Part 1 — First week

Frank is sitting at his new desk in front of his brand-new Thinkpad Laptop with the two external
24-inch monitors attached. Even though the black Laptop is quite small and doesn't look very
fancy, it is a very powerful machine—way better than the Laptop in his previous job or his
private Laptop. Actually, the Laptop is a bit overkill for the work Frank is supposed to do in his
role. But it is nice to get great working tools because it shows that the company is not trying to
save money on the wrong side.

Frank is in the middle of reading the documentation of the new systems. He glances at the lower
right part of his left monitor, where the little clock of his Windows operating system is displaying
the current time. It is 9:39 a.m. He suddenly realizes that the Daily Scrum — or Standup as they
call it here — should have already started nine minutes ago, but nobody in the team appears to
have noticed that it is time for it.

Today it's his first day in the new company. Frank got a nice welcome in the morning from the
team. Fiona even brought half of her self-made chocolate cake to the office. And the team had
some Smalltalk and coffee in the morning while they shook hands and introduced themselves to
their new teammate.

Fiona didn't actually bake the chocolate cake for that occasion. When she came to the office in
the morning she didn't even know that the new colleague is going to start today. The chocolate
cake was just some left-over from the weekend. She had some friends over at her place for
coffee and as usual, she made some chocolate cake for them. And as her friends did not finish
the cake she decided to bring it to the office as she is not able to eat it anyway by herself at
home.

Frank thought that Fiona made the chocolate cake especially for him and his first day. Fiona
didn't clarify the situation. Therefore nobody knew that she actually made the cake for her
friends and just brought the leftovers to the office. So Fiona made a very good first impression
on Frank. But he doesn't know yet that this impression is not going to last for very long. It is
going to change for the worse in the upcoming days.

Frank is turning to his desk neighbor Peter asking: “Don't we have the Standup at 9:30?”

It takes Peter a couple of seconds to realize that this question was directed at him. He is in the
middle of coding and therefore his mind is completely focused on the task at hand.

Peter is working on a feature to improve the login performance of their application. The team got
some user complaints several months back that the startup time of the application is taking
forever. While the fully-started application is responding very fast to user input, it takes about
half a minute — depending on the network speed — to start the app.

This current sprint the team decided to improve the startup time and therefore make the
application more user-friendly.

It is quite a challenging and complex task because it requires code changes in the core of the
system. Therefore Peter, as one of the senior developers, decided to work on this task by
himself.

At the moment he is in the middle of refactoring some code parts, which have been
implemented by former developers about four years ago. Therefore he needs to pay extra
attention to keep an overview of the code changes so that he will not introduce any bugs while
refactoring these core parts.

Peter sighs silently. He is annoyed that he got disturbed and therefore lost his focus.

His view wanders slowly to the bottom-right corner of his main monitor. Without looking up from
his monitor he replies: ”Yeah, we should do that!”.

Then he rolls his office chair a few centimeters back from his desk and while leaning forward
with his upper body he continues to write some additional lines of code on the keyboard. He
stops a couple of times, thinking hard about the task he is currently working on. These stops are
interrupted with a set of very fast typing on the keyboard and then hitting the delete key multiple
times to correct the typing errors after almost every word.

Frank is focusing on Peter and his typing habits, but without staring or even looking at him.
Nevertheless, he can see from the corner of his eyes how Peter is leaning forward with his
upper body. He looks like a thirsty giraffe, which is pulled slowly away from a lake of delicious
water and is trying to keep the mouth in the water as long as possible.

After about two more minutes Peter locks his Laptop with a keyboard shortcut, stands up and
says in a loud tone of voice: “Okay guys, time for Standup!”

Then Peter walks in the middle of the room staring on to the floor, still thinking about his current
task.

Eddy and Fiona also go up and walk towards the middle of the room following the command of
Peter. It seems like they were just waiting for his action, so they can follow him.

A few seconds later also Frank joins them. From this first impression, it looks like Peter is the
informal leader of the team. People were obviously waiting for him to give the order for the
Standup.
Only Danny is still sitting at his desk and typing an email. While the team is waiting for him, they
start with a little bit of Smalltalk. After another minute Danny has finished his email and clicks
the send button. Then he goes up quickly and joins the waiting circle of people.

Frank takes a quick glance at his watch. It is showing 9:44, so they are 14 minutes behind
schedule. But the delay of the Daily Scrum is not bothering him at all.

The more important part of his observations so far is that the team seems to depend on one
single person quite a lot. The team was not moving at all when Frank asked them about the
Standup nor when Peter replied that they should have it.

Only when Peter moved towards the place where the team seems to have their daily Standup,
the other members of the team followed his example.

So, clearly, Peter is the informal leader of the team, at least as far as Frank has observed until
now.

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Thanks for reading so far.

If you have any constructive feedback, then send me a mail to: herbi@scrum-tips.com