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It is interesting that Agile movement has in general enshrined idea of time boxed team meetings for software teams. And in general - we engineers are wary of lo
by gnufied 11y ago
It is interesting that Agile movement has in general enshrined idea of time boxed team meetings for software teams. And in general - we engineers are wary of long meetings.
And yet - most of us measure ourselves, how we are performing in a team by things that happen in team meetings(according to the article anyway):
1. Is idea my ideas heard and debated before being accepted/rejected?
2. Do I get opportunity to present my idea at all.
A time boxed meeting does not by nature leave room for idle chit-chat or from my experience even opportunity to hear everyone's thoughts. Part of the problem of course is, meeting rooms in lot of companies are a scarce resource, so you better clear out after time is out.
This is really curious because we hate meetings and yet we have adopted them in a sort of haphazard way which creates more problems than solves.
- tamana 11y agoAgile standups are designed to give everyone a minute to share info, not debate or reject anything. Debate is for targeted follow-up meetings.
- gnufied 11y agoI didn't mean standups as meetings. I think standup is a good idea as it is and for most teams it lasts hardly more than 5-7 minutes (and some teams have moved it to emails). I meant 20-30 minute meetings that teams typically have, like retrospective or something. But I was not talking about Agile per-se. I meant in general most meetings of software teams are time boxed nowadays- no matter which development methodology they are following. I am also not criticizing time boxed meetings since I have no data to back that claim. But I am just curious, what if as a rule - teams decided to have fewer meetings but meeting last as long as they have to not because someone is knocking on the door for next slot. Will it make things easier?
- squeaky-clean 11y agoThe retrospective and sprint planning are supposed to be much longer than that, and not timeboxed, as far as I know. Also one of the core ideas of Agile is adapting to suit your team, rather than following some process from a book as if it were written in stone. If time limits on certain meetings are causing your team more grief than they help, remove the timeboxes! Talk to your team and see what they think, that's what the retrospective is meant for.
- platz 11y agosharing info typically equates to status updates, not exploratory ideation