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I just had a weird idea.

Absolutely no experience, so this may be stupid.

Has anybody tried to replace this with a "daily shared morning tea/coffee"? Create a collegial atmosphere that's intrinsically unsuited to active management; there's no real need to keep people ontopic anyways because they'll naturally talk about work. Plus drinks may keep people occupied enough that only one person would naturally talk.

[edit] Oh, is that what the watercooler does!




I'm not sure whether I'm replying to heavy sarcasm or not, but the Cambridge Computer Lab has exactly this as an organised thing for many years: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mu232/random/teaclub.html

It's a lot easier to be collegiate in a college.


No sarcasm. Cool to read about!


I actually like to run standups as "all business": everybody says their piece and goes back to work as quickly as possible.

One of the main goals of Agile processes is to remove overhead from the developer so they can focus on adding value to the stakeholder. Anybody who starts goofing around the standup is disrespecting and wasting the team's time.

Now, your idea might be worth a try. As I said in another post: the team runs itself and might decide to try something like you propose... and keep doing it if it works for them.


I find I have a natural tendency to talk about non-work things because I feel guilty about not being more social. If we did that in my team I'd probably spend 20 minutes talking about netrunner with the other player and not actually mention any of my blockers.

But by all means try it out; if it works for your team, great!


That's good to be aware of. And your self-modulation helps the team. But don't let that be an excuse for not sharing what you learned yesterday that you think the team needs to know.




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