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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 som

• 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.
    • JoeAltmaier 9y ago
      Green developers can not know who to ask (they're new, right?) or not know when or how to ask. They can be quite tentative. We're talking Engineers, not Sales guys. Some folks don't think they need standups, ok. But in reality, many folks benefit from them.
      • kpil 9y ago
        I agree, even experienced developers can get stuck barking up the wrong tree. There are at least one or two exchanges like this every week in my team: Dev A: - I'm working on X, and will just need to fix the code for Y to handle it. It's a bit messy but I'm probably done tomorrow. Dev B: - Eh... I think you need to do something to the Z code, we can take a look after the meeting. Dev A: - Sure.
  • kisstheblade 9y ago
    If someone gets blocked that someone better ask for help instead of just doing nothing. How does some daily ritual help with this?
  • lj3 9y ago
    > its very common for a team member to get blocked and not know how to get unblocked. Is it? I haven't seen this very often and only with very junior engineers. Anybody with even a modicum of experience knows to ask for help when they're stuck. On the other hand, what I have seen all too often is an experienced dev blocking everybody else because of poor scheduling by the manager. Oftentimes, there's no way others can help with this. The dev knows what needs to happen, but it takes time and the dev just needs to do it. This makes every standup a humiliation. 'Is Joe still blocking Ted and Tara? Can you speed it up, Joe?'
    • Meai 9y ago
      That is exactly how I see and have experienced it as well. It's part of why I called it a motivation killer but I didn't go into more detail. Not only because of the accusatory thing but also I actually like to surprise my colleagues with cool features and issues I solve, surprising them with my speed even. If I attend a standup, I need to report that I'm working on these things so the surprise is gone. All my motivation to get them done asap is gone. Likewise, I can't do my own "secret" time planning anymore. I like to finish some mandatory feature fast so I can squeeze in a little extra cool thing I wanted to do for a long time. If I have to explain and justify this stuff, the manager will step in and urge me to do other mandatory things instead. It's such a mindkiller.
      • bhauer 9y ago
        When I manage teams, I love having productive and self-motivated people like yourself on the team. As long as you are able to complete the scheduled and required tasks, if by being light-touch with process, you are motivated to contribute above and beyond, the whole team reaps dividends. I have seen such members contribute great tooling upgrades, features to reduce administrative overhead, automation mechanisms, and even delightful user-facing features. In my opinion, processes are designed to resolve or prevent dysfunction. An extra-productive team member that completes assigned tasks and adds in some of their own creativity on top is generally not a source of dysfunction, so I prefer to encumber such people with as little process as feasible. I for one love engaged productive developers who deliver bonus features of the sort I mentioned above and I find over-processing curtails those bonuses.
  • gbersac 9y ago
    > its very common for a team member to get blocked and not know how to get unblocked. In this case just post the question of your team channel on slack.
  • Too 9y ago
    Blocked beginners usually know how to ask their way out of blockers without standups. Another bigger problem with beginners though is the "creative" beginner. For those a stand up is a good place to catch "I just started writing a parser for X to solve problem Y" when there already is a company standard X-parser that the beginner doesn't know about.
• bogomipz 9y ago
  >"So for who's benefit are standups and "agile" in general?" I've worked in a couple of shops where the company hired "Agile Coaches" and then assigned teams a dedicated Agile Coach. The Agile Coaches sole responsibility seemed to be to write up the sticky notes and do the physical moving of them to different swim lanes on the board. It really felt we were having the standups solely for that person's benefit. I couldn't figure out what that person did outside of the 15 minute morning standup.
  • brianwawok 9y ago
    Sounds like a sweet gig
  • superzadeh 9y ago
    I could bet that was one of those coaches with 5 Agile Certifications and no proven track record. Good thing is not all Coaches are like this, but the good ones are actually hard to find.
• js8 9y ago
  > In my opinion standups are mood killers. I came to the same conclusion - standups are placebo for managers and nocebo for (at least some) engineers. Meaning, they have no observable effect whatsoever, they only make managers feel better and engineers feel worse. Unfortunately, SCRUM (and many other methodologies) is not based on scientific method. If it was, then all placebos and nocebos would be weeded out during empirical testing.
  • sillysaurus3 9y ago
    I want to agree, but there's no way to apply the scientific method to this case. Experiments would take at least several months to run, because it's not till several months that you know whether your business is going to fail solely due to the dev team. And at that point it's hard to run another experiment. More importantly, the scientific method relies on an oracle (nature) to tell us whether we're right or wrong. It's not so easy to apply when there's no conclusive way to know you're mistaken. That said, I completely agree that standups are for managers. Someone once said that standups are to re-affirm that everyone reports to the manager, and pretty much nothing else.
    • jerf 9y ago
      "Experiments would take at least several months to run, because it's not till several months that you know whether your business is going to fail solely due to the dev team." If you use the rather stodgy and formulaic scientific method, sure. But if you approach this as a multi-arm bandit problem, and instead look at the question as "how much information do I need to collect with how much statistical power before I am justified in selecting an outcome?", it becomes quite tractable for a team to just try it out. It also helps if instead of using merely "productivity" as your one and only goal that you also consider team happiness as a real and going concern. Then "Nobody likes it and it's demoralizing the engineers" becomes a perfectly valid form of feedback to use in the decision about whether to do it. I also tend to use the metric that the brain is really, really, really good at figuring out what's important, sometimes perhaps even too good, so if we start a stand-up meeting plan, and it just sort of peters out, then I let it go. (Seems like somebody wants to try it every 2 or 3 years or so, I generally just let it happen and then evaluate.) Everybody's brains are coming to the conclusion that it's not important. Rather than fighting it, roll with it. There are some things in life where your rational forebrain must override the deeper instinctive algorithms about what is important, but that's quite cognitively expensive, and I've never seen any reason to believe that stand-up meetings are bringing enough value to justify that. I emphasize the "I've never seen any reason". I hypothesize that in many ways, the work the teams I've been on have been doing is almost maximally pathologically bad for a stand-up meeting. Almost everyone is working on something independent of everybody else, so blockers are only rarely even possible. If your team is, on the other hand, chock-a-block full of blocking potential it may be useful to you. Anyways, there's more ways to find out the truth of things that trying to split the universe into two precisely equal parts, make a change in only one of them, and come back ten years later to see what happened, only for someone to complain that a sample size of one isn't enough and we really need to do this a thousand more times to have a valid result.
• dasil003 9y ago
  I'm probably biased because I have for decades simultaneously worn both IC and manager hats, but I think you are overlooking the importance of passive awareness. It's not simply a matter of everyone knowing what to do and asking for help when they get blocked, there is serendipity and ad-hoc collaboration involved too. If you are small and everyone is sitting close together at the same times, then maybe you have enough chemistry and passive awareness already and things can just flow naturally. That's amazing when it happens. But there's lots of reasons it doesn't happen. Could be whether there are remote team members, or some team members are shy, or there is a general vibe discouraging interruptions and creating a chilling effect. In those cases, taking a couple minutes to share can be very helpful to keep people on the same page. Granted, every single day is probably excessive for this use case. Traditionally I've had best luck with once or twice a week. As to capital-A Agile, I think it's even worse than you say: it ends up being used by consultants to justify their bloated bills. I would encourage you to go back and re-read The Agile Manifesto though, and realize that this is just what happens when good ideas are cargo culted and productized by the snake oil salesmen. More generally though, I want to challenge the idea that something which only benefits managers is a waste of time. Good managers spend all their time doing things to help their reports, so why wouldn't developers want to take a chunk of time to help the manager do their job? As a developer it's nice to have your task and be able to focus 100%, but that will not be possible or effective if there is no coordination with an eye towards the end result. It can definitely work, but it requires ICs taking on managerial duties (even if they don't label them that way), and it is rarely as effective as having a good project manager once you reach a certain scale.
  • Meai 9y ago
    I don't think that I'm underestimating the passive awareness effect, I think it's very negligably useful. Not only that, it should obviously be solved by a great wiki-type solution that doesn't exist yet. It would be some kind of addon to jira or maybe one of those corporate facebooks that never quite took off or solved the problem that they were supposed to solve. Solving this problem by forcing people to talk to each other in standups is just about the least scalable, least enjoyable solution possible .. especially for people who probably became programmers not because they like talking to people. Inter-departement standups could work in theory but then you realize not everybody can attend because it would be too big of a group. Then you end up with 1 guy of each team having to explain what the other teams are doing to their team. I'm also not knocking managers at all. I'm more than thankful for when they deal with clients and project management and solve inter-team issues and and and. That is real value that they are creating.
• jackhack 9y ago
  Meetings are velocity roadblocks. They rob energy and momentum. Stop the meeting and instead of asking what people are missing, watch velocity. The test of a productive team is spontaneous meetings, whiteboard sessions, and conversations. If people on your team are not getting up and talking, you don't have a team, you have independent contractors.
• tremon 9y ago
  So for who's [sic] benefit are standups and "agile" in general? It's for the benefit of managers If your manager takes part in your daily, you're doing it wrong. The daily is for same-level coordination, not for hierarchical evaluation. In a way, your dailies are to replace your manager, not enable him.