, I start this mp3 playing through my phone's speakers when each person starts speaking. It ticks - a reminder to hustle, plays a warning at 45 seconds, and sounds an alarm at 60 seconds. Being constantly aware of the time means that most people don't hit the alarm.

It doesn't make people speak much faster; it just makes them filter what they're saying more effectively. More conversations are taken out of the daily scrum - sometimes even whole-team conversations, and sometimes they start immediately after the scrum - but this is preferable to extending the whole-team, mandatory standup.

So far this is working well; in the future, I hope that I can 'forget' the timer and find that nothing changes.