Ten in the morning. The daily stand-up starts on time, which turns out to be the last thing about it that goes to plan.
We're eight developers on a scrum team, all remote. The meeting is boxed at fifteen minutes, and everyone knows it — it's right there in the calendar invite. Yet most days, around the point where the clock says fifteen, we're maybe halfway down the list of people, someone has just said the Japanese equivalent of "well, about that," and the next twenty minutes write themselves.
I've watched this happen for long enough that I've mostly stopped reading it as a failure. It behaves more like weather. So rather than argue with it, I want to describe it: what actually pushes a Japanese scrum stand-up to twice its allotted length, seen from inside one.
The shape of the meeting
We rotate the facilitator. A different developer runs it each day, which is a nice flat idea, and also — I'll come back to this — part of the problem.
