How Slack and Hangouts have improved our daily scrums

For those of us who work in tech startups (or good non startup tech companies), we’re very familiar with the process of daily scrums or stand-ups. As this isn’t a article on the details of scrum I won’t go into too much detail on the process. It’s essentially A set time in the morning where everyone gathers round a part of the office, and one by one say what they did yesterday; what they’re going to do today, and what if anything is stopping them from achieving that (usually whilst standing up).

There are many benefits to this process, the main one being everyone knows what everyone in the team is working on, but this tends to fall apart for teams that work remotely, for someone who comes in late, or for someone who is on holiday or ill for a long period of time. The development team at Stratajet have it’s daily scrums in a slightly unconventional way to alleviate most of these issues. Here’s our two step, daily scrum process.

1. The Slack scrum

The work day starts with each member of the development team opening up Slack and having a conversation with Strata Bot (after of they’ve settled in and gone through a few Hacker News articles). Strata Bot is a bot created using Hubot by Github and Astroscrum. Each person typed what they did yesterday starting the sentence off with the ‘yesterday’, then they type what they’re planning to get done today starting the sentence with ‘today’, simple.

This needs to be done before 10am every work morning after which the amalgamation of everyones updates is posted into a private slack channel called ‘developers-scrum’. This is helpful for those who have taken the day (or week) off to see what everyone has been up to simply by visiting the channel and going through the archive of notes. Next part of the morning involves.

2. The Hangouts scrum

At 10am UK time straight after the Slack scrum everyone participates in Hangouts chat which is a pretty conventional scrum with a scrum master and product owner. The main advantage of this is to involve our employees who work remotely but also those who want to work from home, at a coffee shop, or on a train–with internet?

Although we don’t record our Hangout scrums it’s something we’ve considered doing, purely for entertainment purposes.