6 ms·

That's useless because everybody else tunes out. Nobody cares what debugging methods you tried on some project they've never touched. If you need help you can j

That's useless because everybody else tunes out. Nobody cares what debugging methods you tried on some project they've never touched. If you need help you can just ask somebody.

chomp 8y ago
I think that's either a team culture issue, a management issue, or a business culture issue. Teams I've worked on have had no issue brainstorming ideas for a person who's stumped. Now, I'm not totally defending standups here, I've been on teams where daily standups are a stuffy formality, and they are miserable. I've also had the pleasure of being on teams where weekly standups were implemented, and they were an absolute delight and completely useful. I will qualify all of my opinions with the fact that the best teams I've worked with implement Kanban, so there is no sprint planning. We just pull off backlog and work with weekly standups. There's way way less overhead, with some tradeoffs. I also definitely think that certain team cultures are completely incompatible with standups, to the point that you receive negative benefit from implementing them. If you have a lot of people who are of the type "my responsibility ends where my story points end", I am pretty sure you will end up have a bad time doing standups.
- lttlrck 8y ago
  Are stand up meetings the correct venue for brainstorming?
  - chomp 8y ago
    Maybe not, but if your peer said "hey can someone help me with this task" in a standup, wouldn't you want to help them once the meeting is over?
    - kelnos 8y ago
      Replace that with asking for help in slack or whatever, and you don't need a standup. And you also get help as soon as people's time is available, not the next day.
      - voltagex_ 8y ago
        I've found that asking for help over text or the phone is less effective than asking in person.
      - Scarblac 8y ago
        But then you'd need people to listen to some slack channel, and be distracted continuously throughout the day. That's worse.
  - maccam94 8y ago
    No, but they can spur an interested subset of people to brainstorm after the standup ends.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    No, those are things you want to take "offline" or "to the parking lot".
- hrktb 8y ago
  In some previous team, I realized that some people working on very long tasks just gave bullshit updates. What they explained was interesting, it gave a sense of progress, and they communicated well. Too well perhaps, their small talk was on super minor or even unrelated stuff that they saw the previous day. They were doing mainly exploratory work, and it made no sense to bring on board other people before they settled on a direction themselves. I think ultimately a one size fits them all approach only “works” when the people on the fringe also play the game and bullshit (in a good light) their way around.
  - still_grokking 8y ago
    It's a good idea to waste valuable engineering time with "bullshit" (in a good light) small talk? OK… I likely will never understand the great minds behind management.
    - jrumbut 8y ago
      It's a trade off. Some of the communication is very valuable, and needs to happen for coordination, knowledge sharing, etc. The potential harm of that communication not happening is great, the risk of having a meeting go 15 minutes longer is worth trying to avoid (hence the article) but much smaller. However, if only some people speak that can create divisions in the team, or make it look like the speakers are the leading members when that may or may not be true. So to prevent that dynamic everyone says something, and people can help the team function better by coming up with a nifty one minute oration. Ultimately making software is a human endeavor. Sometimes a little small talk prevents the humans from feeling bad and not making software. Sometimes it has the opposite effect. The best managers figure out which case is true at a specific time and place and adapt. Good managers just have to pick what risks to take and live with the outcome.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
1. Isn't the standup usually the place you're told to initially ask for that help? 2. Aren't most people, at least the developers/designers in the same standup, supposed to be working on the same project?
- Shaanie 8y ago
  Don't wait until the standup to ask for help if you don't have to. I'm also confused why OP is having standup eith people who havent even heard of the project he's working on. Doesn't sound like he's working on the same product as the other developers.
  - fakecigar 8y ago
    +1 The standup should be the place of last resort for bringing up barriers impeding a task. The more resourceful you can be at solving a problem/brainstorming outside of the standup the better ime
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    "Don't wait until the standup to ask for help if you don't have to." I didn't mean to imply that, but one of the purposes of stand-up is to give a place for that to happen.
- drunken-serval 8y ago
  #2 never happened at any job I've had. It was always the entire team and we all had different projects. Sometimes entirely different applications.
  - taneq 8y ago
    That sounds like you were all on different teams, in the sense being used here, and probably shouldn't have all been in the same standup together apart from maybe a once-a-week catchup.
    - zamber 8y ago
munk-a 8y ago
I think your team is too big then. Don't have company wide standups, have a standup per team and possibly role. If you're working on a web stack have a standup where the backend devs talk, one for the DBAs (if that's a thing you have) one for the front-end people... If there's someone in a product manager role they might want to attend all the meetings but likely not. If a clear majority of the audience isn't interested in your status then you're just burning hours. Also a standup with 40 or 50 people is just plain silly. I worked in gaming a few years ago and our standup was a full game team, the artists, designers, QA, server-devs, client-devs and our stats guy all spoke. It was a bit interesting to see what artists were doing but totally unnecessary for me to hear anything anyone said except the two other people I worked with, and we communicated well outside of the standup anyways.
- jrs235 8y ago
  >If a clear majority of the audience isn't interested in your status then you're just burning hours. From my understanding stand ups are not supposed to be status reports. They tend to turn into them though as it seems the most common format is 1) what did you work on yesterday, 2) what are you working on today, 3) what's blocking you? I prefer daily stand ups (near the onset of the day) for small teams to be 1) what's our goal for today? 2) what might block us or slow us down? 3) how are we going to tackle our goal? When stand ups start feeling like justifying your existence then morale drops, [looking] busy work increases, and too much time is spent on CYA. Focus on solving problems not explaining them.
  - scribu 8y ago
    > what's our goal for today? The same as it was yesterday or whenever the last planning session happened. Like TFA said, the team, as a whole, shouldn’t be changing priorities like socks.
    - refoundglory 8y ago
      If your goal for the sprint is "build widget" then your goal for the day should be "build part 3". You don't change priorities each day, you change how far along you are and where you expect to get to.

That's useless because everybody else tunes out. Nobody cares what debugging methods you tried on some project they've never touched. If you need help you can just ask somebody.

chomp 8y ago

I think that's either a team culture issue, a management issue, or a business culture issue. Teams I've worked on have had no issue brainstorming ideas for a person who's stumped. Now, I'm not totally defending standups here, I've been on teams where daily standups are a stuffy formality, and they are miserable. I've also had the pleasure of being on teams where weekly standups were implemented, and they were an absolute delight and completely useful. I will qualify all of my opinions with the fact that the best teams I've worked with implement Kanban, so there is no sprint planning. We just pull off backlog and work with weekly standups. There's way way less overhead, with some tradeoffs. I also definitely think that certain team cultures are completely incompatible with standups, to the point that you receive negative benefit from implementing them. If you have a lot of people who are of the type "my responsibility ends where my story points end", I am pretty sure you will end up have a bad time doing standups.

lttlrck 8y ago
Are stand up meetings the correct venue for brainstorming?
- chomp 8y ago
  Maybe not, but if your peer said "hey can someone help me with this task" in a standup, wouldn't you want to help them once the meeting is over?
  - kelnos 8y ago
    Replace that with asking for help in slack or whatever, and you don't need a standup. And you also get help as soon as people's time is available, not the next day.
    - voltagex_ 8y ago
      I've found that asking for help over text or the phone is less effective than asking in person.
    - Scarblac 8y ago
      But then you'd need people to listen to some slack channel, and be distracted continuously throughout the day. That's worse.
- maccam94 8y ago
  No, but they can spur an interested subset of people to brainstorm after the standup ends.
- bitwize 8y ago
  No, those are things you want to take "offline" or "to the parking lot".
hrktb 8y ago
In some previous team, I realized that some people working on very long tasks just gave bullshit updates. What they explained was interesting, it gave a sense of progress, and they communicated well. Too well perhaps, their small talk was on super minor or even unrelated stuff that they saw the previous day. They were doing mainly exploratory work, and it made no sense to bring on board other people before they settled on a direction themselves. I think ultimately a one size fits them all approach only “works” when the people on the fringe also play the game and bullshit (in a good light) their way around.
- still_grokking 8y ago
  It's a good idea to waste valuable engineering time with "bullshit" (in a good light) small talk? OK… I likely will never understand the great minds behind management.
  - jrumbut 8y ago
    It's a trade off. Some of the communication is very valuable, and needs to happen for coordination, knowledge sharing, etc. The potential harm of that communication not happening is great, the risk of having a meeting go 15 minutes longer is worth trying to avoid (hence the article) but much smaller. However, if only some people speak that can create divisions in the team, or make it look like the speakers are the leading members when that may or may not be true. So to prevent that dynamic everyone says something, and people can help the team function better by coming up with a nifty one minute oration. Ultimately making software is a human endeavor. Sometimes a little small talk prevents the humans from feeling bad and not making software. Sometimes it has the opposite effect. The best managers figure out which case is true at a specific time and place and adapt. Good managers just have to pick what risks to take and live with the outcome.

s73v3r_ 8y ago

1. Isn't the standup usually the place you're told to initially ask for that help? 2. Aren't most people, at least the developers/designers in the same standup, supposed to be working on the same project?

Shaanie 8y ago
Don't wait until the standup to ask for help if you don't have to. I'm also confused why OP is having standup eith people who havent even heard of the project he's working on. Doesn't sound like he's working on the same product as the other developers.
- fakecigar 8y ago
  +1 The standup should be the place of last resort for bringing up barriers impeding a task. The more resourceful you can be at solving a problem/brainstorming outside of the standup the better ime
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  "Don't wait until the standup to ask for help if you don't have to." I didn't mean to imply that, but one of the purposes of stand-up is to give a place for that to happen.
drunken-serval 8y ago
#2 never happened at any job I've had. It was always the entire team and we all had different projects. Sometimes entirely different applications.
- taneq 8y ago
  That sounds like you were all on different teams, in the sense being used here, and probably shouldn't have all been in the same standup together apart from maybe a once-a-week catchup.
  - zamber 8y ago

munk-a 8y ago

I think your team is too big then. Don't have company wide standups, have a standup per team and possibly role. If you're working on a web stack have a standup where the backend devs talk, one for the DBAs (if that's a thing you have) one for the front-end people... If there's someone in a product manager role they might want to attend all the meetings but likely not. If a clear majority of the audience isn't interested in your status then you're just burning hours. Also a standup with 40 or 50 people is just plain silly. I worked in gaming a few years ago and our standup was a full game team, the artists, designers, QA, server-devs, client-devs and our stats guy all spoke. It was a bit interesting to see what artists were doing but totally unnecessary for me to hear anything anyone said except the two other people I worked with, and we communicated well outside of the standup anyways.

jrs235 8y ago
>If a clear majority of the audience isn't interested in your status then you're just burning hours. From my understanding stand ups are not supposed to be status reports. They tend to turn into them though as it seems the most common format is 1) what did you work on yesterday, 2) what are you working on today, 3) what's blocking you? I prefer daily stand ups (near the onset of the day) for small teams to be 1) what's our goal for today? 2) what might block us or slow us down? 3) how are we going to tackle our goal? When stand ups start feeling like justifying your existence then morale drops, [looking] busy work increases, and too much time is spent on CYA. Focus on solving problems not explaining them.
- scribu 8y ago
  > what's our goal for today? The same as it was yesterday or whenever the last planning session happened. Like TFA said, the team, as a whole, shouldn’t be changing priorities like socks.
  - refoundglory 8y ago
    If your goal for the sprint is "build widget" then your goal for the day should be "build part 3". You don't change priorities each day, you change how far along you are and where you expect to get to.