Photo by Rob Laughter on Unsplash

The Importance of Show and Tell

Various teams I’ve worked with over the years have found ways to get early feedback on things they’re working on. (If you’re a Scrum practitioner, for instance, why wait until the Sprint Review to get such feedback?) There are many ways to get this sort of input. One such technique, which I’m trying with a team I’m currently working with, goes as follows:

• Two days a week, we extend the daily standup by 15 minutes
• Anybody on the team can show something they’re working on
• If we don’t have anything that we want to spend extra time demonstrating on a particular day, we’ll just decide during that day’s standup that we don’t need the show and tell time on that day (there is also the possibility that we’ll complete any such demonstrations within the 15 minute standup timebox ; )

Examples of things we could demonstrate during show and tell time:

• Summarize findings from a design spike
• Show design mockups or wireframes
• Demonstrate just-built/currently being-built components
• Demonstrate an automated testing framework
• Display something that is currently under test to get clarification on behaviors/anomalies

It’s impossible to overstate how important it is for teams to get and to give early feedback. And for distributed teams, the importance of having such conversations early and often tends to be magnified.