CASCON was a lot of fun. Me and one of the other co-authors, Elizabeth, prepared the slide deck as well as some exercises for the participants to do. It was an interesting experience to take the material from the book and twist it this way to get a different results. Personally, what I liked about it was that it actually helped me clear up some things or find some additional pros/cons to add to the chapters during the final edit cycle. There’s nothing like having the material out there staring at you from a Powerpoint slide to get you realize the gaps in what you wrote. I suggested that we stop the editing process and put the entire book in PPT format before going any further… I got vetoed on that idea… Of course, I was just joking around when I made that suggestion.

The talk was about how distributed teams should approach their Daily Scrums. The first part of the talk focused on the goals of the meeting and what teams should try to accomplish with the meeting. Why did I start there? Well, these days, I’m attending daily scrums for 2 or 3 different teams and I find it fascinating to see how teams handle their meetings and the information team members bring to it. Really, the goal of the meeting should be to make sure the team is focused on their sprint plan, make sure everyone is communicating what they are doing and passing along information about their tasks that may impact others on the team. Teams starting out struggle to understand this and their meetings usually resemble more of a daily status report than anything else. The second part of the meeting spoke more about the different types of distributed teams and how teams can meet to do their Daily Scrums as well as approaches that distributed teams with no overlapping work hours can take to successfully conduct their Daily Scrums despite the challenges they face.