Beware the Scrum Witch!

I'm always happy when I see the Internet spread goodness, or at least what I perceive to be goodness. Last week or so I talked about the Scrum Witch, a horrific little screamer that we introduced to our daily scrums as things were getting out of hand. If a team member strays from our standard routine, we unleash the Scrum Witch on them, screaming and howling for everyone in the office to hear.

The witch has been pretty successful as we're sticking closer to the routine and there's less gossip-talk during the scrum. Scrums end in under 10 minutes now (where they previously would linger for 15, 20 and even 30 minutes) and everyone is focused. I've only had to activate the Witch twice, and both times were with the same PM who charged off asking all kinds of questions (not even related to the current sprint!).

Mike Vizdos over at Implementing Scrum has a cartoon this week called Work Naked on dysfunctional things he sees at the daily scrum and yes, the Scrum Witch made an appearance (although it would have been awesome if she made it into the cartoon, ahh someday...)

The message here is simple. The daily scrum is your commitment to the team, not a report to the PM or Scrum Master on what you did. Be kind and respectful and the pain will last only a few minutes.

Watch later this week for more scrum fun as I have a few posts on the go right now.