In yesterday's stand-up, one of the coach/developers brought up a problem he saw. One of the team members appeared to have waited too long to ask for help, working on the same story for several days. It went something like this:
We need to spend more time listening to each other and ourselves in stand-up. If you find yourself saying "I'm almost done" two or more days in a row, or if you hear someone else doing it, that's a red flag. For instance, I was pairing on a story with Bob last Friday, and I heard him say today that he was almost done with it. He and his pair need to say "we're blocked", and reach out for additional help on their story.I thought it was well put, but Bob (not his real name) was pretty upset about it, and felt that he was being called out. I brought it up again in this morning's stand-up, and made it clear that what was being called out was the behavior, not the person. I even said that "Bob wasn't being singled out - we need to call out improvement opportunities as we go so we can all learn."
He wasn't completely satisfied with that response and we've gone back & forth a couple of times over it. I consider this a very good thing. Minimizing conflict and argument in the interests of getting along is a bad practice. It is far better to call out problems as you see them, provided that you keep the following in mind:
- Always criticize a practice, rather than a person.
- If you use a person as an example, be sure to make it clear that this is an example of behavior that anyone on the team could end up engaging in if we don't guard against it.
- Be polite.
The purpose of stand-up is to enable good communication. This helps us hold each other accountable, which is another way of saying that we help each other to be good team players.
