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From a Scrum Master PoV, I feel like this app sort of misses the point of stand-ups. Stand-ups are supposed to be daily interaction/live communication between t

From a Scrum Master PoV, I feel like this app sort of misses the point of stand-ups. Stand-ups are supposed to be daily interaction/live communication between team members—not a daily report. The point is to further inter-team communication in order to better overcome impediments. A pre-recorded update isn't very useful if other team members has comments or questions. Stand-up is also a great opportunity to ask if the rest of the team has any input on a problem you may be dealing with. From the website: > Often times we miss standups. Sorry to be blunt but then you're doing it wrong, or maybe it could be worth reconsidering the choice of framework if it's not possible to implement the most basic features of Scrum. > To avoid updates that are rather long, we implemented a timebox of 1.5 minutes [...] This seems oddly arbitrary. You don't necessarily need to limit each individual's speaking time. In e.g. a team of 4 people it's fine if each person speaks for 3 minutes as long as its relevant for stand-up. If you're removing the conversational aspect of stand-up along with timeboxing people then it seems to me like doing stand-up over Twitter.

jsjohnst 8y ago
While I get where you are coming from to some extent and partially agree, as someone who’s also a certified scrum master, if there are a lot of discussion going on in your stand ups, you are doing it wrong too. The point of standups is to be quick update, with follow up discussions if something needs more depth. The best practice is for each person to answer the following three questions: 1) What did you accomplish since the last meeting? 2) What are you working on until the next meeting? 3) What is getting in your way or keeping you from doing your job? Further, if your team is having discussions that aren’t relevant to everyone at the standup, then by definition you are doing standups wrong.
- lillesvin 8y ago
  Yeah, I agree, except "relevant to everyone" is not accurate enough, I think. It should be "relevant to reaching the sprint goal", because it can be relevant to everyone on the team but completely irrelevant in relation to the sprint goal. Our stand-ups are strictly about stuff relating to the sprint goal and hence the success of the team in the sprint. So the 3 points are all suffixed with "... to help the team meet the sprint goal". Sometimes we'll spend 3 minutes on our individual updates and 10 minutes on discussing an issue brought up in point 3 because it affects the whole team and threatens the sprint. Sometimes stand-up is over in just 3 minutes because there's nothing new and no issues. The real-time feedback at stand-ups is super important, IMO. When doing point 2 from your list, there may be other team mates with valuable input. E.g. if someone is planning on working on X and someone else have worked on something related to that, then they may know of some gotchas and other stuff to be aware of, where they can simply interject that they should maybe talk a little about that after stand-up. We do that in my team all the time and it's saved us countless hours because we managed to catch problems long before they became actual problems and a a topic for point 3.
seer 8y ago
These days, with powerful tools like jira/github/gitlab you can do the update and ask for help in a much more convenient text format, easily searchable and referencable. And you can do that all day every day, if your team is good you’ll get an answer much sooner than “once per day”. With that in mind, the standup’s role is sort of weird - everyone agrees that “it’s important”, but for everything you actually do in it there are better ways to do it. Maybe it’s the actual talking with other human beings thats the important part, where you can see that your team mates have their own struggles and problems, to read their body language and feel a bit more part of the tribe. And if _that’s_ the case, maybe we’ve missed the whole point of the standup? We could make the standup a small slack post, and have a “talkie time” set up each day just to feel human?

jsjohnst 8y ago

While I get where you are coming from to some extent and partially agree, as someone who’s also a certified scrum master, if there are a lot of discussion going on in your stand ups, you are doing it wrong too. The point of standups is to be quick update, with follow up discussions if something needs more depth. The best practice is for each person to answer the following three questions: 1) What did you accomplish since the last meeting? 2) What are you working on until the next meeting? 3) What is getting in your way or keeping you from doing your job? Further, if your team is having discussions that aren’t relevant to everyone at the standup, then by definition you are doing standups wrong.

lillesvin 8y ago
Yeah, I agree, except "relevant to everyone" is not accurate enough, I think. It should be "relevant to reaching the sprint goal", because it can be relevant to everyone on the team but completely irrelevant in relation to the sprint goal. Our stand-ups are strictly about stuff relating to the sprint goal and hence the success of the team in the sprint. So the 3 points are all suffixed with "... to help the team meet the sprint goal". Sometimes we'll spend 3 minutes on our individual updates and 10 minutes on discussing an issue brought up in point 3 because it affects the whole team and threatens the sprint. Sometimes stand-up is over in just 3 minutes because there's nothing new and no issues. The real-time feedback at stand-ups is super important, IMO. When doing point 2 from your list, there may be other team mates with valuable input. E.g. if someone is planning on working on X and someone else have worked on something related to that, then they may know of some gotchas and other stuff to be aware of, where they can simply interject that they should maybe talk a little about that after stand-up. We do that in my team all the time and it's saved us countless hours because we managed to catch problems long before they became actual problems and a a topic for point 3.

seer 8y ago

These days, with powerful tools like jira/github/gitlab you can do the update and ask for help in a much more convenient text format, easily searchable and referencable. And you can do that all day every day, if your team is good you’ll get an answer much sooner than “once per day”. With that in mind, the standup’s role is sort of weird - everyone agrees that “it’s important”, but for everything you actually do in it there are better ways to do it. Maybe it’s the actual talking with other human beings thats the important part, where you can see that your team mates have their own struggles and problems, to read their body language and feel a bit more part of the tribe. And if _that’s_ the case, maybe we’ve missed the whole point of the standup? We could make the standup a small slack post, and have a “talkie time” set up each day just to feel human?