3 ms·
Daily standups have been the most useful development I've seen in my 17 year career so far, I'm not sure why there's the hate for them. Two things that bother
by dasmoth 10y ago
Daily standups have been the most useful development I've seen in my 17 year career so far, I'm not sure why there's the hate for them.
Two things that bother me:
1) You either have to hold them at the start of the working day (in which case they become a synchronization point and everyone has to turn up at the same time -- which will inevitable be a bad time for some people) or a bit later (in which case you end up with an odd slot at the start of the day which usually isn't long enough to start on anything substantive).
2) They mandate daily visibility, and (by design, I think) prevent people going off for a week or two and solving something substantial on their own.
There are possible solution to (1) -- e.g. asynchronous stand ups in a chat client (and it's probably not coincidental that the only times I've found these things at all helpful, they've followed this model rather than the actual stand-up-in-circle thing). But (2) is kind-of the whole premise of "agile teams", so not sure what can be done about that.
- Nursie 10y agoDoes the timing matter? We hokd ours in the middle of the day at the moment. Still seems to work (though the discipline is lacking and they often overrun, which I hate)
- dasmoth 10y agoIt matters if you're trying to preserve some decent chunks of time for focussed work. And if matters if the standup is scheduled for 9am and you can't drop the kids of and be sure of getting in before 9.10 If everyone goes for lunch at the same time, holding it 10 minutes before lunchtime could be a smart move. But only if you've already got that "everyone eats together" culture.
- Nursie 10y agoWe hold ours after lunch. No "everyone eats together culture", unfortunately, but there is now an "everyone finishes lunch by 13.30" culture.
- humanrebar 10y ago> asynchronous stand ups in a chat client I've been thinking this is actually the perfect standup. People don't tend to write novels in chat clients anyway (and to the extent they do, you can move the text to a README or wiki and just link it). Does anyone have any experience with this? Any pros and cons worth mentioning?
- dasmoth 10y agoI pushed http://geekbot.io/ http://geekbot.io/ as an alternative for physical standups at my current place -- it's been generally well received, and when I've used it on short projects (that were set up a way that needed daily sync-ups) I found it pretty helpful, and much less intrusive than a physical standup. Still prefer to have things structured in a more coarse-grained manner, though.
- ashark 10y agoWe do. Post in Slack. It's great because you can ignore anything that doesn't mention you (which is what people do in napping-while-standing IRL standups anyway) but you can always go back and see what someone's up to if it becomes relevant. Well, I wrote "great", but the latter case should be handled by other tools anyway. So really the whole thing could be replaced by just at-mentioning someone who needs to know what you're doing, when they need to know it. Which is just, you know, normal communication. But if you must do standups this is the way to do it, I guess, since it does the least harm.