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> The rituals, mainly the standups and grooming sessions, were fantastic. Standups are a great way to keep everyone aligned on the work. Can anyone elaborate w

• danmaz74 11y ago
  > I find most people zone out during the standup Out of curiosity, how long do your standups last? How big is the team?
  • alistairSH 11y ago
    I'm a project manager/scrum master, with a team that varies from 6 to 12 (roughly half the team is semi-permanently on-loan to other related projects/teams). My daily stand-up is usually 5-10 minutes. About 5 minutes of the standard "what I did, what I plan to do, and what's in my way". And 0-5 minutes of resolving problems (figuring out if I need to escalate, or if another team needs to be involved, etc). Anything longer than that, and we schedule follow-up meetings with a more correct set of attendees.
  • smileysteve 11y ago
    15 (goal) minutes with a 10 person team. Everybody didn't zone out every day, but most did, most of the time.
    • nickpsecurity 11y ago
      Exactly. It's a waste of time. Best to give a direct message or face-to-face telling the person what they need to know. Or not say anything if nothing is needed. At most, I'd say weekly meetings that were a mix of tracking project status and fun just for team-building purposes. Keeping people connected.
    • smileysteve 11y ago
      It's also detrimental to morale when you realize that other people are zoned out through standup. Nothing much more frustrating than when a coworker asks a question that was answered in the "meeting" we were all just in. Frankly, it's a huge opportunity for the listeners to shine. (Yay for being a listener)
  • seanwilson 11y ago
    I've found this with big and small teams. With small teams you already know what everyone is up to and with larger ones the meetings go on for longer.
• patrickmay 11y ago
  You need to tighten up your standups. Each person should be saying what they did yesterday, what they're going to do today, and identify any dependencies or blockers. It's important for everyone on the team to know what others are doing in order to share knowledge. If people are zoning out, you're not getting that benefit.
  • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Yes but either you don't know what they're talking about (different part of the project), or already know what they're talking about (because you are a tight team). So, zone out. Who's the Punch and Judy show for?
    • Huggernaut 11y ago
      At least where I work (Pivotal) where we are often rotating between pairs, and changing tracks of work in the order of every day to every few days, being kept up to date on the state of the rest of the work is useful. Additionally, we use it as a chance to bring up anything we need help with, or anything we found interesting in the last day, which wasn't important enough to interrupt the rest of the team with.
      • douche 11y ago
        > where we are often rotating between pairs, and changing tracks of work in the order of every day to every few days These sort of working arrangements sound horribly inefficient. How do you ever get enough real familiarity with what you're actually doing when you're getting jerked around to something different every couple days? It sounds like being constantly on the treadmill.
    • andylei 11y ago
      you are in between those 2 extremes and standups are useful?
      • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
• manigandham 11y ago
  Usually it's the managers who find it helpful - for them. Getting verbal confirmation from everyone of what's on the board.
  • metamet 11y ago
    Which can be incredibly important if the manager has to report to someone as well.
    • devhead 11y ago
      ... and can't find the ticket that has that info
• Nursie 11y ago
  You get a quick status update of all the bits everyone is working on. Oh, Bob finished the xyz bit? Great I'll get started on abc now. Jim's stuck with the autobuzzulator? I've used those before, I'll jump in and give him a hand after the standup. Katie's not been able to deliver the turnip functionality? Still can't test the beets either then... It should take no more than a few seconds per person and I find it far more effective than any agile status tool I've used, be that a physical board or an online system. >> I only find them helpful if some people in the team generally don't communicate well what they're up to (e.g. during daily work, over lunch). I communicate well with people I'm working with in the microcosm of what I'm doing right now, but there may be a few other people on the team doing related tasks that I'm not talking to every day. And lunchtime is my time to get a few minutes away from screens and work, take a walk, have some food etc.
  • seanwilson 11y ago
    > It should take no more than a few seconds per person and I find it far more effective than any agile status tool I've used, be that a physical board or an online system. Isn't that information already on your planning board? Likewise, it should only take a minute to review the planning board updates each day and you should be getting direct notifications for things you're suppose to be helping on. I can see the value in you all getting together to have a high-level chat on how things are going maybe once a week but every single day is way too much for me.
    • Nursie 11y ago
      Personally I hate weekly meetings as, unless you have strong leadership (rare) they turn into long, boring gripe-fests.
  • slavik81 11y ago
    If you were waiting on Bob to finish xyz, why does he wait up to a day before telling you he's done? After doing scrum for a few years, my impression is that stand-ups are useless because you can't depend on them. They're frequently too far away to be used for the purposes you're talking about, so you always need an alternative. If that alternative is good, you might as well always use it and cancel the meeting.
• conradfr 11y ago
  Yes thank you. I think the reality of DSM don't live up to their theoretical usefulness. I think even in a small team where everyone keep it short it's just too much information. I can already see what everyone is doing on Jira/etc and later on git in my IDE, the rest don't stick. I have tested people by asking them less than 30mn after a DSM questions about who is doing what and nobody could answer and yet they usually can't admit that DSM are mostly worthless. I also hate DSM when I'm on a long task because I just say the same thing everyday and feel like a slacker. At which point do you start to game the system and only pick short easy tasks ? I guess maybe Scrum and agile appeal more to young devs ? They seem to like the gamification aspect of it, moving post-its, feeling great by under-estimating tasks' length, the flatness of the team. Myself I would prefer a competent project manager instead of those empowering retrospectives and those velocity charts that could be turning against you by management any day. Over dramatization aside :) and in good spirit about the article I would prefer Kanban to Scrum but it seems way less used (at least in webdev).
  • seanwilson 11y ago
    > I also hate DSM when I'm on a long task because I just say the same thing everyday and feel like a slacker. At which point do you start to game the system and only pick short easy tasks ? I've had that feeling too. You feel like dropping the long tricky important task you're doing to complete a couple of easy ones so you have something better sounding to say for the impending standup. A similar and much worse situation happens when you have to give client demos too often I find.
    • garethrees 11y ago
      If you have a long important task, then surely you can break it down into sub-tasks that take less than a day to implement? Not just for the sake of having something to say in the daily status meeting, but to be able to manage your own work and evaluate your progress? In my own work, I find that anything taking longer than a day benefits from my doing some planning and task breakdown.
      • 11y ago
• vpeters25 11y ago
  I think the standup meeting is there because it follows the first principle of the Agile Manifesto: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"
  • Udik 11y ago
    I thought that the scrum meeting is a process. The whole Agile thing is a strictly defined process. That needs a lot of specific tools too.
    • vpeters25 11y ago
      Correct, Agile is a development process. As for needing tools, at least scrum doesn't need anything more than pen and paper to generate its artifacts: 2 lists (backlogs) and a chart (burndown).
• cscharenberg 11y ago
  The value is in creating a summary, to collect all the stream of conscience updates into a coherent statement about status and next steps. A daily standup of summaries removes the burden of mentally remembering yesterday's minutiae to reconstruct the current state. I mean, if you want to know the status of a system do you go to the dashboard or do you go review every system event for the past few hours? I hope not the latter! That's what you do when something seems off, which is exactly the case too for daily standups. If something doesn't seem right, you go review discussions and updates. Also, at the risk of triggering on standup philosophy, I do believe that zoning out during standups mean it's being done poorly: updates are too long or people are not engaging each other. That's the problem to fix, by setting an example of good habits yourself: cut off rambling, encourage active cross-questioning and ideas, etc.
  • technofiend 11y ago
    >Scrummerfall My classically trained PM after taking an Agile training class: First we'll have a planning sprint. Then we'll have a coding sprint, Followed by a testing sprint...
  • douche 11y ago
    Having seen some of how the sausage of dashboards get made, you go look at the real data, not the fancy crap that is thrown on the dashboard to sell the product in demos...
• jsolson 11y ago
  My current team does not do standups (or Scrum or... any of these things, really). We have a rolling list of open features/cleanups/bugs and a polite triage convention. In my last company we were all-in on what I can only call Scrummerfall. As far as I can tell, the effectiveness of the team has a lot more to do with people's ability to self manage their workload (under any system) than how much time and effort is dedicated to tracking it. We are also able to provide other dependent teams with better day to day visibility on specific requests rather than sprint-level visibility.
• michaelbuddy 11y ago
  You want people to elaborate on the concept that standups "keep people aligned on the work" Like you want a bunch of examples? How do you have some much patience for that if a standup interrupts your work? Maybe you have them at the wrong time. We have one at 9:30 and it works. People who arrive early are pretty much cranking and the standup is a break from that. People who arrive later (me) show up and it's the first thing of the day goes with a cup of coffee or tea. Any breakouts can happen right after, have those discussions at somebody's desk while you're already interrupted and THEN jump into the long stretch till lunch. I don't really see the interruption there. Even if I get bored and dont' know what people are talking about some of the time, I'd say it'd be pretty selfish of me to claim that they are a waste of time. And it would also be stupid of me to think that something sent in an email or commmented on slack or lync is enough. I mean if you could send a message and everyone got it the first time, I think there wouldn't be a concept of marketing or advertising in the world. Sometimes people need to hear things twice. I guess I'm just not big on keeping work in a black box. And I think it's comical and sad that we go to jobs and stare at screens all day. face to face interaction and having to express yourself to a group for a measly 30 seconds a day is a positive. It might even force a few of us to consider our appearance too. And frankly, I think I'm paid to answer questions and be available to people as needed, so a standup is meant to be an efficient way to do that and it's supposed to encourage brevity. If it's not, start communicating push it in that direction.