The dysfunctional daily stand-up

This is a brilliant little game I love playing with both new and experienced agile teams... Unfortunately I can't claim any credit as I never came up with it!

Preferably it's best to play with a team who are already doing some level of agile practices and are already doing the daily stand-up.

Ask for one volunteer in the group to play Scrum master and give the rest of them a card with one of the following 'secret' objectives on, It's important that team members don't discuss their hidden role before hand :-

• Arrive late.

• Hidden impediment: Mention an impediment/blocker but don’t be obvious about it

• Noisy chicken: start by saying, "I’m only an observer" and then report on things the group doesn’t care about.

• Silent chicken: as an observer, just say "pass" or "I’m just observing" when it’s your turn

• Ask a clarifying question on somebody else’s turn.

• Ramble on until you’re asked to move on.

• Try to sidetrack the meeting.

• Try to solve somebody’s problem.

• Start a side discussion.

If possible it's often helpful to have a few members of the team just watching/observing.

Once everybody has their card get the Scrum master to call the daily stand-up

After the stand-up hold a group discussion and see how many of the 'dysfunctional' practices were spotted and discuss how many of them they see day to day in their stand-ups.

I find it a brilliant little game to just re-focus people's minds and to highlight to scrum teams what the stand-up is all about and perhaps more importantly not about!