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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 grea

by 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.

dasil003 9y ago
I already conceded that daily standups are probably overkill, but you are going to great lengths to overestimate the cost of a standup. It's not unreasonable to spend 20 minutes a couple times a week to let your colleagues know what you're doing. Using some a wiki is emphatically not the right tool for the job. If the personalities are such that you really don't want to have to talk to a group, you could use something like StandupMail. Also as a single developer, it's entirely possible that you don't know what you don't know, and thus your estimate of value is dubious. As someone who built a product from 0 to 7M users and took a team from 3 people in a room to a team of 50, I can tell you that once we passed the 7 or 8 engineer mark but before we had bi-weekly standups, there was steady drumbeat of cases where the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. One way to manage this would have been for the PM to micromanage everyone, but given that the team was built of entpreneurial full-stack hacker types, it worked a hell of a let better for people just sync up as a group periodically. Obviously you are entitled to your opinion, but also consider that the corner of the dev world that you inhabit is not representative of the universe of software development, and just because sometimes there is a cargo cult mentality doesn't mean that there aren't good reasons for some overdone practices.

by Meai 9y ago

dasil003 9y ago

I already conceded that daily standups are probably overkill, but you are going to great lengths to overestimate the cost of a standup. It's not unreasonable to spend 20 minutes a couple times a week to let your colleagues know what you're doing. Using some a wiki is emphatically not the right tool for the job. If the personalities are such that you really don't want to have to talk to a group, you could use something like StandupMail. Also as a single developer, it's entirely possible that you don't know what you don't know, and thus your estimate of value is dubious. As someone who built a product from 0 to 7M users and took a team from 3 people in a room to a team of 50, I can tell you that once we passed the 7 or 8 engineer mark but before we had bi-weekly standups, there was steady drumbeat of cases where the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. One way to manage this would have been for the PM to micromanage everyone, but given that the team was built of entpreneurial full-stack hacker types, it worked a hell of a let better for people just sync up as a group periodically. Obviously you are entitled to your opinion, but also consider that the corner of the dev world that you inhabit is not representative of the universe of software development, and just because sometimes there is a cargo cult mentality doesn't mean that there aren't good reasons for some overdone practices.