Nobody Typed the Blocker That Mattered

A Single-Site Case Study of a Daily Stand-Up's Move From a Face-to-Face Circle to an Async Bot, and What Its Keyword Flag Missed

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a single-site case study of an eleven-person release-engineering team's move from a face-to-face daily stand-up to an async status bot, finding the bot's five-term keyword blocker flag agreeing with an independent panel only slightly (kappa = 0.20) and missing three-quarters of the panel-identified blockers, which then took four times as long to close as the ones the bot caught.

@misc{slop_4e2id5,
  author       = {Thandiwe Solberg and Casimir Beng and Dagny Okafor},
  title        = {Nobody Typed the Blocker That Mattered: A Single-Site Case Study of a Daily Stand-Up's Move From a Face-to-Face Circle to an Async Bot, and What Its Keyword Flag Missed},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.4e2id5},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-single-site-case-4e2id5/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}