I'm an introvert and generally an pretty comfortable around people I know pretty well. But I still get physically anxious during stand-ups. Something about going around the circle doing status updates makes me super nervous when focus is on me.

that's what i took comfort in while doing Public Speaking at school: everyone was too nervous about having to speak to even slightly listen to whatever I was saying

We do scrum at my workplace and I love it. As an incorrigible procrastinator the daily standups keep me honest and I don't mind the team focus as long as the team size isn't too big.

I consider myself an introvert and I don't mind the yay-team aspect since my team has decent people that I've gotten familiar with and they respect my zone out time when i got my headphones on.

That's not Agile/Scrums fault though, right?

I've seen this a lot, where developers are given orders XYZ, and disappear onto their own, and come back with it. It's very demoralizing to me.

From what I have experienced so far, the real world implementations of agile/scrum have been as close to the ideals behind the philosophy as the real world implementations of communism.

scrummunism?

It's not, but probably the reason a lot of people dislike it.

Great story about collaboration, productivity, and creativity from the legends of programming

http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/11/leg...n-programming/

Yeah I don't think the intention is bad at all but it's practiced horribly in many places and the reason (imo) is that non-programmers try to force more "let's do this as a team" stuff on people.
Estimating the hardness of tasks as a team activity ("planning poker") seems inferior to analytically coming up with a value on your own or consulting the required coworkers on a need basis for example.

And scrum meetings being just a status update...would be nice but I've seen it as a forced meeting that contributed very little (+status updates over software/mail work just fine). I can't quite express what I want to say but agile is an opener of ways for fluffy non-programming activities.

[which is ironic since people over processes is one of the agile battle cries and sticking to processes is often one of the huge mistakes that are being made]

I've worked at non-scrum places and it's really easy for programmers to slip through the cracks and just do nothing for months on end. That is the biggest value of daily status meetings imo.

Has anyone done a virtual meeting with developers providing updates as they come in?

When we do planning poker, each dev in the team analytically comes up with a value and shows it with his card. Then we compare and if there are big differences in estimates we discuss why we feel that way. This both keeps people honest and also helps people understand the task better when someone in the team might have a better understanding. I really think it works better than doing it solo.

Another reason is that in scrum the tasks aren't pre-assigned to each dev. Everyone has equal say and there is no lead dev. And in theory everyone should be able to jump into a task and complete it, although obviously in practice some people might have a preference or more skills for particular tasks.

this.

And the trick is to keep them short and quick. Anything more than 15 minutes is not good imo, which means teams need to be reasonably sized. All you're doing is saying what you did yesterday and what you're gonna do today. Sometimes issues are raised and if its outside the scope or timebox of standup then a followup meeting can happen.

I disagree that status updates over email work just fine. If someone can't make scrum they'll just send an email update to the team. But it's definitely not as good because it can be a pain in the ass to follow up on stuff.

If you're working on a team it's clearly necessary to get together as a team for certain activities - particularly planning and coordinating work. I don't see any alternative that is close to as efficient as a quick in person 'meeting'.

Group chat over IM? Use a wiki for updates?

Neither one is even close to as efficient.

I try not to let a conversation take more than 10-15 minutes over chat until I suggest a G+ hangout because face-to-face is just incredibly more efficient than a written conversation.

I've never understood why people think speaking is more efficient than typing. Clearly if something is important, it should be referenced in the future.

Though I guess you're considering group audio chats to be face-to-face?

I agree face to face provides value but I doubt doing it everyday is the perfect solution. How do you record the status updates?
I much prefer face to face to settle the big picture and then using some small weight tool for daily updates. If you need extra information you can still talk to people.

I think it's more efficient to have your status updates in writing and computer based from the getgo and pull information as you need it instead of getting a complete dump each day.

[And agile is done well in many places and works nicely even though I think "alone time for pure thinking" (or hammock time in Hickey speak) is often missing on the kanban boards. The big problem is that it can get out of hand really quickly (imo)]

Did Skype as we had team members in China, Canada, Boise, and Bellevue.

Because the back and forth exchange of ideas and issues occurs at a more rapid pace?

One problem is that 90% of back and forth tends to only be relevant for 2 or 3 out of the X participants in the room.

That's how I knew that Agile was done horribly where I have encountered it so far.
Daily "scrums" often taking between 45 and 60 minutes, very rarely less than 30 minutes. And out of those, I only had 5 minutes of relevance to my tasks at hand.

I actually don't enjoy video conferences because I like to multitask and it will probably appear that I'm not paying attention when it isn't the case.

Lync or Skype is good for voice calls and texting between members or setting up a group chat.
Lync is actually a bad experience, when we were using it because no saved groups with an easy to find tab like Skype exists. No group tab like Skype has makes people less likely to engage with each other by messages and 1v1 messages ends up being more popular then it should be. Microsoft needs to improve it because right now its a product that just exists to exist and hasn't went after the user experience much. They do have cool features like share desktop but software like team viewer already exists or other free alternatives.

Anyway, I do think video works good for the celebration of project milestones or completions.

Almost nobody can type as fast as they can talk. When you're using chat software people get distracted leading to pauses in the conversation. Chat software is super serial. You can't start thinking about what the other person says until they've typed their whole point.

Just some of the reasons chat software is nowhere near as efficient as talking.

Most things don't need a written record, but if they do you write up a summary of the conclusion and send that out.

We do a modified scrum where I run a trello board and we go through that. As people talk we update the stories.

We do a thing where if anybody wants more details other than the basic status update the discussion gets put aside until the end. After all basic updates are done the extra discussions happen and anybody that doesn't care can leave. The odd time where there are a bunch of extra discussions people can either wait around or more often they just leave and say come find me when you're done.

We had a new PM come in and make us do stupid stuff like throw a ball around to see who speaks next. Also he wanted to go to 1-week sprints. We revolted.