Standups

One of the many key things in deliverying in an AgileBI way is the use of daily standups to enable the Agile Team to have regular conversations on where they are at, where they are going any any current impediments.

Who can Attend

Anybody should be able to attend and watch the Standup whenever they want to. People outside the Agile Team often want to attend and often for a myriad of reasons, such as:

• To see what this Agile thing is all about;
• To get a better understanding of what the Agile Team are working on;
• Another Agile team is keeping track of dependencies on this Agile Team

The key is that Agile Team members are the only people that are allowed to talk. Non Agile Team members should be coached by the Scrum Master that they can arch but they cannot comment, ask questions, try and help with solving issues.

In fact they should be coaches that they can arch but not talk at all, until the Standup ceremony is finished.

One technique to help reinforce this is to have the Agile Team form a semi circle around the Sprint board, and have the non team members stand in another semi circle that is behind the Agile Teams semi circle. This physical separation tends to provide a clear message to people attending the standup on who can speak and who can’t.

Locking people out

I have seen instances when the Scrum Master has excluded anybody other than the Agile Team members from attending the Standups. In my experience this is often done because either the Scrum Master has no experience running a Standup and so wants t hope that fact, or the Agile Team are operating in an Adhoc manner and if anybody else attended the Standup then the Scrum Master and the Agile Teams behaviour would be exposed.

So if your Scrum Master is keeping the Standups as a closed room ceremony, you might want to start digging a little deeper on what is going on.

Retrospectives

Non Agile Team members should not be able to attend the Restrospectives. This is a time solely for the Agile Team to discuss what went well, what didn’t go so well and what they will concentrate on improving in the next iteration. To be bale to do this effectively they need to be in a safe environment