2.4: Speak to the Round Table

Problem How do you keep your team synchronized?

Solution Hold brief, regular round table meetings.

Discussion Knowledge and understanding of a legacy system is always distributed and usually hidden. A reengineering team is also performing archeology. The information that is extracted from a legacy system is a valuable asset that must be shared for it to be exploited.

Nobody has time for meetings, but without meetings, communication is ad hoc and random. Regular, focussed, round table meetings can achieve the goal of keeping team members synchronized with the current state of affairs. Round table meetings should be brief, but everyone must be required to contribute. A simple approach is to have everyone say what they have done since the last meeting, what they have learned or perhaps what problems they have encountered, and what they plan to do until the next meeting.

Round table meetings should be held at least once a week, but perhaps as often as daily.

Minutes of a meeting are important to maintain a log of progress, but keeping minutes can be an unpleasant task. To keep it simple, record only decisions taken and actions to be performed by a certain deadline.

Beck and Fowler recommend “Stand Up Meetings” (meetings without chairs) as a way to keep round table meetings short [BF01].

---