It's surprising that the general assumption is that it was manager's idea. It was actually idea of regular team member, who noticed a situation of tension between team members and wondered how to get these tensions out to the light and resolve them peacefully. It was put to a try and team had all rights to drop it if they found it brings no useful information. Yet they kept it further.

Nobody feels the pressure to feel happy - so-so and unhappy faces are common (btw Luc = myself and nobody here thinks about firing me for speaking out the truth). Everybody simply states his real mood and a reasons for it - ie. stuck with some problem for 3rd day with no feel of progress, having too many meetings on particular day, having some personal reasons, whatever. If it is in power of team to help with issue, it has been brought to the light and something can be done about it. That's all it is about - token for raising a discussion - not a thing to show off how happy team we are.

Having it has not made our daily scrums any longer, yet we are able to start a day with better understanding of what is happening around us in the team and project and yet another opportunity to spot issues and deal with these together supporting each other (and on each retrospective team support is one of the strongest voted "winds in the sails").

I'd like also to thank Ben (brudgers). What he has wrote in his comments has the grasped the notion behind the idea and its implementation in DeSmart.