I received several e-mail comments on my last post on agile meetings.  The most common was not about the cost of the meeting time, but about the inability of people to make all of the meetings.  Some of the comments suggested having a wiki or something similar to share the results of each meeting with team members who could not attend the daily stand ups etc.  Others suggested recording the meetings using conference calls or Webex-type recordings.  I would have to voice my opinion that I don't think either of these are good ideas.  The daily stand up is an essential synchronization point for the team and should be attended by everyone everyday...unless there are really extenuating circumstances.  Planning meetings, reviews and retrospectives are equally important and demand the attendance of all team members.

There are three key points I'd like to make about documenting agile meeting minutes.  First, I believe that the more you enable people to not attend agile meetings the more you encourage the behavior.  If team members have no place to read about the meeting or hear a recording, they're forced to attend the live meetings.  If team members can simply miss a meeting and read a wiki entry about the meeting, while adding their own update to the wiki, you've enabled and encouraged the behavior of missing meetings. 

Secondly, in agile development, we focus on developing working software, not creating documentation.  I believe this extends to meeting minutes.  If we time-box a daily stand-up to 15 minutes, that should be all we spend on the meeting.  If we're required to document the meeting for those that missed it, we're spending valuable development time writing up the meeting minutes.

My final point is in regards to a collaborative, tight knit team.  If we enable people to miss meetings, we begin to degrade the collaborative team environment that agile practices thrive upon.  The daily stand-ups and other meetings are a chance for the team to communicate with each other.  It encourages a collaborative team environment.  If team members are enabled to regularly miss meetings, they're less likely to feel a part of the team and less likely to commit to the team goal each iteration.

So, to wrap this up....don't enable people to miss meetings.  These meetings are crucial to the success or failure of your agile practices.