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Stop the Daily Standup Meeting

271 points by struppi 9y ago

borplk 9y ago
Daily standup is a scam just like the "open office". Most of the time it turns into a beating stick for incompetent managers to feel good. They are both defended by people for various superficial theoretical reasons that never come to fruition. Like they try to defend open office because "it's good for collaboration" but in reality it's only to cut down office costs and to let employees watch each other. If giving people private offices was much cheaper you'd never in a million years see a company accept the increased cost of an open office just because "it's good for collaboration". This is a pattern that you can notice easily in business. Anything undesirable that is not good for you will be applied a lip-stick of colorful language in order to "sell" it to you and it goes right into the echo chamber. You can put people in boxes that stack on top of each other and then say "Our beautiful stacked-box office promotes a culture of deep thinking and solitude where you can re-gain your focus and stay away from constant distractions.".
- dasmoth 9y ago
  If giving people private offices was much cheaper you'd never in a million years see a company accept the increased cost of an open office just because "it's good for collaboration". Were this testable, I'd absolutely take the other side of this bet. (Some) managers get too much satisfaction out of seeing their "doers" lined up and visibly working. And/or believe that watching one another makes people work harder. Open offices would happen, even at a premium. Edit: actually, it kind-of is testable. If office costs were the biggest factor in how workers were deployed, we'd see far more remote work. You can put people in boxes that stack on top of each other and then say "Our beautiful stacked-box office promotes a culture of deep thinking and solitude where you can re-gain your focus and stay away from constant distractions.". Please tell me when you open one of these, I might be after a job!
supercoder 9y ago
I like stand ups
- dsjoerg 9y ago
  but whyy
sidcool 9y ago
Not very convincing. But standups should be tailored for team needs, rather than imposing a standard. And I don't get the role of a Scrum Master. Good article overall in terms of encouraging discussion.
nimchimpsky 9y ago
Don't have them at all. Suits me just fine.
- khazhoux 9y ago
  BUT HOW DO YOU GET ANY WORK DONE WITHOUT STANDUPS??!?
  - OskarS 9y ago
    You work. You do your job. If you're unsure about what task to do, you speak to your manager. You know, how offices have worked for the previous hundred years.
    - OhSoHumble 9y ago
      I think he was being sarcastic.
- dimgl 9y ago
  Agreed. This is a trend I'd like to see done away with.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  That's okay, if your team works in this fashion. You shouldn't cargo-cult stand-ups or any other aspect of Scrum. It's important to realise that they are a tool, like any other form of meeting or organisational strategy. For example, if you find that your team are sometimes stepping on each other's toes, then a daily stand-up might be able to help with that. If you don't need them, then don't have them.
foxylion 9y ago
In the aspect of scrum the daily is good defined, I don't think you need to experiment about what needs to be talked about. It is a one time a day meeting where everyone gives a glimpse over what he has done and how this may affect others and what he is going to achieve until the next meeting. Committing to a goal motivates me to get things done. A third aspect is to give the scrum master feedback about impediments which do prevent me from achieving my goals. And yes this does not mean that nobody is talking to each other through the day. But even if you are a team it is important to get everyone up to date. Most discussion through the day happen between 2 or 3 persons, and not with everyone (4-6 people).
drinchev 9y ago
Having a >short< daily meeting is important part of any dev-team. Goals are: 1. Discussion on who's doing what ( details ) 2. Discussion on who did what, since last meeting. 3. Help / suggestions based on the conversations above.
- struppi 9y ago
  True. That's the goals you want to achieve. I am just trying to say that you do not necessarily need a daily meeting to achieve these goals. And that you might get all the value from the daily scrum with something that better suits your team.
- int_19h 9y ago
  A daily meeting is not the only way to achieve all that. And in many cases, the precise details of what someone is doing aren't really relevant to everyone, either.
- dkersten 9y ago
  Provided only work that's in the issue tracker is worked on (thus avoiding work being done more than once by different people), I've never found 2. useful. That is, the information has never been actionable for me, so it really doesn't matter what people did. People SHOULD flag stuff they encountered that others should know about, but to me that's part of the 3. "what you need/can help on" category (essentially "anything you want to flag?" be it gotchas, blockers, offers of help etc) Even 1. I find usually not useful, provided you do regular planning meetings (I like them to be weekly personally) where people are roughly assigned to areas and then just work off the backlog, although it can vary I suppose. I buy into the peopleware model personally: status meetings are a distraction, other meetings need an agenda (with a clearly defined "end point") and be time boxed. Aligning people and sharing knowledge should be accomplished through informal "coffee morning" conference-breaks-hallway-conversation style events. Ideally an hour set aside once a week, purely for this. That largely covers the cases of people overhearing what you're doing and saying they can help. In my experience, my team works so closely anyway that the standups don't add much, if anything, and the people who could benefit are not at the meeting (other teams basically). I've tried text updates in slack and that had the great side effect that other teams could see them and offer advice or help, but the downside is they're boring and people often don't read them. Informal coffee morning chats largely solve that in my opinion. Besides peoplewares suggestions on meetings, I also really like the GROWS Method model of agile.
sbose78 9y ago
It's fair to ask the team how frequently they want stand-ups. It could be daily or it could be weekly. Without asking, standups are counter-productive.
ealexhudson 9y ago
I disagree with the basic premise of this: "When it gets cancelled because a certain person is not there, you are doing the meeting for that person". One person being the driving force behind making something happen doesn't imply that all the benefit accrues to them at all. "Just make sure everyone is actually recording what they are missing!" Except they have no way of recording the opportunity cost - they don't know what they haven't been told; they could be missing something huge, but without a venue for communication they don't find out. I have to say, I don't think this is great advice.
- 3825 9y ago
  This isn't great advice because this isn't advice. It isn't advice because there's nothing actionable here. The only thing I'll say you can do if you're in a team like this is try to find your way out. Your "team" is already doomed and beyond saving.
- ozim 9y ago
  If it is cancelled then he is right, if it is more like there is no one in the room who comes up and calls for standup then you are right.
- struppi 9y ago
  "Except they have no way of recording the opportunity cost" This is a very good point. I have to think about it more. Still, as an independent consultant, I have seen some teams who get close to 0 value from their dailies (while others got tremendous value). And just trying to change some small things about the dailies will probably lead to no results. "One person being the driving force behind making something happen doesn't imply that all the benefit accrues to them at all." Well, if nobody goes to the daily just because a single person is missing, you have a problem. Right? Even if that problem is only that the others do not recognize the value they are getting...
scorpioxy 9y ago
Stand ups at an agency I am currently working for on a short term engagement just has people in the tech team listing what clients they're going to be working for today. You know, because that's very helpful for everyone to know.... I think the spirit of agile development is lost on most places and blindly sticking to process without questioning it becomes the norm.
awjr 9y ago
"When it gets cancelled because a certain person is not there, you are doing the meeting for that person" This rang true with my current team. It isn't that the meeting doesn't happen but it is extremely fast. No round robin, just a simple 'has anyone got any issues'. Nope, ok carry on. We still get high value from those discussions. My personal observation is that when this senior person is there, they are using the stand-up as a project management meeting. This should really be 'taken offline' and this person should be working with team leads away from the stand-up. Luckily I'm working closely with one of the team leads in an isolated area and I excuse myself from the meeting and let him talk on my behalf but I shouldn't be at that point where I'm trying to avoid them. The other day 8 people did a stand-up for 27minutes. That's a crazy loss of time.
- wojt_eu 9y ago
  Half an hour meeting with 8 developers takes 4 developer hours. This is often enough to give manager a pause.
  - bad_user 9y ago
    That's a drop in the ocean compared to hours wasted dicking around on Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, Reddit, etc
    - antigirl 9y ago
      SSSHHHHhhhhhhh !!!!!
    - 0xfeba 9y ago
      But I'm more productive if I take a 15 minute break every hour, or so some article said so.
  - ralmeida 9y ago
    I agree with 'bad_user' here, to some extent. That is enough to give a manager a pause, but not to immediately dismiss it as a bad idea. Most professionals will agree that it's unrealistic to believe that developer-typing-code-time has 100% efficiency. The time spent 'decompressing', which can sometimes manifest itself as spending time reading/doing unrelated stuff, does sometimes produce a solution faster than just banging away coding. Management work is different from coding in that everything is hard and noisy to measure, so to some extent heuristics are relied upon, simply because it's the state of the art in this area. So, even if half an hour meeting with 8 developers takes 4 developer-hours (which is a rather large number), it does not mean those hours are wasted. If one of those meetings a day stops someone spending one week chasing a dead-end known to others at least once in a while, on average the team moves faster, not slower. BTW, I actually agree that 8 developers is too much, and that half an hour is too long for a daily. Just going off a tangent here.
don_draper 9y ago
I haven't done standup in 6 months and I just feel generally better. Where I work you just report to the tech lead every 2 or 3 weeks. So much nicer than daily standups. Could you imagine other professions doing what we do?
- DLight1 9y ago
  The point of the standup meeting is not to report to someone, but to communicate between team members.
- dasmoth 9y ago
  Where I work you just report to the tech lead every 2 or 3 weeks. Sounds pretty much perfect to me (although I also know people who would go stir-crazy like this...) Can I ask: what sort of company is this? Dedicated software operation or a tech department inside a company doing something else?
  - don_draper 9y ago
    It's an engineering company that does math/science stuff along with regular software development.
- martijn_himself 9y ago
  In some other professions it would most likely lead to strikes :).
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  Where I work you just report to the tech lead every 2 or 3 weeks. So much nicer than daily standups. This might work for some organisations, products or development styles. In my team of five, over a two or three week period we might have delivered half a dozen customer-facing features or changes, and the team will generally be working quite collaboratively on those. It would not be feasible to 'report to a tech lead every 2 or 3 weeks'. Could you imagine other professions doing what we do? Yes, and I think in some cases they would gain a lot from it.
scalatohaskell 9y ago
I agree with author... instead of doing "Scrum", how about we act like adults, and speak with people when we need to, in respect to their time, schedule accordingly, and not clown and parade around with scrum and poker cards. http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  Ugh, this attitude is just the worst. There are a whole bunch of legitimate reasons that aspects of Scrum are useful to some teams. Like the planning poker thing –I work with a team of talented, experienced and professional developers, and we still have misconceptions about complexity that are revealed by the planning poker approach. The idea that 'if everyone just programmed it would be fine' is totally asinine.
  - scalatohaskell 9y ago
    that's not how I meant it. Sure, plan it, however it suits you and the team. If planning poker works for you, great. But do you need to coat it under "Scrum", having special moderators such as Scrummaster and consultations every year how you are not doing scrum "enough". I don't advocate programming anarchy, but I don't like when managers treat programmers like some woodchoppers that they need to wrap fine grained process around, instead of having the team work the way it fits them best.
    - matthewmacleod 9y ago
      I completely agree that 'agile' without being agile is just buzzword bingo, and I've been through it myself. Ultimately, plan however works for your team. But I do get the impression generally that there can be a lot of unjustified resistance to any kind of organisation among certain groups of developers; it pays to be open-minded about techniques that can work.
      - scalatohaskell 9y ago
        I think the resistance is not unjustified - mostly programmers are fed up with "these" things, since they always get misused against them (i.e. - estimations - you and me know how it works, that it's well, estimation - but in back there is manager who translates it in his excel to $$$ and time, and the second your 8point story is now day overdue you are being pushed to zones which only further damage the project down the road (costs which you will have to pay by overtimes, not the guy behind his excel). Does that mean estimation is bad? No. It's non-programmers who misuse it. Would team be better without estimation? Probably, since it wouldn't be misused by external elements, and we could just do our damn job). Perhaps the original agile was meant correctly, but as of today most organisations just use it to justify and coat (perhaps) same things agile was to be against. For me today Agile has so way too many faces. If it doesn't work, answer is always "you're not doing agile/scrum correctly). There are always reasons how you're not being agile enough, no matter how many times you fine-tune your "agile" on retrospectives, if there are managers and people misusing it against you, you could as well be better without it. What an incomprehensive piece of text I wrote. Sorry. I'm not native English speaker. If you're lucky non of this applies though, but you have to be lucky enough to work with lots of (prehaps we might say all) smart people across whole "chain of command".
danielbln 9y ago
We have switched to asynchronous, slack-based standups a long time ago, moderated by a bot (we're using a modified version of https://github.com/eelzon/morgenbot https://github.com/eelzon/morgenbot). This way everyone knows what everyone else has been up to, will be up to and what blockers are, without being caught up in endless discussions, and since it's asynchronous, people can supply their standup (within limits) at their own leisure. Works well for us.
- dasmoth 9y ago
  If you have to have fine-grained updates, this is so obviously the right way to do it that I'm startled it's not ubiquitous. (But if there isn't a compelling reason to be counting the days, it's still nice to have the option to "go dark" for a few days sometimes)
- epalmer 9y ago
  Apologies if the repo makes this obvious. I'm on my phone. Do you maintain a virtual scrum board? What software do you use and how do you like it? I am on small scrum team and we all would like to go virtual for many reasons. Mostly we are from different parts of campus and the travel time eats productivity. And many of us have families that get in the way of the morning standup. A virtual one can be done from anywhere. Thanks for any help.
  - danielbln 9y ago
    Yeah, we are using Trello to coordinate our tasks/stories, and have been quite happy with it.
expertentipp 9y ago
The effort to say something about yesterday and about today is an obsolete overhead. Sometimes one is just stuck for couple of days with bloated and partially obsolete Java setup, sometimes one has done nothing and needs a break instead of daily confessions. Saying these might be perceived arrogant or disrespectful. I perceive standups as an immature way to discipline developers.
- Confusion 9y ago
  So just say "still working on ..." or "didn't get much done today, ...". We understand.
  - jakubp 9y ago
    The latter statement undermines your position in the group. Not a smart thing to say long-term.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  Saying these might be perceived arrogant or disrespectful. I perceive standups as an immature way to discipline developers. If this is what's happening in a team, then there is something more broken than unnecessary stand-ups. It should be perfectly acceptable to talk openly an honestly about the things that you have or have not been able to do. If you're in a situation where you have to 'hide' the work you have been doing, then your team atmosphere is poisonous and avoiding stand-ups is not going to fix that.
  - jakubp 9y ago
    If you're in a situation where you have to 'hide' the work you have been doing, then your team atmosphere is poisonous and avoiding stand-ups is not going to fix that. Unfortunate office reality is that it's sometimes beneficial to withdraw by "hiding" your work or by not contributing openly to a discussion. The benefit is in avoiding (negative) spotlight, avoiding additional work or pressure, or similar consequences. This can happen even in an otherwise happy and supportive environment. If you're not pushed too hard by anyone, you can become complacent and settle on doing less. You can argue this is poisonous, but I'm not sure many people would call those "low ambition" or "low stress" or "hands off management" environments poisonous.
mdekkers 9y ago
I do some contracting from time to time with a devshop that has gone "full agile" - I love these people, and have a lot of respect for the work they do, but OH. MY. GOD. save me from the fucking standups. What a totally useless waste of everybodies' time. I refuse to attend most of them in any case, which harms my standing with the project managers, but I seriously don't care - most standups as well as the majority of other project management activities they practice appear to be designed to keep the project managers happy, and contribute little to the overall quality or speed of delivery of the project at hand, and are a massive distraction to everyone involved. Daily $project_management_ritual should die.
johan_larson 9y ago
I've worked both in a standard office setting and remotely. When I was in-office, I found the daily stand-ups tedious, because everyone was telling me stuff I was already aware of. But now when I am remote I find the stand-ups much more useful, because they are telling me stuff I don't already know. It's like stand-ups are overkill when the team is already working together in close quarters.
JackMorgan 9y ago
As a counterpoint: stand-ups can be a great way to operate a team without a managers, tech leads, or assigned work: http://deliberate-software.com/self-organizing-balance/ http://deliberate-software.com/self-organizing-balance/ I think "bad stand-ups" is a symptom you are using a self-organizing practice in a command-and-control team.
- js8 9y ago
  This is nice in theory, but I am afraid it fails quickly in practice. I am a leftist, but I don't believe self-organizing works in situations where there is some higher level of control. People don't have incentive to self-organize in small scale, if there is some other big beneficiary outside their control. This is very abstract, so let me give two examples of what I mean. 1. In communist countries, sometimes, self-organization was tried on the level of individual state-owned companies (basically they were supposed to run as worker-owned cooperatives). It mostly failed horribly. But all of these countries were dictatorships with top-level, directive planning of the economy. So these "cooperatives" were still subject to larger plans, and that broke the incentive (or will) to self-organize. 2. Similarly, even though many companies try to have people self-organize, it falls flat because of the basic capitalistic premise - that there is an owner (or multiple owners) to the whole enterprise. This owner takes in a large amount of economic profit, which, if the team was truly self-organizing, would stay within the team. This breaks the incentive to self-organize. Why make something more efficient (even as a group) if some other people are going to decide how much you benefit? So I think, taken my and your conclusions together, bad stand-ups are inevitable, except maybe in worker cooperatives (which are actually very efficient in capitalist economy, that is, if they operate entirely for the benefits of their own members).
  - JackMorgan 9y ago
    I disagree with the premise that self-organization can only work when people are motivated by money. I believe that money is only a component of motivation, and sometimes a negative one. Intrinsic motivations like mastery and a job well done are much more effective in my opinion. You should check out the book "Reinventing Organizations" which is a case study of 12 successful self-organizing companies and how they do it. Also I'd like to hear your feedback to my post that shows how my team has accomplished it for over a decade and counting.
yeukhon 9y ago
I used to like standup because that's the only time I have to see what my team is soingnsince most of them are remote and working in a different time-zome. It was a great way to give tips and do the "okay let's talk about this offline afterward." But now I hated it. Not only rhe standup is mismanaged ao badly, I also don't have much to update on a daily basis which means I feel useless if I have nothing to say or have little progress on my tickets.
douche 9y ago
The standup meeting can burn in hell. It's a lovely bit of useless micromanagement. Consider: If you're organized at all, there should be notifications going out when anyone on your team commits code, or comments on tickets, or whatever. If your communications are so dysfunctional that you need to have a defined point every day to apprise people of what is going on or ask questions of your teammates, focusing on that root problem would be more effective than band-aiding it with a daily standup. There's never a good time to schedule it. No matter when you do so, it's going to frig someone up and waste one to two hours of productive flow time, at best. First thing in the morning doesn't work, because people run late. Later in the morning, and you might as well kiss the whole morning goodbye for productive work. At the end of the day, it will inevitably run over and piss off everybody who needs to get the hell out of the office and take care of their personal obligations at the end of the day. There's always one or two people that want to ramble along and narrate every little thing they did in excruciating detail. Or that want to turn an issue that turns up relevant to two people into an interminable status/planning meeting on that issue. Mostly, I'm just not convinced that there is any way to do a standup meeting right, so that it is useful for it's stated purpose without being more costly than it is worth. If you need this kind of fine-grained progress reporting, have everybody send an email or a group chat with the three standup kindergarten circle-time questions answered. Then if there is an actual need to meet and go over something, you can identify the relevant people and not waste everyone else's time. We ditched standup meetings a while back. It's been glorious.
Beltiras 9y ago
I'm in a small team. I am the lone coder and I report directly to the CEO. I asked to do a standup because it's imperative for me to gain focus on tasks and frame my work. We used to have weekly status meetings but that was too infrequent. Instead of a weekly half-hour we now do 2-5 minutes of me standing in his doorway running through the "Yesterday I worked on [tasklist]. I am [not] stuck. I [don't] have resources for my tasks. Today I commit to work on [tasklist]." Standup for me is making me accountable.
algesten 9y ago
We (the developers) took control over our standups. We went back to basics and talked about _why_ are we doing kanban boards standups, and found two reasons. 1) We do need better awareness of what others around us are doing, especially across the dev/ops divide. 2) Communication, kanban is there to show interested non-devs how projects are progressing. We update the kanban before the meeting and let one person per day read through the entire board for today/ongoing/blocked. If there are any tasks that person doesn't understand – this is the time to ask. The process takes often less than 10 mins per day. Any issues raised will be discussed in loosely formed groups afterwards to not waste everyone's time. I think what I learned is that you mustn't let process be shoved on you by middle management. Take control to make these things productive for you.
- struppi 9y ago
  This is a great example. In one team I was coaching, we also experienced that standups improved when we switched to a kanban board and enumerating tasks on the board: We would not ask people "What did you do today", but pick a task and ask: "Who contributed to that task? Who thinks they can contribute?" This made a huge difference (although there still were people that did not like the daily stand up - but less than before).
- mianos 9y ago
  We have a slack channel. You write what you did yesterday, what you are going to do today. If you are blocked, what is blocking you. When you expect to deliver what. Everyone does it. As a reader, you skip the stuff you don't care much for. Pretty interesting though. Maybe ask someone for further clarification. Works great. I like to do it just before I leave for work. The only issue is some skill-less turkey with a title 'coach' can't make a buck, but I am sure he would pipe in and tell us we are doing it all wrong.
  - jakozaur 9y ago
    In fact we write plan for today on Slack and later modify me message to change what actually gets done. It is great because: 1. Most of the time you skim the list, but sometimes want to follow up and collaborate. It helps ppl keep on same page and avoid redoing the same stuff. 2. Async, written as first thing when you come to work. 3. Writing todos and sharing them helps ppl to get focused and make them productive.
throwthrowisit 9y ago
"She cancels the daily standup meeting, a.k.a "Daily Scrum". Did that ever happen to you?" Nope.
user5994461 9y ago
Never do daily meeting. Never accept daily meeting. Never participate in daily mettings. That's simply too frequent. People will spend all their day thinking about what they will present the next day instead of doing actual work.
- taneq 9y ago
  If you're working in an interdisciplinary team you need to know what the other groups in your team are working on. Maybe if you're doing deep research or something, you can hide in your cave and focus purely on your own work, but if you're doing implementation rather than research, you have to understand all of what's going on.
  - ljw1001 9y ago
    If everyone needs to know what everyone else is doing, you have no encapsulation in your code, which is a major design flaw.
  - dagw 9y ago
    If you're working in an interdisciplinary team you need to know what the other groups in your team are working on. Sure, but does everybody need to be updated every single day? And does that update have to take the form of an all hands meeting?
  - Udik 9y ago
    But if you need to know what the others are working on, isn't it simpler to ask them at any time when the curiosity arises? Do you need to stand up and listen to what everybody is working on, every day, in order to do what you should do naturally, that is, be in touch with the members of your team?
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    Who changes what those groups are working on from day-to-day without telling anyone?
- tremon 9y ago
  If you need to "present" something during your daily meeting, you're doing it wrong.
kornakiewicz 9y ago
Basically: - if it's a status/reporting meeting - don't do it, there are better tools. - if it's knowledge transfer meeting and it benefits a whole team - do it.
samblr 9y ago
In regular corporate settigns, I see these standup meetings are a way to simply make information flood across organisation hierarchy. A good leader can then parse and make sense of signal amongst plenty of noise. But it does rarely serves that purpose. We used to 've standup of 10 members several years ago! Since then I kind of developed disliking towards regular meetings. Currently we 've a trello-kanban updated so that we've information flowing. And a weekly mail with traffic lights, explaining current-and-next week activities - working well so far.
Samathy 9y ago
I found out yesterday that a new colleague who is transferring from another department is used to having mandatory hour long daily standups. We were all shocked that a manager could justify wasting that much time every single day. We have no standups since we all work on different projects, we don't really need to know what everyone else is doing.
ryanmarsh 9y ago
As a coach here's my question about the standard standup format (what did you do yesterday, etc...) If the reason we are all here is to get the work done why is it ok that it's a mystery what is done or not? Why is it not obvious? Why do we have to ask? Why not just keep your board or whatever up to date and talk about other things? Like surprises, blockers, questions, or concerns.
- noxToken 9y ago
  > Why not just keep your board or whatever up to date and talk about other things? Like surprises, blockers, questions, or concerns. I could be wrong, but I think that might have been the original intent. Enumerating everything work related you did yesterday is a waste of time. "I worked on X, Y, and Z. Y and Z are closed. I still need to finish up X," tells nothing that the board doesn't tell. If Y and Z are closed, Y and Z's status reflect that on the board. "X is still unfinished. An external dependency from ${team} is failing, so I'm coordinating with ${point-of-contact} to resolve the issue." That is a worthwhile update that takes the same amount of time yet contains infinitely more information. Maybe we need a new format. Everyone who speaks could start with, "Everything I did was routine except..." We know that you went to a meeting with another upstream team, because you have that same meeting at the same time every Tuesday. Therefore, we don't need you to say, "Yesterday I went to a meeting with ${team}." Give us the meeting details that's relevant to our team. You then drop the preamble after a few days or so.
  - ryanmarsh 9y ago
    I think you're right, I think it was the original intent. Seems to be lost on quite a few coaches though
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
flurdy 9y ago
Appreciate the OP is about whether the stand up is for the scrum master/project manager etc or for the team members. Hopefully it is both, and mostly the later. Also see in the other threads (and discussion in general) that mistakes the standups as for reporting your status to managers. That may be required in some organisations or partially, but not in most. But I would view a good stand up one that does NOT require each team member to in turn state the old: "what they did yesterday, what will do toady, any impediments". Instead you hope project leadership trust their team members and instead focus on the tasks. In order of task priority a participant in that story can quicklyy broadcast if anything has changed with a task/story, no need for details of what happened yesterday, no need for whom did what etc. Then if any impediments for that story, escalations, anything else etc. And just quickly rattle through them to make sure focus is maintained on getting the tasks flowing through to delivered. TL;DR focus on tasks not people reporting. I ranted about this some years ago... http://blog.flurdy.com/2013/04/i-dont-care-what-you-did-yesterday-i.html http://blog.flurdy.com/2013/04/i-dont-care-what-you-did-yest...
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
In my old job we used Geekbot [0], a Slack bot for async standup meetings. It's great for geographically distributed teams. I found it made it much easier to get an idea of what people were up to, as well as providing an opening for occasional tips and suggestions. Posts typically included a mix of what you achieved, what you hope to achieve, and any blockers. Any updates or big breakthroughs were usually shared as well. I think it's best to be flexible about how frequently status updates are shared, leaving it up to the developer's discretion. [0] https://geekbot.io https://geekbot.io
DorothySim 9y ago
Also relevant: https://vimeo.com/110554082 https://vimeo.com/110554082
JetJaguar 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvks70PD0Rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvks70PD0Rs
gdulli 9y ago
I've been at my current job for 5 years and spent my previous 15 at 7 different jobs combined. It's not an accident that I've stayed at this one but left all of the others. This is the one where people are allowed to be responsible for their own productivity without overhead like standups, project managers, status reports, task tracking software, etc. It couldn't work for all people or all companies, but it means enough to me to manage my career around finding the environments like this one that make me enjoy coming to work so much more.
kabdib 9y ago
Our "scrum" stand-ups were taken over by the PM stack, and they started getting longer and longer and weren't useful for the team doing the work. So I started calling them status meetings. "Hey, stand-up in five minutes!" "You mean status?" ... and kept doing that. Eventually even the PM grudgingly admitted that it was just a status meeting, and referred to it that way himself. It was okay; agile had died (and turned into simple micro-management) a long time ago in our division.
Meai 9y ago
In my opinion standups are mood killers. If you need something, you ask for it anyway. Anything else would be ridiculous, you have a job to do and you need something from somebody so you ask. This is collaboration 101. Yeah sure, there is some tiny possibility that person A happens to mention his approach to some task and person B happens to know a better way, but really that is such a motivation killer for several psychological reasons, but even more than that: How likely is that? It never happens anyway and if you know your colleagues, you likely already know if they probably can help you with something and you ask them for some pointers. If you don't do that, a standup isn't going to help you because you don't want help. So for who's benefit are standups and "agile" in general? It's for the benefit of managers who by their nature don't have insight into what's going on in general and they want the most superficial general overview of what everyone is doing. For developers, I don't see any added value whatsoever. This applies to all pillars of agile, I could go on and on about this. Agile is only pseudo-beneficial for managers. Everybody knows everything and then everybody(=nobody) is responsible when code breaks, giving the manager peace of mind but the developer couldn't care less: It's not like it was his baby.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  On the other hand, its very common for a team member to get blocked and not know how to get unblocked. A (occasional) standup can get them past that. And one blocked team member can quickly become the long pole on the tent. Standups and agile are quite useful, especially for new teams or teams of greener developers. Which, in our growth industry, is 'most teams everywhere'. If you're part of a team that's worked well for months or years, then the utility is greatly diminished. I think standups can gracefully fade away after some months.
  - Meai 9y ago
    > On the other hand, its very common for a team member to get blocked and not know how to get unblocked Yes of course that can happen and I said so, which means that he should ask whoever is blocking him how to proceed. If he doesn't know who it is, he asks the manager and he will direct him to the right person. If there is literally no way to proceed, he will work on another issue in the meantime and inform the manager that he's blocked on the more important stuff. If there is some way to speed it along together with multiple other people, it will come up when he talks to that first guy. Obviously waiting for the next standup tomorrow is a ridiculous proposition, so standups solve a problem for 1 time of the day requiring by definition more people than should be required because everyone is in it instead of pulling the people in that need to be pulled in for that specific block or feature. I don't even know how people defend standups, they usually say something like "hey yeah, I know it's mostly useless but it's just for 10min a day". Absolutely unacceptable. Now I get to the last line of your post, and it's such a relief: "I think standups can gracefully fade away after some months." Well you should tell the other proponents of standups because I can guarantee you that this never happens. Standups might be a good idea in the starting phase of a projects but frankly even then it's debatable and then you would just call them meetings.
themtutty 9y ago
Ugh. Provocative, radical idea that is founded upon overly-simple, faulty assumptions. To think that the author's three categories for teams are the only three, and that standup communication only takes the forms he describes is just hubris, and leads to dangerous advice.
- lojack 9y ago
  The author identified three potential pitfalls of stand ups and suggested not doing them if you fit into those three categories. Title comes off as a blanket statement, but I didn't get that feeling from the rest of the article.
cavanasm 9y ago
I'm a junior developer in a "Scaled Agile Framework" (SAFe, apparently) team at a VERY big company, and although we never cancel our stand ups, the format seems to exclusively be for status updates / reporting, and not "for the team". Feels like everyone else is habituated to it though, and they don't seem to mind, but it definitely bothers me. Generally lucky if a morning stand up takes 30 minutes, let alone 15.
rosalinekarr 9y ago
I'm seeing a lot of comments about how terrible different people's standup meetings are at their particular companies, and I can't help but think the problem isn't with standup itself, it's with these companies. At my job, we meet for standup via video chat as early as we can. That's about 9am for some of us and 10am or 11am for others depending on timezones. We each say what we worked on yesterday and what we're working on now, which only takes about 5 to 10 minutes, then we enter what we call "parking lot." We call it "parking lot" because if this were an in-person meeting, this is bit where we would be talking in the parking lot on our way out to lunch. No one is expected to stick around unless there's something urgent related to what your working on that needs to be discussed. Anyone is free to hop off the call at this point. During parking lot, we discuss impediments, anything that's going to keep someone from getting work done that day. If the problem is something complicated that's difficult to describe via text, we chat about it face to face and work out a solution together. If the problem is simple, we just agree to talk it out in either a public or private channel on Slack depending the kind of problem. The purpose of the meeting isn't to build a big report of who's working on what or to guilt us into working harder. It's just to guarantee that we're all online at a given time each day to help each other out. Working across several timezones, we all have wildly different hours, and without standup, we would probably be waiting for days to hear back from each other about any issues we run into. Maybe standup is a problem for other people or other companies, but for my team at least, we couldn't work without it.
- vikingcaffiene 9y ago
  Couldn't agree more with what you are saying here. Daily stand ups, if done right are very helpful especially for remote teams. I did daily stand ups at my previous company and they took on average an hour and were unfocused, meandering and generally pointless. I dreaded them and the whole team felt the same. By contrast, my current team is much larger but keeps the daily stand up to 15 minutes. It's focused and everyone is on page about tabling longer discussions for post stand up with the relevant stakeholders. While I won't ever say I'm looking forward to it, I see the tangible benefits. We are a remote team across multiple time zones and are able to effectively work together with ease. The daily stand up is a big part of that.
- 9y ago
dkhenry 9y ago
I found the best way to make a standup successful was to put a hard limit on how long people could talk. When my teams were working the best they had a limit of 15 seconds ( I would count down while they talked ). The stand up is situational awareness not status of ongoing projects. Once the 15 second round of updates were done, if there was someone I needed more information from I would grab them after the standup to talk to them. I don't really understand how a team can have a 30 minute standup, to me that is a manager who is lazy or disconnected who doesn't bother to follow the teams progress on the myriad of tools they inevitably have ( Whiteboards, Jira, Github, ..... )
- lojack 9y ago
  I would refuse to go to any meeting where I was asked to talk and then had someone counting down from 15 the second I started. I understand why you're doing it, but it comes off as rude and demeaning to me. My stand ups are time boxes at 15 minutes total, and the person running the meeting cuts it off at 15 minutes even if people haven't had a chance to talk. If you have something to say you don't have to cram it in 15 seconds, but often people just pass. It only takes a few meetings going over 15 minutes for habits to adjust.
  - iamatworknow 9y ago
    >I would refuse to go to any meeting where I was asked to talk and then had someone counting down from 15 the second I started. I understand why you're doing it, but it comes off as rude and demeaning to me Like a parent counting down before you're put in time out.
  - dkhenry 9y ago
    the countdown is necessary because its rude and demeaning for someone to take up everyone time by talking longer then they should. In a perfect world we all agree to the rules and follow them, but like you said even at 15 minutes someone has to cut everyone else off. Its the same principle applied at a different level. You time box the whole meeting and someone is rude and disbands it before everyone has talked, or you time box each person and everyone gets a chance to talk. In an environment where you have a mix of strong personalities and more introspective people the folks who are more soft spoken will be drown out if you don't specifically allot them time to talk. At least that has been my experience
geori 9y ago
The point of a standup is to coordinate team communication in batches and not interrupt people at random times. We always finish it up in less than 15 minutes and then small groups meet afterwards about talking points.
- lawnchair_larry 9y ago
  Whenever you decide to have a standup is a random time for some people. For some, it will be too early, prematurely terminating their sleep cycle and rushing them in, probably leaving them below peak cognitive performance for the entire day. For others, they are already in their awake-and-productive time, and they'll either have to stop to join, or they will simply waste time until the meeting, knowing that an interruption is on the way, and being preoccupied with those thoughts. To work as a team, this is going to happen here and there, and that's fine. But to do it daily as a ritual is an incredible tax on your human capital for no good reason. Not only that, but you're filtering out your talent pool to folks who don't perform at their best under these constraints. From what I have seen, these can often be very high performers.
mfukar 9y ago
Right now my team are trying out only doing standups if there's important stuff to share. This leads to 1-2 standups per week for the past month. Tidbits of info which can be shared at a glance, and probably don't affect anybody's workflow, go on a whiteboard. That way we know everybody's status, and seems like we can share important info when it matters.
smizell 9y ago
For those who do daily standups via a Slack channel, I made a little tool to help me. https://www.npmjs.com/package/onit https://www.npmjs.com/package/onit
htsh 9y ago
I can see the value of the standup but I find daily to be too often. The best teams I've worked with have staggered them to either M-W-F or T-R, primarily because the work we do require more than a day. And depending how one works, a daily standup every morning makes it tough to get a good night's work in. I often point people to PG's relevant essay during discussions about this: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
pinaceae 9y ago
My team is working on an big application with 100k+ users, worldwide, generating a couple hundred mill in revenue/year. Native apps on multiple mobile platforms, heavy enterprise stuff. Tried it without stand-ups - doesn't work. Once you need to coordinate heavily, care about speed and quality at the same time, working in code bases others have written you try to align with others as much as possible. We do 2-3 stand-ups per week, depending on team preference. M-W-F or T-T. It works, far less trial and error, far less issues found late in QA. Daily is too much, that we learned. No structured stand-up at all doesn't work either, humans are not disciplined enough across large teams. YMMV.
timwaagh 9y ago
stand up has to be the one good thing about scrum. the rest is just boring meetings which cost too much time entirely. but 5 minutes i can spare each day. the daily accountability it brings keeps managers from firing me (i have been fired way too many times often in the first week) as they know what i'm doing and therefore dont think i lack motivation. it also motivates me to perform even better. i dont think standup is bad at all and i think managers should be present for it. it may not be for some kind of idealistic 'for the team' thing or even the original intent, but... standups are a good thing. even if you're not doing agile, standups can still be useful to keep managers informed if you are a larger team (>3 people).
Chaebixi 9y ago
> Stop the Daily Standup Meeting Please yes! Especially the more dogmatic ones (e.g. only stating what you did yesterday, what you're going to do today, what's blocking you). It's just an empty status reporting ritual that feeds some negative emotional need of a manager (either anxiousness or a need to feel directly in control). Personally, I think a freeform dev team meeting that happens 2 or 3 times a week is much more valuable. For instance: if there's a big issue going on, lets actually talk about it rather than merely stating we're working on it (and taking "offline" the only information others might actually be curious about).
alienreborn 9y ago
I actually like the way we do stand ups at my current job. All of us sit together, so we just stand up in place and state what we are working on and if we have any blockers that need to be taken offline with specific ppl. Whole thing will be done under 2mins.
Floegipoky 9y ago
No way, my team gets a lot of value from our standup! We have 5 devs. We have a scrum master, but we rotate who's facilitating from our lead down to our most junior dev. If our scrum master's out it's no problem, any one of us is able to step up. The first ~10 minutes or so are spent updating the team on the progress we made yesterday and making sure everyone knows what they're working on today. Pretty standard fair. But we always take a full 1/2 hour. We use the rest of the time for backlog grooming. It works really well for us for 2 reasons: 1. We get a lot of reactive work, and it's really convenient to have time set aside every day to address it 2. By piggybacking backlog grooming onto time that we're already scheduled to be together as a team, we cut down on the number of other meetings we need to have (and context switching to/from coding). We all find it much more convenient to spend an extra ~20 minutes together every morning so that we can have the rest of the day to work.
itomato 9y ago
Tracking systems and wallboards should suffice. In absence of those, a 15 minute Standup seems (woefully) inadequate by comparison.
mixmastamyk 9y ago
Worked on a team just like described, all on different projects. It was infuriating, the boss interrupted me every morning at ten, just as I was entering the "zone" for a no value (to me) standup.
TimJYoung 9y ago
Team-oriented software development has become somewhat infantilized, and it's a worrying trend that keeps showing up in our society, in general. We need to stop approaching team development with the expectation that one or more team members will need checking up on because they're goofing off too much or not working on what they're supposed to be working on. Professional software development is a career, and we should be able to start all employer <-> employee relationships with the expectation that a) we're all adults, and will treat each other accordingly, and b) we're all, ultimately, responsible for our own work and the work of the team. If someone repeatedly demonstrates that they can't execute in this fashion, then they're gone. There's simply too much to do, and dragging the entire team down to the level of the least-responsible member is ridiculous. You're better off just distributing the extra work among existing team members. For example: want the team to bond and communicate ? Ditch the daily meetings, and every Friday take the team out for a meandering late work lunch where everyone talks about the week, what they're working on, the overall project, etc. Any other time, everyone knows where the other team members are working - if there's something that you need, you ask in the least-intrusive way possible, depending upon how busy the other team member is and the importance of your task.
relics443 9y ago
My company did standup for 3 years either in person or over hangouts (once we became distributed), and recently switched to an async model over slack. Much better engagement, and much better quality updates.
edpichler 9y ago
People, I respectfully do not agree with this blog post. How people can notice that work is not being done if they don't do meetings? How to assure they are communicating correctly? How to prevent a bomb explodes a day before the deadline? If you discover problems close to the deadline, you already have a big problem. My opinion is that these daily meeting are to prevent problems, like integration between systems. People are comfortable on their own doings, they don't like meetings, they prefer a problem occurs and share the blame than doing daily meetings. We must do daily meetings because it's good for the project and not because we enjoy it, we do to avoid that some lazy or introvert collaborator don't share a problem that can affect everybody. That's why we have a scrum master to do the dirty job and assure everyone is talking each other.
- edpichler 9y ago
  You can perfectly go to a daily scrum meeting and say that you are doing your job on schedule and have no problem to report and, maybe, are available to someone who need a help. These meetings must be rapid.
- Ace17 9y ago
  > That's why we have a scrum master to do the dirty job and assure everyone is talking each other. Encouraging communication is a great goal ; but trying to force it on a regular basis might have the contrary effect.
  - edpichler 9y ago
    It's complicated. Who decides if it's necessary? Most of people prefer to stay on their comfort zone, that is why I think the team must follow some rules.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

271 points by struppi 9y ago

Daily standup is a scam just like the "open office". Most of the time it turns into a beating stick for incompetent managers to feel good. They are both defended by people for various superficial theoretical reasons that never come to fruition. Like they try to defend open office because "it's good for collaboration" but in reality it's only to cut down office costs and to let employees watch each other. If giving people private offices was much cheaper you'd never in a million years see a company accept the increased cost of an open office just because "it's good for collaboration". This is a pattern that you can notice easily in business. Anything undesirable that is not good for you will be applied a lip-stick of colorful language in order to "sell" it to you and it goes right into the echo chamber. You can put people in boxes that stack on top of each other and then say "Our beautiful stacked-box office promotes a culture of deep thinking and solitude where you can re-gain your focus and stay away from constant distractions.".

dasmoth 9y ago
If giving people private offices was much cheaper you'd never in a million years see a company accept the increased cost of an open office just because "it's good for collaboration". Were this testable, I'd absolutely take the other side of this bet. (Some) managers get too much satisfaction out of seeing their "doers" lined up and visibly working. And/or believe that watching one another makes people work harder. Open offices would happen, even at a premium. Edit: actually, it kind-of is testable. If office costs were the biggest factor in how workers were deployed, we'd see far more remote work. You can put people in boxes that stack on top of each other and then say "Our beautiful stacked-box office promotes a culture of deep thinking and solitude where you can re-gain your focus and stay away from constant distractions.". Please tell me when you open one of these, I might be after a job!

supercoder 9y ago

I like stand ups

dsjoerg 9y ago
but whyy

sidcool 9y ago

Not very convincing. But standups should be tailored for team needs, rather than imposing a standard. And I don't get the role of a Scrum Master. Good article overall in terms of encouraging discussion.

nimchimpsky 9y ago

Don't have them at all. Suits me just fine.

khazhoux 9y ago
BUT HOW DO YOU GET ANY WORK DONE WITHOUT STANDUPS??!?
- OskarS 9y ago
  You work. You do your job. If you're unsure about what task to do, you speak to your manager. You know, how offices have worked for the previous hundred years.
  - OhSoHumble 9y ago
    I think he was being sarcastic.
dimgl 9y ago
Agreed. This is a trend I'd like to see done away with.
matthewmacleod 9y ago
That's okay, if your team works in this fashion. You shouldn't cargo-cult stand-ups or any other aspect of Scrum. It's important to realise that they are a tool, like any other form of meeting or organisational strategy. For example, if you find that your team are sometimes stepping on each other's toes, then a daily stand-up might be able to help with that. If you don't need them, then don't have them.

foxylion 9y ago

In the aspect of scrum the daily is good defined, I don't think you need to experiment about what needs to be talked about. It is a one time a day meeting where everyone gives a glimpse over what he has done and how this may affect others and what he is going to achieve until the next meeting. Committing to a goal motivates me to get things done. A third aspect is to give the scrum master feedback about impediments which do prevent me from achieving my goals. And yes this does not mean that nobody is talking to each other through the day. But even if you are a team it is important to get everyone up to date. Most discussion through the day happen between 2 or 3 persons, and not with everyone (4-6 people).

drinchev 9y ago

Having a >short< daily meeting is important part of any dev-team. Goals are: 1. Discussion on who's doing what ( details ) 2. Discussion on who did what, since last meeting. 3. Help / suggestions based on the conversations above.

struppi 9y ago
True. That's the goals you want to achieve. I am just trying to say that you do not necessarily need a daily meeting to achieve these goals. And that you might get all the value from the daily scrum with something that better suits your team.
int_19h 9y ago
A daily meeting is not the only way to achieve all that. And in many cases, the precise details of what someone is doing aren't really relevant to everyone, either.
dkersten 9y ago
Provided only work that's in the issue tracker is worked on (thus avoiding work being done more than once by different people), I've never found 2. useful. That is, the information has never been actionable for me, so it really doesn't matter what people did. People SHOULD flag stuff they encountered that others should know about, but to me that's part of the 3. "what you need/can help on" category (essentially "anything you want to flag?" be it gotchas, blockers, offers of help etc) Even 1. I find usually not useful, provided you do regular planning meetings (I like them to be weekly personally) where people are roughly assigned to areas and then just work off the backlog, although it can vary I suppose. I buy into the peopleware model personally: status meetings are a distraction, other meetings need an agenda (with a clearly defined "end point") and be time boxed. Aligning people and sharing knowledge should be accomplished through informal "coffee morning" conference-breaks-hallway-conversation style events. Ideally an hour set aside once a week, purely for this. That largely covers the cases of people overhearing what you're doing and saying they can help. In my experience, my team works so closely anyway that the standups don't add much, if anything, and the people who could benefit are not at the meeting (other teams basically). I've tried text updates in slack and that had the great side effect that other teams could see them and offer advice or help, but the downside is they're boring and people often don't read them. Informal coffee morning chats largely solve that in my opinion. Besides peoplewares suggestions on meetings, I also really like the GROWS Method model of agile.

sbose78 9y ago

It's fair to ask the team how frequently they want stand-ups. It could be daily or it could be weekly. Without asking, standups are counter-productive.

ealexhudson 9y ago

I disagree with the basic premise of this: "When it gets cancelled because a certain person is not there, you are doing the meeting for that person". One person being the driving force behind making something happen doesn't imply that all the benefit accrues to them at all. "Just make sure everyone is actually recording what they are missing!" Except they have no way of recording the opportunity cost - they don't know what they haven't been told; they could be missing something huge, but without a venue for communication they don't find out. I have to say, I don't think this is great advice.

3825 9y ago
This isn't great advice because this isn't advice. It isn't advice because there's nothing actionable here. The only thing I'll say you can do if you're in a team like this is try to find your way out. Your "team" is already doomed and beyond saving.
ozim 9y ago
If it is cancelled then he is right, if it is more like there is no one in the room who comes up and calls for standup then you are right.
struppi 9y ago
"Except they have no way of recording the opportunity cost" This is a very good point. I have to think about it more. Still, as an independent consultant, I have seen some teams who get close to 0 value from their dailies (while others got tremendous value). And just trying to change some small things about the dailies will probably lead to no results. "One person being the driving force behind making something happen doesn't imply that all the benefit accrues to them at all." Well, if nobody goes to the daily just because a single person is missing, you have a problem. Right? Even if that problem is only that the others do not recognize the value they are getting...

scorpioxy 9y ago

Stand ups at an agency I am currently working for on a short term engagement just has people in the tech team listing what clients they're going to be working for today. You know, because that's very helpful for everyone to know.... I think the spirit of agile development is lost on most places and blindly sticking to process without questioning it becomes the norm.

awjr 9y ago

"When it gets cancelled because a certain person is not there, you are doing the meeting for that person" This rang true with my current team. It isn't that the meeting doesn't happen but it is extremely fast. No round robin, just a simple 'has anyone got any issues'. Nope, ok carry on. We still get high value from those discussions. My personal observation is that when this senior person is there, they are using the stand-up as a project management meeting. This should really be 'taken offline' and this person should be working with team leads away from the stand-up. Luckily I'm working closely with one of the team leads in an isolated area and I excuse myself from the meeting and let him talk on my behalf but I shouldn't be at that point where I'm trying to avoid them. The other day 8 people did a stand-up for 27minutes. That's a crazy loss of time.

wojt_eu 9y ago
Half an hour meeting with 8 developers takes 4 developer hours. This is often enough to give manager a pause.
- bad_user 9y ago
  That's a drop in the ocean compared to hours wasted dicking around on Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, Reddit, etc
  - antigirl 9y ago
    SSSHHHHhhhhhhh !!!!!
  - 0xfeba 9y ago
    But I'm more productive if I take a 15 minute break every hour, or so some article said so.
- ralmeida 9y ago
  I agree with 'bad_user' here, to some extent. That is enough to give a manager a pause, but not to immediately dismiss it as a bad idea. Most professionals will agree that it's unrealistic to believe that developer-typing-code-time has 100% efficiency. The time spent 'decompressing', which can sometimes manifest itself as spending time reading/doing unrelated stuff, does sometimes produce a solution faster than just banging away coding. Management work is different from coding in that everything is hard and noisy to measure, so to some extent heuristics are relied upon, simply because it's the state of the art in this area. So, even if half an hour meeting with 8 developers takes 4 developer-hours (which is a rather large number), it does not mean those hours are wasted. If one of those meetings a day stops someone spending one week chasing a dead-end known to others at least once in a while, on average the team moves faster, not slower. BTW, I actually agree that 8 developers is too much, and that half an hour is too long for a daily. Just going off a tangent here.

don_draper 9y ago

I haven't done standup in 6 months and I just feel generally better. Where I work you just report to the tech lead every 2 or 3 weeks. So much nicer than daily standups. Could you imagine other professions doing what we do?

DLight1 9y ago
The point of the standup meeting is not to report to someone, but to communicate between team members.
dasmoth 9y ago
Where I work you just report to the tech lead every 2 or 3 weeks. Sounds pretty much perfect to me (although I also know people who would go stir-crazy like this...) Can I ask: what sort of company is this? Dedicated software operation or a tech department inside a company doing something else?
- don_draper 9y ago
  It's an engineering company that does math/science stuff along with regular software development.
martijn_himself 9y ago
In some other professions it would most likely lead to strikes :).
matthewmacleod 9y ago
Where I work you just report to the tech lead every 2 or 3 weeks. So much nicer than daily standups. This might work for some organisations, products or development styles. In my team of five, over a two or three week period we might have delivered half a dozen customer-facing features or changes, and the team will generally be working quite collaboratively on those. It would not be feasible to 'report to a tech lead every 2 or 3 weeks'. Could you imagine other professions doing what we do? Yes, and I think in some cases they would gain a lot from it.

scalatohaskell 9y ago

I agree with author... instead of doing "Scrum", how about we act like adults, and speak with people when we need to, in respect to their time, schedule accordingly, and not clown and parade around with scrum and poker cards. http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/

matthewmacleod 9y ago
Ugh, this attitude is just the worst. There are a whole bunch of legitimate reasons that aspects of Scrum are useful to some teams. Like the planning poker thing –I work with a team of talented, experienced and professional developers, and we still have misconceptions about complexity that are revealed by the planning poker approach. The idea that 'if everyone just programmed it would be fine' is totally asinine.
- scalatohaskell 9y ago
  that's not how I meant it. Sure, plan it, however it suits you and the team. If planning poker works for you, great. But do you need to coat it under "Scrum", having special moderators such as Scrummaster and consultations every year how you are not doing scrum "enough". I don't advocate programming anarchy, but I don't like when managers treat programmers like some woodchoppers that they need to wrap fine grained process around, instead of having the team work the way it fits them best.
  - matthewmacleod 9y ago
    I completely agree that 'agile' without being agile is just buzzword bingo, and I've been through it myself. Ultimately, plan however works for your team. But I do get the impression generally that there can be a lot of unjustified resistance to any kind of organisation among certain groups of developers; it pays to be open-minded about techniques that can work.
    - scalatohaskell 9y ago
      I think the resistance is not unjustified - mostly programmers are fed up with "these" things, since they always get misused against them (i.e. - estimations - you and me know how it works, that it's well, estimation - but in back there is manager who translates it in his excel to $$$ and time, and the second your 8point story is now day overdue you are being pushed to zones which only further damage the project down the road (costs which you will have to pay by overtimes, not the guy behind his excel). Does that mean estimation is bad? No. It's non-programmers who misuse it. Would team be better without estimation? Probably, since it wouldn't be misused by external elements, and we could just do our damn job). Perhaps the original agile was meant correctly, but as of today most organisations just use it to justify and coat (perhaps) same things agile was to be against. For me today Agile has so way too many faces. If it doesn't work, answer is always "you're not doing agile/scrum correctly). There are always reasons how you're not being agile enough, no matter how many times you fine-tune your "agile" on retrospectives, if there are managers and people misusing it against you, you could as well be better without it. What an incomprehensive piece of text I wrote. Sorry. I'm not native English speaker. If you're lucky non of this applies though, but you have to be lucky enough to work with lots of (prehaps we might say all) smart people across whole "chain of command".

danielbln 9y ago

We have switched to asynchronous, slack-based standups a long time ago, moderated by a bot (we're using a modified version of https://github.com/eelzon/morgenbot https://github.com/eelzon/morgenbot). This way everyone knows what everyone else has been up to, will be up to and what blockers are, without being caught up in endless discussions, and since it's asynchronous, people can supply their standup (within limits) at their own leisure. Works well for us.

dasmoth 9y ago
If you have to have fine-grained updates, this is so obviously the right way to do it that I'm startled it's not ubiquitous. (But if there isn't a compelling reason to be counting the days, it's still nice to have the option to "go dark" for a few days sometimes)
epalmer 9y ago
Apologies if the repo makes this obvious. I'm on my phone. Do you maintain a virtual scrum board? What software do you use and how do you like it? I am on small scrum team and we all would like to go virtual for many reasons. Mostly we are from different parts of campus and the travel time eats productivity. And many of us have families that get in the way of the morning standup. A virtual one can be done from anywhere. Thanks for any help.
- danielbln 9y ago
  Yeah, we are using Trello to coordinate our tasks/stories, and have been quite happy with it.

expertentipp 9y ago

The effort to say something about yesterday and about today is an obsolete overhead. Sometimes one is just stuck for couple of days with bloated and partially obsolete Java setup, sometimes one has done nothing and needs a break instead of daily confessions. Saying these might be perceived arrogant or disrespectful. I perceive standups as an immature way to discipline developers.

Confusion 9y ago
So just say "still working on ..." or "didn't get much done today, ...". We understand.
- jakubp 9y ago
  The latter statement undermines your position in the group. Not a smart thing to say long-term.
matthewmacleod 9y ago
Saying these might be perceived arrogant or disrespectful. I perceive standups as an immature way to discipline developers. If this is what's happening in a team, then there is something more broken than unnecessary stand-ups. It should be perfectly acceptable to talk openly an honestly about the things that you have or have not been able to do. If you're in a situation where you have to 'hide' the work you have been doing, then your team atmosphere is poisonous and avoiding stand-ups is not going to fix that.
- jakubp 9y ago
  If you're in a situation where you have to 'hide' the work you have been doing, then your team atmosphere is poisonous and avoiding stand-ups is not going to fix that. Unfortunate office reality is that it's sometimes beneficial to withdraw by "hiding" your work or by not contributing openly to a discussion. The benefit is in avoiding (negative) spotlight, avoiding additional work or pressure, or similar consequences. This can happen even in an otherwise happy and supportive environment. If you're not pushed too hard by anyone, you can become complacent and settle on doing less. You can argue this is poisonous, but I'm not sure many people would call those "low ambition" or "low stress" or "hands off management" environments poisonous.

mdekkers 9y ago

I do some contracting from time to time with a devshop that has gone "full agile" - I love these people, and have a lot of respect for the work they do, but OH. MY. GOD. save me from the fucking standups. What a totally useless waste of everybodies' time. I refuse to attend most of them in any case, which harms my standing with the project managers, but I seriously don't care - most standups as well as the majority of other project management activities they practice appear to be designed to keep the project managers happy, and contribute little to the overall quality or speed of delivery of the project at hand, and are a massive distraction to everyone involved. Daily $project_management_ritual should die.

johan_larson 9y ago

I've worked both in a standard office setting and remotely. When I was in-office, I found the daily stand-ups tedious, because everyone was telling me stuff I was already aware of. But now when I am remote I find the stand-ups much more useful, because they are telling me stuff I don't already know. It's like stand-ups are overkill when the team is already working together in close quarters.

JackMorgan 9y ago

As a counterpoint: stand-ups can be a great way to operate a team without a managers, tech leads, or assigned work: http://deliberate-software.com/self-organizing-balance/ http://deliberate-software.com/self-organizing-balance/ I think "bad stand-ups" is a symptom you are using a self-organizing practice in a command-and-control team.

js8 9y ago
This is nice in theory, but I am afraid it fails quickly in practice. I am a leftist, but I don't believe self-organizing works in situations where there is some higher level of control. People don't have incentive to self-organize in small scale, if there is some other big beneficiary outside their control. This is very abstract, so let me give two examples of what I mean. 1. In communist countries, sometimes, self-organization was tried on the level of individual state-owned companies (basically they were supposed to run as worker-owned cooperatives). It mostly failed horribly. But all of these countries were dictatorships with top-level, directive planning of the economy. So these "cooperatives" were still subject to larger plans, and that broke the incentive (or will) to self-organize. 2. Similarly, even though many companies try to have people self-organize, it falls flat because of the basic capitalistic premise - that there is an owner (or multiple owners) to the whole enterprise. This owner takes in a large amount of economic profit, which, if the team was truly self-organizing, would stay within the team. This breaks the incentive to self-organize. Why make something more efficient (even as a group) if some other people are going to decide how much you benefit? So I think, taken my and your conclusions together, bad stand-ups are inevitable, except maybe in worker cooperatives (which are actually very efficient in capitalist economy, that is, if they operate entirely for the benefits of their own members).
- JackMorgan 9y ago
  I disagree with the premise that self-organization can only work when people are motivated by money. I believe that money is only a component of motivation, and sometimes a negative one. Intrinsic motivations like mastery and a job well done are much more effective in my opinion. You should check out the book "Reinventing Organizations" which is a case study of 12 successful self-organizing companies and how they do it. Also I'd like to hear your feedback to my post that shows how my team has accomplished it for over a decade and counting.

yeukhon 9y ago

I used to like standup because that's the only time I have to see what my team is soingnsince most of them are remote and working in a different time-zome. It was a great way to give tips and do the "okay let's talk about this offline afterward." But now I hated it. Not only rhe standup is mismanaged ao badly, I also don't have much to update on a daily basis which means I feel useless if I have nothing to say or have little progress on my tickets.

douche 9y ago

The standup meeting can burn in hell. It's a lovely bit of useless micromanagement. Consider: If you're organized at all, there should be notifications going out when anyone on your team commits code, or comments on tickets, or whatever. If your communications are so dysfunctional that you need to have a defined point every day to apprise people of what is going on or ask questions of your teammates, focusing on that root problem would be more effective than band-aiding it with a daily standup. There's never a good time to schedule it. No matter when you do so, it's going to frig someone up and waste one to two hours of productive flow time, at best. First thing in the morning doesn't work, because people run late. Later in the morning, and you might as well kiss the whole morning goodbye for productive work. At the end of the day, it will inevitably run over and piss off everybody who needs to get the hell out of the office and take care of their personal obligations at the end of the day. There's always one or two people that want to ramble along and narrate every little thing they did in excruciating detail. Or that want to turn an issue that turns up relevant to two people into an interminable status/planning meeting on that issue. Mostly, I'm just not convinced that there is any way to do a standup meeting right, so that it is useful for it's stated purpose without being more costly than it is worth. If you need this kind of fine-grained progress reporting, have everybody send an email or a group chat with the three standup kindergarten circle-time questions answered. Then if there is an actual need to meet and go over something, you can identify the relevant people and not waste everyone else's time. We ditched standup meetings a while back. It's been glorious.

Beltiras 9y ago

I'm in a small team. I am the lone coder and I report directly to the CEO. I asked to do a standup because it's imperative for me to gain focus on tasks and frame my work. We used to have weekly status meetings but that was too infrequent. Instead of a weekly half-hour we now do 2-5 minutes of me standing in his doorway running through the "Yesterday I worked on [tasklist]. I am [not] stuck. I [don't] have resources for my tasks. Today I commit to work on [tasklist]." Standup for me is making me accountable.

algesten 9y ago

We (the developers) took control over our standups. We went back to basics and talked about _why_ are we doing kanban boards standups, and found two reasons. 1) We do need better awareness of what others around us are doing, especially across the dev/ops divide. 2) Communication, kanban is there to show interested non-devs how projects are progressing. We update the kanban before the meeting and let one person per day read through the entire board for today/ongoing/blocked. If there are any tasks that person doesn't understand – this is the time to ask. The process takes often less than 10 mins per day. Any issues raised will be discussed in loosely formed groups afterwards to not waste everyone's time. I think what I learned is that you mustn't let process be shoved on you by middle management. Take control to make these things productive for you.

struppi 9y ago
This is a great example. In one team I was coaching, we also experienced that standups improved when we switched to a kanban board and enumerating tasks on the board: We would not ask people "What did you do today", but pick a task and ask: "Who contributed to that task? Who thinks they can contribute?" This made a huge difference (although there still were people that did not like the daily stand up - but less than before).
mianos 9y ago
We have a slack channel. You write what you did yesterday, what you are going to do today. If you are blocked, what is blocking you. When you expect to deliver what. Everyone does it. As a reader, you skip the stuff you don't care much for. Pretty interesting though. Maybe ask someone for further clarification. Works great. I like to do it just before I leave for work. The only issue is some skill-less turkey with a title 'coach' can't make a buck, but I am sure he would pipe in and tell us we are doing it all wrong.
- jakozaur 9y ago
  In fact we write plan for today on Slack and later modify me message to change what actually gets done. It is great because: 1. Most of the time you skim the list, but sometimes want to follow up and collaborate. It helps ppl keep on same page and avoid redoing the same stuff. 2. Async, written as first thing when you come to work. 3. Writing todos and sharing them helps ppl to get focused and make them productive.

throwthrowisit 9y ago

"She cancels the daily standup meeting, a.k.a "Daily Scrum". Did that ever happen to you?" Nope.

user5994461 9y ago

Never do daily meeting. Never accept daily meeting. Never participate in daily mettings. That's simply too frequent. People will spend all their day thinking about what they will present the next day instead of doing actual work.

taneq 9y ago
If you're working in an interdisciplinary team you need to know what the other groups in your team are working on. Maybe if you're doing deep research or something, you can hide in your cave and focus purely on your own work, but if you're doing implementation rather than research, you have to understand all of what's going on.
- ljw1001 9y ago
  If everyone needs to know what everyone else is doing, you have no encapsulation in your code, which is a major design flaw.
- dagw 9y ago
  If you're working in an interdisciplinary team you need to know what the other groups in your team are working on. Sure, but does everybody need to be updated every single day? And does that update have to take the form of an all hands meeting?
- Udik 9y ago
  But if you need to know what the others are working on, isn't it simpler to ask them at any time when the curiosity arises? Do you need to stand up and listen to what everybody is working on, every day, in order to do what you should do naturally, that is, be in touch with the members of your team?
- mattmanser 9y ago
  Who changes what those groups are working on from day-to-day without telling anyone?
tremon 9y ago
If you need to "present" something during your daily meeting, you're doing it wrong.

kornakiewicz 9y ago

Basically: - if it's a status/reporting meeting - don't do it, there are better tools. - if it's knowledge transfer meeting and it benefits a whole team - do it.

samblr 9y ago

In regular corporate settigns, I see these standup meetings are a way to simply make information flood across organisation hierarchy. A good leader can then parse and make sense of signal amongst plenty of noise. But it does rarely serves that purpose. We used to 've standup of 10 members several years ago! Since then I kind of developed disliking towards regular meetings. Currently we 've a trello-kanban updated so that we've information flowing. And a weekly mail with traffic lights, explaining current-and-next week activities - working well so far.

Samathy 9y ago

I found out yesterday that a new colleague who is transferring from another department is used to having mandatory hour long daily standups. We were all shocked that a manager could justify wasting that much time every single day. We have no standups since we all work on different projects, we don't really need to know what everyone else is doing.

ryanmarsh 9y ago

As a coach here's my question about the standard standup format (what did you do yesterday, etc...) If the reason we are all here is to get the work done why is it ok that it's a mystery what is done or not? Why is it not obvious? Why do we have to ask? Why not just keep your board or whatever up to date and talk about other things? Like surprises, blockers, questions, or concerns.

noxToken 9y ago
> Why not just keep your board or whatever up to date and talk about other things? Like surprises, blockers, questions, or concerns. I could be wrong, but I think that might have been the original intent. Enumerating everything work related you did yesterday is a waste of time. "I worked on X, Y, and Z. Y and Z are closed. I still need to finish up X," tells nothing that the board doesn't tell. If Y and Z are closed, Y and Z's status reflect that on the board. "X is still unfinished. An external dependency from ${team} is failing, so I'm coordinating with ${point-of-contact} to resolve the issue." That is a worthwhile update that takes the same amount of time yet contains infinitely more information. Maybe we need a new format. Everyone who speaks could start with, "Everything I did was routine except..." We know that you went to a meeting with another upstream team, because you have that same meeting at the same time every Tuesday. Therefore, we don't need you to say, "Yesterday I went to a meeting with ${team}." Give us the meeting details that's relevant to our team. You then drop the preamble after a few days or so.
- ryanmarsh 9y ago
  I think you're right, I think it was the original intent. Seems to be lost on quite a few coaches though
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

flurdy 9y ago

Appreciate the OP is about whether the stand up is for the scrum master/project manager etc or for the team members. Hopefully it is both, and mostly the later. Also see in the other threads (and discussion in general) that mistakes the standups as for reporting your status to managers. That may be required in some organisations or partially, but not in most. But I would view a good stand up one that does NOT require each team member to in turn state the old: "what they did yesterday, what will do toady, any impediments". Instead you hope project leadership trust their team members and instead focus on the tasks. In order of task priority a participant in that story can quicklyy broadcast if anything has changed with a task/story, no need for details of what happened yesterday, no need for whom did what etc. Then if any impediments for that story, escalations, anything else etc. And just quickly rattle through them to make sure focus is maintained on getting the tasks flowing through to delivered. TL;DR focus on tasks not people reporting. I ranted about this some years ago... http://blog.flurdy.com/2013/04/i-dont-care-what-you-did-yesterday-i.html http://blog.flurdy.com/2013/04/i-dont-care-what-you-did-yest...

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

In my old job we used Geekbot [0], a Slack bot for async standup meetings. It's great for geographically distributed teams. I found it made it much easier to get an idea of what people were up to, as well as providing an opening for occasional tips and suggestions. Posts typically included a mix of what you achieved, what you hope to achieve, and any blockers. Any updates or big breakthroughs were usually shared as well. I think it's best to be flexible about how frequently status updates are shared, leaving it up to the developer's discretion. [0] https://geekbot.io https://geekbot.io

DorothySim 9y ago

Also relevant: https://vimeo.com/110554082 https://vimeo.com/110554082

JetJaguar 9y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvks70PD0Rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvks70PD0Rs

gdulli 9y ago

I've been at my current job for 5 years and spent my previous 15 at 7 different jobs combined. It's not an accident that I've stayed at this one but left all of the others. This is the one where people are allowed to be responsible for their own productivity without overhead like standups, project managers, status reports, task tracking software, etc. It couldn't work for all people or all companies, but it means enough to me to manage my career around finding the environments like this one that make me enjoy coming to work so much more.

kabdib 9y ago

Our "scrum" stand-ups were taken over by the PM stack, and they started getting longer and longer and weren't useful for the team doing the work. So I started calling them status meetings. "Hey, stand-up in five minutes!" "You mean status?" ... and kept doing that. Eventually even the PM grudgingly admitted that it was just a status meeting, and referred to it that way himself. It was okay; agile had died (and turned into simple micro-management) a long time ago in our division.

Meai 9y ago

In my opinion standups are mood killers. If you need something, you ask for it anyway. Anything else would be ridiculous, you have a job to do and you need something from somebody so you ask. This is collaboration 101. Yeah sure, there is some tiny possibility that person A happens to mention his approach to some task and person B happens to know a better way, but really that is such a motivation killer for several psychological reasons, but even more than that: How likely is that? It never happens anyway and if you know your colleagues, you likely already know if they probably can help you with something and you ask them for some pointers. If you don't do that, a standup isn't going to help you because you don't want help. So for who's benefit are standups and "agile" in general? It's for the benefit of managers who by their nature don't have insight into what's going on in general and they want the most superficial general overview of what everyone is doing. For developers, I don't see any added value whatsoever. This applies to all pillars of agile, I could go on and on about this. Agile is only pseudo-beneficial for managers. Everybody knows everything and then everybody(=nobody) is responsible when code breaks, giving the manager peace of mind but the developer couldn't care less: It's not like it was his baby.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
On the other hand, its very common for a team member to get blocked and not know how to get unblocked. A (occasional) standup can get them past that. And one blocked team member can quickly become the long pole on the tent. Standups and agile are quite useful, especially for new teams or teams of greener developers. Which, in our growth industry, is 'most teams everywhere'. If you're part of a team that's worked well for months or years, then the utility is greatly diminished. I think standups can gracefully fade away after some months.
- Meai 9y ago
  > On the other hand, its very common for a team member to get blocked and not know how to get unblocked Yes of course that can happen and I said so, which means that he should ask whoever is blocking him how to proceed. If he doesn't know who it is, he asks the manager and he will direct him to the right person. If there is literally no way to proceed, he will work on another issue in the meantime and inform the manager that he's blocked on the more important stuff. If there is some way to speed it along together with multiple other people, it will come up when he talks to that first guy. Obviously waiting for the next standup tomorrow is a ridiculous proposition, so standups solve a problem for 1 time of the day requiring by definition more people than should be required because everyone is in it instead of pulling the people in that need to be pulled in for that specific block or feature. I don't even know how people defend standups, they usually say something like "hey yeah, I know it's mostly useless but it's just for 10min a day". Absolutely unacceptable. Now I get to the last line of your post, and it's such a relief: "I think standups can gracefully fade away after some months." Well you should tell the other proponents of standups because I can guarantee you that this never happens. Standups might be a good idea in the starting phase of a projects but frankly even then it's debatable and then you would just call them meetings.

themtutty 9y ago

Ugh. Provocative, radical idea that is founded upon overly-simple, faulty assumptions. To think that the author's three categories for teams are the only three, and that standup communication only takes the forms he describes is just hubris, and leads to dangerous advice.

lojack 9y ago
The author identified three potential pitfalls of stand ups and suggested not doing them if you fit into those three categories. Title comes off as a blanket statement, but I didn't get that feeling from the rest of the article.

cavanasm 9y ago

I'm a junior developer in a "Scaled Agile Framework" (SAFe, apparently) team at a VERY big company, and although we never cancel our stand ups, the format seems to exclusively be for status updates / reporting, and not "for the team". Feels like everyone else is habituated to it though, and they don't seem to mind, but it definitely bothers me. Generally lucky if a morning stand up takes 30 minutes, let alone 15.

rosalinekarr 9y ago

I'm seeing a lot of comments about how terrible different people's standup meetings are at their particular companies, and I can't help but think the problem isn't with standup itself, it's with these companies. At my job, we meet for standup via video chat as early as we can. That's about 9am for some of us and 10am or 11am for others depending on timezones. We each say what we worked on yesterday and what we're working on now, which only takes about 5 to 10 minutes, then we enter what we call "parking lot." We call it "parking lot" because if this were an in-person meeting, this is bit where we would be talking in the parking lot on our way out to lunch. No one is expected to stick around unless there's something urgent related to what your working on that needs to be discussed. Anyone is free to hop off the call at this point. During parking lot, we discuss impediments, anything that's going to keep someone from getting work done that day. If the problem is something complicated that's difficult to describe via text, we chat about it face to face and work out a solution together. If the problem is simple, we just agree to talk it out in either a public or private channel on Slack depending the kind of problem. The purpose of the meeting isn't to build a big report of who's working on what or to guilt us into working harder. It's just to guarantee that we're all online at a given time each day to help each other out. Working across several timezones, we all have wildly different hours, and without standup, we would probably be waiting for days to hear back from each other about any issues we run into. Maybe standup is a problem for other people or other companies, but for my team at least, we couldn't work without it.

vikingcaffiene 9y ago
Couldn't agree more with what you are saying here. Daily stand ups, if done right are very helpful especially for remote teams. I did daily stand ups at my previous company and they took on average an hour and were unfocused, meandering and generally pointless. I dreaded them and the whole team felt the same. By contrast, my current team is much larger but keeps the daily stand up to 15 minutes. It's focused and everyone is on page about tabling longer discussions for post stand up with the relevant stakeholders. While I won't ever say I'm looking forward to it, I see the tangible benefits. We are a remote team across multiple time zones and are able to effectively work together with ease. The daily stand up is a big part of that.
9y ago

dkhenry 9y ago

I found the best way to make a standup successful was to put a hard limit on how long people could talk. When my teams were working the best they had a limit of 15 seconds ( I would count down while they talked ). The stand up is situational awareness not status of ongoing projects. Once the 15 second round of updates were done, if there was someone I needed more information from I would grab them after the standup to talk to them. I don't really understand how a team can have a 30 minute standup, to me that is a manager who is lazy or disconnected who doesn't bother to follow the teams progress on the myriad of tools they inevitably have ( Whiteboards, Jira, Github, ..... )

lojack 9y ago
I would refuse to go to any meeting where I was asked to talk and then had someone counting down from 15 the second I started. I understand why you're doing it, but it comes off as rude and demeaning to me. My stand ups are time boxes at 15 minutes total, and the person running the meeting cuts it off at 15 minutes even if people haven't had a chance to talk. If you have something to say you don't have to cram it in 15 seconds, but often people just pass. It only takes a few meetings going over 15 minutes for habits to adjust.
- iamatworknow 9y ago
  >I would refuse to go to any meeting where I was asked to talk and then had someone counting down from 15 the second I started. I understand why you're doing it, but it comes off as rude and demeaning to me Like a parent counting down before you're put in time out.
- dkhenry 9y ago
  the countdown is necessary because its rude and demeaning for someone to take up everyone time by talking longer then they should. In a perfect world we all agree to the rules and follow them, but like you said even at 15 minutes someone has to cut everyone else off. Its the same principle applied at a different level. You time box the whole meeting and someone is rude and disbands it before everyone has talked, or you time box each person and everyone gets a chance to talk. In an environment where you have a mix of strong personalities and more introspective people the folks who are more soft spoken will be drown out if you don't specifically allot them time to talk. At least that has been my experience

geori 9y ago

The point of a standup is to coordinate team communication in batches and not interrupt people at random times. We always finish it up in less than 15 minutes and then small groups meet afterwards about talking points.

lawnchair_larry 9y ago
Whenever you decide to have a standup is a random time for some people. For some, it will be too early, prematurely terminating their sleep cycle and rushing them in, probably leaving them below peak cognitive performance for the entire day. For others, they are already in their awake-and-productive time, and they'll either have to stop to join, or they will simply waste time until the meeting, knowing that an interruption is on the way, and being preoccupied with those thoughts. To work as a team, this is going to happen here and there, and that's fine. But to do it daily as a ritual is an incredible tax on your human capital for no good reason. Not only that, but you're filtering out your talent pool to folks who don't perform at their best under these constraints. From what I have seen, these can often be very high performers.

mfukar 9y ago

Right now my team are trying out only doing standups if there's important stuff to share. This leads to 1-2 standups per week for the past month. Tidbits of info which can be shared at a glance, and probably don't affect anybody's workflow, go on a whiteboard. That way we know everybody's status, and seems like we can share important info when it matters.

smizell 9y ago

For those who do daily standups via a Slack channel, I made a little tool to help me. https://www.npmjs.com/package/onit https://www.npmjs.com/package/onit

htsh 9y ago

I can see the value of the standup but I find daily to be too often. The best teams I've worked with have staggered them to either M-W-F or T-R, primarily because the work we do require more than a day. And depending how one works, a daily standup every morning makes it tough to get a good night's work in. I often point people to PG's relevant essay during discussions about this: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

pinaceae 9y ago

My team is working on an big application with 100k+ users, worldwide, generating a couple hundred mill in revenue/year. Native apps on multiple mobile platforms, heavy enterprise stuff. Tried it without stand-ups - doesn't work. Once you need to coordinate heavily, care about speed and quality at the same time, working in code bases others have written you try to align with others as much as possible. We do 2-3 stand-ups per week, depending on team preference. M-W-F or T-T. It works, far less trial and error, far less issues found late in QA. Daily is too much, that we learned. No structured stand-up at all doesn't work either, humans are not disciplined enough across large teams. YMMV.

timwaagh 9y ago

stand up has to be the one good thing about scrum. the rest is just boring meetings which cost too much time entirely. but 5 minutes i can spare each day. the daily accountability it brings keeps managers from firing me (i have been fired way too many times often in the first week) as they know what i'm doing and therefore dont think i lack motivation. it also motivates me to perform even better. i dont think standup is bad at all and i think managers should be present for it. it may not be for some kind of idealistic 'for the team' thing or even the original intent, but... standups are a good thing. even if you're not doing agile, standups can still be useful to keep managers informed if you are a larger team (>3 people).

Chaebixi 9y ago

> Stop the Daily Standup Meeting Please yes! Especially the more dogmatic ones (e.g. only stating what you did yesterday, what you're going to do today, what's blocking you). It's just an empty status reporting ritual that feeds some negative emotional need of a manager (either anxiousness or a need to feel directly in control). Personally, I think a freeform dev team meeting that happens 2 or 3 times a week is much more valuable. For instance: if there's a big issue going on, lets actually talk about it rather than merely stating we're working on it (and taking "offline" the only information others might actually be curious about).

alienreborn 9y ago

I actually like the way we do stand ups at my current job. All of us sit together, so we just stand up in place and state what we are working on and if we have any blockers that need to be taken offline with specific ppl. Whole thing will be done under 2mins.

Floegipoky 9y ago

No way, my team gets a lot of value from our standup! We have 5 devs. We have a scrum master, but we rotate who's facilitating from our lead down to our most junior dev. If our scrum master's out it's no problem, any one of us is able to step up. The first ~10 minutes or so are spent updating the team on the progress we made yesterday and making sure everyone knows what they're working on today. Pretty standard fair. But we always take a full 1/2 hour. We use the rest of the time for backlog grooming. It works really well for us for 2 reasons: 1. We get a lot of reactive work, and it's really convenient to have time set aside every day to address it 2. By piggybacking backlog grooming onto time that we're already scheduled to be together as a team, we cut down on the number of other meetings we need to have (and context switching to/from coding). We all find it much more convenient to spend an extra ~20 minutes together every morning so that we can have the rest of the day to work.

itomato 9y ago

Tracking systems and wallboards should suffice. In absence of those, a 15 minute Standup seems (woefully) inadequate by comparison.

mixmastamyk 9y ago

Worked on a team just like described, all on different projects. It was infuriating, the boss interrupted me every morning at ten, just as I was entering the "zone" for a no value (to me) standup.

TimJYoung 9y ago

Team-oriented software development has become somewhat infantilized, and it's a worrying trend that keeps showing up in our society, in general. We need to stop approaching team development with the expectation that one or more team members will need checking up on because they're goofing off too much or not working on what they're supposed to be working on. Professional software development is a career, and we should be able to start all employer <-> employee relationships with the expectation that a) we're all adults, and will treat each other accordingly, and b) we're all, ultimately, responsible for our own work and the work of the team. If someone repeatedly demonstrates that they can't execute in this fashion, then they're gone. There's simply too much to do, and dragging the entire team down to the level of the least-responsible member is ridiculous. You're better off just distributing the extra work among existing team members. For example: want the team to bond and communicate ? Ditch the daily meetings, and every Friday take the team out for a meandering late work lunch where everyone talks about the week, what they're working on, the overall project, etc. Any other time, everyone knows where the other team members are working - if there's something that you need, you ask in the least-intrusive way possible, depending upon how busy the other team member is and the importance of your task.

relics443 9y ago

My company did standup for 3 years either in person or over hangouts (once we became distributed), and recently switched to an async model over slack. Much better engagement, and much better quality updates.

edpichler 9y ago

People, I respectfully do not agree with this blog post. How people can notice that work is not being done if they don't do meetings? How to assure they are communicating correctly? How to prevent a bomb explodes a day before the deadline? If you discover problems close to the deadline, you already have a big problem. My opinion is that these daily meeting are to prevent problems, like integration between systems. People are comfortable on their own doings, they don't like meetings, they prefer a problem occurs and share the blame than doing daily meetings. We must do daily meetings because it's good for the project and not because we enjoy it, we do to avoid that some lazy or introvert collaborator don't share a problem that can affect everybody. That's why we have a scrum master to do the dirty job and assure everyone is talking each other.

edpichler 9y ago
You can perfectly go to a daily scrum meeting and say that you are doing your job on schedule and have no problem to report and, maybe, are available to someone who need a help. These meetings must be rapid.
Ace17 9y ago
> That's why we have a scrum master to do the dirty job and assure everyone is talking each other. Encouraging communication is a great goal ; but trying to force it on a regular basis might have the contrary effect.
- edpichler 9y ago
  It's complicated. Who decides if it's necessary? Most of people prefer to stay on their comfort zone, that is why I think the team must follow some rules.

deleted 9y ago

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