19 ms·

The pointlessness of daily standups

• Traubenfuchs 7y ago
  Daily standups are often a panopticon for those who mine story points and their wardens that micro manage them. Anyone not coding (RE, BA, managers of any kind) usually don't need to justify their contributions to the team. It fits extremely well in the story point driven "agile" world where working on stuff that does not provide immediate business value, like code quality and technical debt, is highly discouraged. I have seen so many dysfunctional standup cultures: Places where you had to showcase and exaggerate how much stuff you had to do and people were looking at you funnily when you said what you are doing in under a minute, places where discussion that only interested a third of the team were started and standups took half an hour, places where the managers interrupted and asked why stories took so long...
  • tracer4201 7y ago
    I’ve worked at two of the FAANGs, and some of my teams had daily stand ups and some didn’t. Some teams had stand ups but didn’t track points or velocity of any kind. Others did. When we were working to disambiguate deliverables or working on design or implementation, stand ups were useful. They held everyone accountable, when folks weren’t making progress because of some issue, it was super obvious - it gave management a really good insight into where things are and what blockers are. Your characterization certainly doesn’t represent my experience. We went through phases of launching a products or services and focusing on them and then going back to pay off some of the tech debt until product management, engineers, and leadership arrived on the next set of big features.
  • BlameKaneda 7y ago
    > panopticon "The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century...[It] allows all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched." Learned a new word and concept today. Thanks!
• josh_fyi 7y ago
  I'm on your side. But some, maybe most people, prefer synchronous talking. And even with async, making a point of daily updates keeps teams focused.
  • ants_a 7y ago
    Synchronous talking has a synchronization overhead. If you do the stand-up in the beginning of the day it forces everyone to arrive at the same time. If you do it in the middle of the day it is an interruption for everybody. It's usually just not worth the costs to create meetings just to satisfy the interaction needs of extroverts in your team.
    • amitport 7y ago
      As I see it, if managed properly, daily stand-ups is more about introverts. As one, I found the formal obligation to give verbal updates and a be in a place to hear updates very helpful especially when I was a junior programmer.
• jimbob45 7y ago
  They're called standups for a reason: you're supposed to do them standing up so that people whine if they go over five minutes. That tracks out to 25 minutes or less than one-eightieth of your week.
  • colinhowe 7y ago
    Except if you're already deep into work because you start earlier than everyone else then they just rip you out of your flow. They also tend to be longer than five minutes in terms of herding people to them etc.
    • thawaway1837 7y ago
      The deep flow disturbance can be caused by any sort of communication. So basically, that’s an argument against communication, as opposed to being an argument against standups. If anything, by being at a fixed time, either at the start, or the end of a team’s day, it’s far easier to prevent a standup from disrupting deep work than a Slack message would be.
      • zorked 7y ago
        You know it will disrupt you so you never even start the deep work. Victory!
      • kchamplewski 7y ago
        Except async communication doesn't disrupt deep flow if done properly since it should be simply ignored until flow breaks or pauses naturally. A slack message won't disrupt my deep work because I'll have notifications turned off, unless it's extremely urgent in which case it would be too urgent to leave until a standup anyway.
    • jmkni 7y ago
      If they are at the same time every day, surely you can plan your work around that?
  • vfc1 7y ago
• JaumeGreen 7y ago
  Daily Standups do make sense to some. In an ideal world everyone would be perfectly professional and not need any supervision at all. In the real world some times you might be in a rough period or have some other problem that makes concentrating hard. In an ideal world the thought of getting a paycheck would be enough motivation. Sometimes it isn't. A daily standup, if done well and short, helps one to focus on what's important, sets the tone for the day, and unites the team as a tribe. When one is not motivated enough by looking a big fat dashboard with tickets pending, or the though of getting another paycheck at the end of the period, one can be motivated by the thought of not failing to their tribe, their peers, their coworkers. You gave them your word, face to face, that you would work on something, so you better do, they are your people.
  • kelnos 7y ago
    > A daily standup, if done well and short That's the rub, though. Despite best intentions, sometimes things just go off into the weeds. It happens more often than I'd like, and it's happened on every team I've ever been on, at every company I've ever worked at. Sure, you can say, "well you're doing it wrong", but that's not helpful. Process should support how the team works, not define how the team works. > helps one to focus on what's important If you need to refocus someone every day, you've made a bad hire. > sets the tone for the day That's my job. I know what I'm supposed to be working on, and set my own tone. > and unites the team as a tribe Ugh, gross. We're not a "tribe", "family", whatever. We're a team of co-workers working on a variety of tasks, who are not children and can be trusted to communicate adequately with the rest of the team, and honor our commitments. If you have someone on the team for whom that's not the case, again: you made a bad hire. Don't punish the rest of the team because you have someone who can't do their job. I get that some people get off track sometimes. It happens, even to the most senior of people. The solution to that is called management. Regular 1:1s, making sure your team keeps their tickets updated, and getting regular (individual, asynchronous, as-needed) status updates. If someone is having an off day, or an off week, that should be addressed individually, not by preemptively assuming the worst of everyone on the team and instituting a daily standup.
    • ElFitz 7y ago
• Fiahil 7y ago
  I like standups. They keep me updated on what's happening in the code base, and give us the opportunity to discuss what's going to happen next. The repo is vast and we're gown adults that don't need to be micro-managed because story A or B is taking too long. The problem doesn't come from standups, but rather from dysfunctional startup culture.
  • antisemiotic 7y ago
    I have a similar experience. Standups keep me at least vaguely informed on what other people are doing, provide an opportunity to take the pressure off poor souls buried under a new influx of tasks, and are perhaps some light team building (such as the canned joke that a burndown chart isn't supposed to look even remotely like that, or something in the lines of "help me, those goddamn morons from $OVERSEAS_BRANCH at it again"). 10 minutes tops, and back to work. If I were to compile a list of workspace annoyances, even the most pointless standup would be way after serious business like "people standing behind my back while talking to someone".
• asplake 7y ago
  I've long been sceptical of the three questions – well intentioned no doubt but way too prone to becoming an unhealthy exercise in individual self-justification. Much prefer to review the work "right to left", starting with work just completed, then work we can get over the line, then the bulk of what's in progress, and (if there's capacity), what's in the immediate pipeline. Now it's about what _we_ can do to finish the most important of what's in front of us.
• amitport 7y ago
  I strongly disagree. People sometimes won't mention important things (e.g., blockers, possible misunderstandings) unless prompted and encouraged (you sometimes actually need to look at the person's face and hear the intonation). Async interrupts are bad (I don't have time to get into that one right now). I would have replace "Excitement" with "expectation management", "mental atmosphere monitoring". I do agree that badly managed stand-ups are a waste of time.
  • ddebernardy 7y ago
    > People sometimes won't mention important things (e.g., blockers, possible misunderstandings) unless prompted and encouraged (you sometimes actually need to look at the person's face and hear the intonation). But that's a management fail. Every time I've managed a person that did this, I took them aside and had a short but firm word with them. You can't tolerate that type of behavior in a team if you plan to operate effectively. I seldom need more than one warning; I never needed more than two.
    • amitport 7y ago
      The point I was trying to make is that when a person is [inexperienced/shy/too aggressive/doesn't get along with somebody/lazy/does not like the current task/does not understand the motivation/etc] I need, as a manager, opportunity to notice it. some of those are not necessarily "bad" or require intervention, just awareness. some of those can change over time (and on daily basis). (and in the case of bad behavior, in order to prevent "management fail", I want to take them aside for that short talk before things get spiraling) (that being said, it's not the only reason for standups) (if in my team everybody is in the same place, actually interacting in-person does give some added value)
• sorich87 7y ago
  I think what you're against are the sync daily standups, not the async, usually written, ones. If I was an employee, I would prefer you to let me self-manage my work however I feel comfortable using whatever tool suits me and my team, instead of constantly interrupting on Jira, Trello, etc. And I'll keep you updated at a frequency we agreed on (daily or weekly). It's also great to read daily updates of others on the team, and even other teams, to learn about what they're working on without having to check at multiple places or interrupt their work. It's usually a great way to discuss, give and receive feedback, asynchronously. Also, it's strange that you're suggesting "reach out on Slack" as an alternative. Doesn't that promote the "incessant messaging that Slack allows" you're decrying at the start of the article? Disclaimer: I'm cofounder of the team communication tool https://www.happierco.com https://www.happierco.com
  • debt 7y ago
    That’s my biggest gripe with stand ups. Management has as much if not more access to all the project management tools the developers do, so if they need a daily standup they should be able to get a sense of what’s going on simply by correctly using the tool.
• ritchiea 7y ago
  This is absurd to me. Standups are quick and it is helpful to know what everyone is working on. And they can serve as a time when you are up front about being stuck on something and get some help from a teammate when maybe otherwise you might have just kept tinkering or hammering away in your own world. It’s just a little nudge to share your status and keep everyone on the same page. It prevents wondering what your colleague is typing up a storm about which is a natural human curiosity. And the author says make it async, I agree! That’s not against the spirit of standups, I’ve worked on remote teams with an asynchronous standup slack channel. The most common problem I’ve seen with standups is they can become more than status updates and end up a time during the day to brag about your accomplishments or justify your status within a team/project. Usually to keep management happy or angle for an agenda other than keeping the team together.
• BigJ1211 7y ago
  Don't agree with this assessment at all, we do stand-ups and it rarely takes more than 5 minutes. It help immensely with production as your colleagues often help keep things from falling through the cracks. (I.e. someone forgets something). Or they might be able to help you out, or further along because they've done something similar. When they do, you don't do it during the stand-up to not disrupt that. Overal I don't think it's disruptive at all to do a short stand-up, constant nagging however is very disruptive. That person that just walks in or starts spamming you on slack takes more time altogether per instance than a single stand-up does. It takes you out of your process, you then have to pick that up again. If you're working on something complex that can mean it takes an additional 10 minutes before you're back on track. That's the kind of disruption stand-ups can help prevent. This of course only works if you actually stick to what the stand-up is meant for.
  • kelnos 7y ago
    > That person that just walks in or starts spamming you on slack takes more time altogether per instance than a single stand-up does. It takes you out of your process, you then have to pick that up again. Walks in? Yes. That should be discouraged always. Spamming on Slack? If that is a problem, you're doing Slack wrong. It's an asynchronous method of communication. Don't be buried in it or feel the need to respond to every message as it comes in. Check it during natural breaks or stopping points. If something actually is urgent and requires your immediate attention, then they can break the above rule and walk up to your desk (or call you if you're remote).
    • ElFitz 7y ago
      Some of my colleagues had a hard time with this. They would actually ask me to come to their desk whenever I had a question, and come to mine when I didn't answer fast enough (only after I had gotten them to understand I really preferred slack. Seems they never got the why though, despite making it very clear...)
      • kelnos 7y ago
        Yep, there are some people who just don't get it, and it's hard to get them to. I find that most developers have a hard time even bringing up the issue with someone face-to-face, even though all it usually takes is: "Hey, just wanted to let you know, I really prefer having these sorts of exchanges over Slack. Otherwise I find it really disruptive to my day. Could we give that a try next time and see how it works out?" And you have to be willing to escalate if the behavior doesn't improve: "Listen, I asked if we could take care of these things over Slack, and I'd really appreciate it if you could accommodate me here." Then: "Hey, I know I keep bringing this up, but it's really important to me. I need to keep a lot of my day interruption-free in order to be productive. Please try harder to respect my time when coming to me for help." It seems most developers aren't even comfortable with the first bit, let alone escalating things. Instead, most people just seethe and complain privately to other colleagues, and nothing changes. At the very least, the team's manager should be brought in to do a better job of protecting the everyone's time, and you'd think that would be easy for a developer to do, because it outsources any sort of confrontation. But it still often doesn't happen, for whatever reason. (Of course, if it's the manager who is the offender here, you're probably screwed if the diplomatic method fails.)
• dagw 7y ago
  In my limited experience, one key to successful standups is making them as small as possible. The worst standups are the ones which contain over a dozen people working on a bunch of only vaguely related projects. The best ones are the ones that only involve the people working on things directly related to thing I happen to be working on. I you're a manager this might mean that you have to organize 3 or 4 standups instead of just one and keep track of who is working on what and being sure the right people show up to the right meeting. If it turns out that someone is being blocked by someone not at the meeting then either set up a new meeting with just the people involved in that problem or make sure that particular person is at the next meeting.
• kelnos 7y ago
  Completely agree with this. It just seems like ritual for ritual's sake. I tend to learn nothing from standup that I couldn't learn by checking Jira or just directly asking someone. And waiting a full day to raise blockers is foolish. Sometimes things go a bit too far, with people delving too deeply into whatever topic, with a sort of side-conversation starting. Yes, these people should "take it offline", and often after a minute or so of back and forth, they will, but it still happens often enough that it turns into a waste of most of the team's time. "Be more disciplined!", you say? Sure, ok, wave your magic wand and make that happen, please. The counter-argument I usually hear to anyone who wants to get rid of standup goes something along the lines of: "but it's great to get everyone together once a day, and sometimes people will spontaneously learn of something that they have useful input for, and save someone some time". Ok, so you want to waste 10-20 minutes of my time on the off chance that someone might randomly have a useful contribution that wouldn't otherwise come up? No, pass. And regardless, this sort of attitude is actively hostile toward remote members of the team, who may be in different time zones and can't reasonably participate. If your team really needs daily status updates, create a "standup" channel for your team on Slack (or whatever you use), and have people do a once-a-day post in there. No deadline, just when they get to it. But even that just feels like micro-management.
  • lispm 7y ago
    > waiting a full day to raise blockers is foolish that does not make sense. Just because you have a short sync meeting once a day, it does mean should should delay all work until then.
    • kelnos 7y ago
      I'm having trouble parsing the last half of your sentence, but I'm going to assume (please correct me if I'm wrong here) that you meant: "Just because you have a short sync meeting once a day, it doesn't mean you should delay all work until then." And yes, I totally agree! If you're blocked on something, you should raise it immediately, so you're not delaying all work until your next standup! If you do have other work to do, you should still raise the issue immediately, figure out who should own the blocker (if it's non-trivial, your manager will likely find ownership for you), and then move onto another task until the blocker is resolved. You gain nothing by waiting until the next day, and possibly exacerbate the problem if you do wait.
• mstaoru 7y ago
  Standups hurt more than help. As someone who managed fully remote teams in the past, what worked very well for us is a set of rules around in-house built task management system (something like Jira could work too). 1) Aim to take 2-3 tasks, do not take more, take 1 if the task is large, but usually, it's a sign of an overblown story. 2) Every day at the end of the day, write a "current status" comment. These comments are visible in the master panel, and I could take action the next day to help developers resolve roadblocks, if the resolution is taking longer, they can work on other tasks they claimed. This effectively eliminated the need for standups, the whole team could sync using task "current status" updates, and chime in with help or advice. I was able to see the progress and issues without forcing people into a mess of a video call, and everybody could still stick to their preferred schedules and have personal lives.
  • mywittyname 7y ago
    This is my preferred method as well when leading a team. Standups as intended are too brief to discuss the important details. This is why they end up ballooning to 30+ minutes at most companies, because anything shorter is of little value. They also end up as a catch-all meeting for any topics that require the team's input; I dislike this because people are expected to provide input on the spot without really making any thoughtful considerations. If we want to have a discussion on a UI component, that should be done in a dedicated, prepared meeting, not at 8:30 in the morning when people are unprepared and said developer can take advantage of unpreparedness to obtain the consensus they want. When I provide up-stream status reports, I like to have the developer's notes in front of me for a quick refresher. Plus, they serve as a good reminder on topics that need followup.
• vfc1 7y ago
  I've worked in many teams that used standups, the general feeling was that they were utterly useless. Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them. I even saw once a developer on his last day throwing the speaker's token (a teddy bear) to the trash can LOL! Everyone on the teams I worked on seemed to think that standups where useless, this showed clearly through the team body language and tone in those meetings. Its an interruption on your work just when you just got started in the morning, now you have to stop and go to a meeting. What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other, and if you need help you ask it anyway on the spot, there is no need to wait for the next standup for that. It's hard to come up with different things to say on the meetings, as there aren't many things that have changed since yesterday.
  • tsimionescu 7y ago
    > What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other I think this is the key difference between teams that like stand-ups and teams that don't. In the teams I've worked in, our work was highly relevant to one another, so knowing daily where everyone was with their tasks is usually interesting to everyone.
    • light94 7y ago
      I second that. I've founf that when the work of other people is relevant, you might have some inputs having worked on a related thing earlier that might help them.
    • alxlaz 7y ago
      But as the article points out, knowing daily where everyone was with their tasks isn't something that needs a formal meeting. I've worked in highly integrated teams, too, and easily got by with one team meeting a week.
      • solidasparagus 7y ago
        Depends on the size of your team. Once you get to 10+ people in a team, it's hard to spread information effectively with 1:1 communication. What I've liked about standups in teams of that size is the opportunity to kick of unexpected brainstorming because you mention what you're working on and someone mentions they have expertise/ideas in the area that you didn't know about. There are of course many ways to run a productive team.
• gamesbrainiac 7y ago
  I completely agree with this. Standups are pointless, you have just communicate anything that you need to communicate via chat. Standups in general are simply a pressuring mechanism.
• mosselman 7y ago
  The questions as presented strike me as something that is more suited in a 1-on-1: > What did I work on yesterday? > What am I working on today? > What issues are blocking me? At my job we have tickets on a physical board and we discuss them from right-to-left. There are magnets on the tickets with people's names on it and when you get to 'your' tickets you talk about what is happening with that ticket. This is a lot more concrete and relevant to the rest of the team. At a previous company we went from person to person and they'd discuss what they were working on. This always struck me as a strictly personal accounting of their previous work day and I had a feeling that people felt like they had to boast or exaggerate what they were working on. It never felt relevant or interesting.
• bengale 7y ago
  > I've had this feeling that the industry likes to treat development teams like a bunch of idiot teenagers. The infantilisation of developers seems to be common in larger organisations. It's extremely tiring.
  • rswail 7y ago
    The infantilisation of all workers seems to be common. The stupidity of terms like "tribes" and "squads", the endless gamification, the "open office to encourage communication", the discussion of "learnings" and other verbed nouns. The only people that it suits are HR types that love that everyone can be seen to be working together and the management that save lots of money on real estate and infrastructure costs. Sure, breaking down company silos is a Good Thing. Orienting people to work across disciplines and be focused on the customer is a Good Thing. Inventing crap like standups (the Queen does them for Privy Council meetings, works for her), and titles like "scrum master" is just as bad as the "black belt 6 sigma" of the early 2000s and the other management fads.
• keriati1 7y ago
  We do standups, however the questions are more like What task moved yesterday? (handover?) What task is going to move today? and the most important one: What is blocked? (Who can help to unblock?) I can recommend this format for everybody.
• jedberg 7y ago
  I don't know if they daily standup is necessary, but there is some value in frequent synchronous meetings. Some people just feel more comfortable bringing things up during a meeting, despite the myriad ways they could otherwise communicate.
• jake_morrison 7y ago
  I am a consultant working in a distributed team, often remote from our client. I find the standup format to be very useful, often delivered via a daily email. While we use a formal issue tracker like Jira which handles approvals and estimates, from a project management perspective it's useful to have a summary email that is short enough for people to read and focused on business level issues. "Today I worked on this" / "Next I plan to work on that." This helps clients to see exactly what we are working on. It avoids miscommunication where we think they told us to prioritize something different, or they thought they told us to stop work on something, or they think we are finished with something and we are not. Having an email every day lets them tell us to stop work immediately if we are doing the wrong thing, avoiding surprise invoices the next month. It avoids them claiming that they didn't know that we were working on something. "Here are the problems I am having / things I need from you". This is very useful to keep track of delays caused by the client. This might be them needing to review and accept work, review specs, or pay their invoices. Issues stay on the report until they are resolved. It documents that we didn't get what we needed, so we can't be blamed for things being late.
• mrkeen 7y ago
  Don't just do something, stand there!
• LandR 7y ago
  One way of doing stand-ups that I found least annoying was we went through the Kanban board and basically asked if you had any problems with your assigned item. If there was no problem then you were done. If no one had any issues it was done in a few minutes and there was no chance for it to descend into pointlessness or irrelevant tangets.
• disposedtrolley 7y ago
  I've had no issues with standups. Even in a small team I find them useful as a way to step back and see the bigger picture, plus they rarely take more than 5-10 minutes of my morning. On the other hand, I've had friends who have endured 30 minute standups every day for the past few months. I think they started sitting after the first few sessions.
• lispm 7y ago
  Reducing actual face-to-face interaction and communicating only over Jira is a way to de-humanize work. Do work as a team of humans. Talk directly to your fellow team members. Using daily standups is a face-to-face way of syncing. Don't work by sitting 10 hours in front of your screen and communicate only via chat channels.
  • Uhuhreally 7y ago
    Jira is the passive aggressive student fridge note system of communication
• yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
  What information does a standup monologue convey that couldn't be expressed more clearly and with persistent links to context than a comment on a Trello card? My team don't do daily standups. They're pointless ceremony. Yesterday I worked on… Yes we know. We can see the Trello card you worked on. Today I am working on… Yes we know. We can see what you've currently assigned yourself on Trello. I am blocked by… Why the hell are you waiting until now to bring this up?!
  • onion2k 7y ago
    I am blocked by… Why the hell are you waiting until now to bring this up?! ...because, as the author of the article notes, developers don't like interruptions. You can't have it both ways - either you can have distraction-free work time so issues like blockers have to wait until the next scheduled communication time or you get distractions when important things happen. You can't reasonably state that people shouldn't interrupt you and they shouldn't wait until the next meeting to tell you stuff. Those things are opposed to each other.
    • yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
      > You can't reasonably state that people shouldn't interrupt you and they shouldn't wait until the next meeting to tell you stuff You absolutely can, and we do it all the time. You didn't interrupt me by replying to my comment here. If I was busy working on something, I wouldn't have read/replied to this right now. If I am working on something, it's highly likely that I'll be finished and take a break to check what else is happening in the team well before a morning meeting the following day. If something is truly time-critical and deserving of interruption, then its a moot point.
    • erik_seaberg 7y ago
      For me to interrupt you has a lower cost than for me to be stuck all day. But we need to fix something if it happens to me every day, or I can't figure out who to interrupt without affecting every member of the team.
• NalNezumi 7y ago
  As a fairly new out of university and with my first startup job, I found the newly introduced daily standup a motivation saver & reduced stress in the group. Our dev sub-group had no sync-meeting except weekly-meetings where we met the entire department that presented their progress that didn't give us any insight in what was going on at all. Didn't help that our sub-group responsible where the CTO, that was mostly absent for investor/customer/management meetings. Tasks where distributed really unevenly, some devs got isolated in their module/tasks for week/months and lost sight of where the development was at the moment. standups seems to work pretty well when the person in charge have insight in to how each members work fit in to the overall picture, and would rather not manage the group much more than making sure people are not trailing off. It helps the group more than the managers, if done right.
• 1337shadow 7y ago
  Well, I see the point of a senior: with enough practice you should not need rituals of this kind anymore. Some seniors don't even need a kanban board on a fast moving project, they just know what needs to be done now to create value at lowest cost, they just feel it. It's not like when you're junior, you've never done any standup and you don't know when you've been blocked long enough to switch task or ask for support, you've never done any poker planning if you're techie, or value estimations if you're product / sales, you've never prioritized by complexity / value score if you're manager - or equivalent. For this reason, I think there's still value in such rituals when there are non seniors in a team. However, I prefer text-chat based standups myself and feel like they produce the same value and cost less time.
  • rusk 7y ago
    Very interesting point. When you have senior guys that know the important things work then the importance of process, beyond some key staging points, diminishes. From a business and strategic planning perspective could this be some kind of a risk? There's the old "hit by a bus" (or just quits) trope of course, which is related to the "single point of failure" systems analogy. Then there's the management ideology of control, which can be subverted when individuals are on the critical path for projects. I also wonder how this jives with change management: If you have guys mired in the details around whom changes pivot, what happens when there's significant changes e.g. in personal life of these guys, or organisationally, or migrations to new architectures etc. I also wonder how putting individuals at the centre of a business jives with external compliance requirements such as ISO and GDPR ... EDIT also recalling personal experience: What about growth, where you want to grow the business and bring new (senior or otherwise) team members in, but everything is vested in the idiosyncracies of a few individuals?
    • 1337shadow 7y ago
      I agree that processes are going to be necessary to scale. My comment focused more on the conditions that seemed to make the article relevant: a small team making a new project that's not really in production (fast moving) and apparently with only seniors who don't need even a voice-based standup ritual.
• jacknews 7y ago
  it depends on the tone of the standup. For a start they should be quick, and the team needs to be fairly small (about 5-6 seems ideal). and cohesive, mostly working on related or interacting code. Also I assume remote, as that's my experience. The status update part should be extremely quick even perfunctory, unless there's an interesting lesson or important caveat or note-bene etc to share with the team. The reason for the standup is to make sure everything is "joining up" properly, no new obstacles are looming, and possibly to plan meetings/pairing sessions/etc, for later that day, where required. ie like a football scrum where you agree the game-play for the day. It's also chance for a bit of "team bonding" type stuff, eg to ask the whole team "are we all feeling good about this sprint", etc - ie, the kind of stuff that may not obvious from stats If the standup just becomes a forced "status report", that's worse than useless, I agree, and just makes everyone feel "monitored" and under pressure. I would guess they are also less useful (and potentially more stressful) where everyone is physically present, and might be seen as a trick to get everyone to the office on time.
  • majewsky 7y ago
    > ie like a football scrum where you agree the game-play for the day. Why do you need to change your strategy every single day? Do your requirements change that fast? What you're describing is the point of the sprint planning meeting IMO.
    • jacknews 7y ago
      Daily would be tactics, not strategy, and ideally the daily game-plan follows, and follows obviously from, what was planned for the sprint, in which case the scrum is just a rubber stamp. Ideally.
• paggle 7y ago
  I use standups to check in with everyone and... 1) inform everyone of why I'm making certain product decisions, so that everyone gets a "feel" for the problem space even though they're not directly talking to customers, etc. 2) Talk about a particular problem that wouldn't get discussed as a group if there wasn't time on the calendar every day, such as "where do we need to improve our telemetry" and 3) to just talk to each other for 30 minutes a day. I don't like treating engineers as bug-closing robots and I don't think they like being treated as such. Standup gives everyone the feeling of being on a team of people working towards a common objective.
• bigpeopleareold 7y ago
  Daily standups are not useful to me, but having just a periodic conversation with who you work with is more useful that both just standups and/or just checking issue lists. A lot of times, there are plenty who simply don't talk about the projects they are working on unless prompted. This extends even to JIRA tickets, which can feel like bookkeeping than actual work. For me, this tends to be a constant problem, but adding more layers of protocol tends to scare people more than anything. This can be like a fear around saying you couldn't get anything done yesterday. With simple conversations where I can just talk with team members for an hour or so is more revealing that trying to answer specific questions. The important thing is not to cover each detail. Instead, for me, is just conversing about problems where we all gain more insight in what we are doing that helps a lot.
• pandizzle 7y ago
  I agree @ stand-ups being useless. I've been on both sides of them: to give information to managers and to get information from people I delegated. Stand-ups tend to turn into a defensive justification for 'being busy', and distracts from the intended purpose of asking for help. At my current job, our manager wastes more time interrupting people during their stand-ups to tell them that they are giving the wrong amount of info "that nobody else cares about", instead of listening or helping. At my previous job, it was used as a way to get people in the office at a certain time. Your peers don't care about what you're working on, they care about sounding busy.
  • sime2009 7y ago
    > I've been on both sides of them: to give information to managers and to get information from people I delegated. This is horrific. It looks like you don't have a team which is self regulating, autonomous and where team members support each other. You've got a military style command and control structure where subordinates report to their commanding officer/manager. It is everyone for themselves. You've got far bigger problems than stand ups. There is no trust and people are treated like children.
    • pandizzle 7y ago
      Yeah, this has been my feeling for quite a while now, so it's 'nice' to see it being extrapolated from a situational observation. Some individuals are trusted* while most are not trusted at all. * Ts and Cs apply
• matthewfelgate 7y ago
  Provocative headline. Absolute BS argument. Daily Stand up is crucial for juniors to know what is going on.
  • majewsky 7y ago
    > Mentoring is crucial for juniors to know what is going on. FTFY
    • perfetti 7y ago
      iunno, listening to the whole team and knowing what people are working on was wildly helpful when I was a junior. Mentoring is important but so is knowing how the team actually tackles the problems. Especially for juniors who are worried about seeming dumb when they have a blocker/problem. Having that space to hear Seniors say they're stuck makes em talk more. I'm a consultant so I get to see all the wide wide varieties of standups and the short sweet ones just make things hum so much nicer than a 30 minute morning meeting.
• andygeers 7y ago
  I work in a fully remote team and our daily standups are one of the highlights of the day as we get some actual "face to face" time rather than just the usual Slack chat. I think it's probably a bit reductionist to use a headline like "Standups are pointless" rather than just "I've personally not found them helpful".
• bengalister 7y ago
  For me daily scrum meetings were valuable when the team remains small and work on related stuff in a fast pace. But for the last few years, it has not been the case for me. Standups have been organized for managers and scrum masters so that they attend only 1 meeting and participants were not working on directly related topics. Most did not care about what others were doing and issues they faced. We reduced them to bi-weekly or 3 times a week and re-focused them on synchronization topics... Also my general feeling (maybe because I am an old developer) is that it is infantilizing, and a way to maintain peer pressure.
• sbhn 7y ago
  Does anybody suspect that software development is just that tad slightly a completely micro managed profession.
• golemiprague 7y ago
  The problem is trying to formalise a process which should be different for each project and team. Instead of just using common sense and putting something in place to suit the situation people come with all those methodologies which are not really so sophisticated but rather complicates terminologies to such degrees that it looks as if it is sophisticated. It was true to waterfall and true to agile. At the end of the day what you need is a homogenous team of good people that can do their job well and understand each other. They will figure out the right way to manage thing for the specific project.
• reallydontask 7y ago
  As a grunt, hate them but as a team leader they really help make my life easier. In short, depending on team size, you are sacrificing the producers to make the manager's job easier and unfortunately this is a decision that the manager gets to make, so guess what decision is made all the time. The problem is that as a manager I don't want to look bad in front of my manager and he he/her manager's and so on and so forth, so I have to do things that are suboptimal from a delivery point of view to avoid this, e.g. run a stand up to keep a close eye on what everybody is working on rather than say not and ensure that they guys (and gals) know that I'm here to help should they get stuck. To be fair, they do help with managing people that are, for whatever reason, reluctant to look for help, but there are other ways of managing this
  • 0027 7y ago
    > As a grunt, hate them but as a team leader they really help make my life easier. Have your grunts obeyed their leader?
• fnord123 7y ago
  This type of article has far too broad a brush. It's like saying don't play 4-4-2 in football (soccer) because we just won a trophy using 3-5-1-1 so 4-4-2 killed your team's chances of success. It's so small minded it's incredible. As a manager or as a team, you need to determine what will work best for your team and you will need to adapt.
• keyle 7y ago
  The key to a good stand up is if you have nothing to add, or to say, just make it very quick. They're useful for people actually working together and having a sit-rep. When it's business as usual, they just hinder morale.
• frenchman99 7y ago
  Working remotely, the daily standups are the only times in the day where we meet up face to face in a video call. Not only that but it's a time where we feel safe to say that we are struggling on something and ask for help to everyone at once: this often leads to someone in the team (not necessarily the manager) suggesting a pair-programming session to move forward more quickly. Another thing is that we have several products developed independently but with shared libraries. The standup is the moment where we suggest appropriate usages of the shared libraries depending on what our teammates are working on. This increases code re-use and makes us faster. In addition, we have what we call "Sharing time" at the end of our standups, which is a time dedicated to sharing anything we care about, mostly non work related. It's actually cool to see what our colleagues are up to outside work (one colleague is into model planes and 3D printing, another is currently traveling across Portugal, etc, etc). Very interesting stuff ! Our daily standup is kind of like the coffee break in a traditional office.
• Quarrelsome 7y ago
  Ours take 10 minutes, we use them to update people on how our work item is going (e.g. if smth is taking longer than expected) and specifically to give a sense of citizenship and culture. Otherwise we might as well remote in from various corners of the globe in shadowy rooms and talk using voice modulators. Sure, not everyone works like that but I personally like to put names to faces and gain a sense of personality behind the names in a git blame. If you don't value those things then just be low key in your input, its literally 10 minutes of your day and has the potential to present an avoidable issue. To discard it as "management trash" is IMO a massive amount of disrespect toward your fellow team members. They can help and the stand-up opens opportunities for help. There's design work, review work, product management work, scheduling, triage, retrospectives. There's ample opportunities for efficiency gains in these areas during a stand-up outside of just writing code. If you think your job is just writing code then I can see how you might think they're useless but nobody's job is, we all work in teams.
  • lawn 7y ago
    > its literally 10 minutes Even if the meeting itself was instant it would take more than 10 minutes. You would have to stop whatever you're working on, even if you're in the middle of a valuable flow state. Then after the meeting you have to get back into whatever it was, which alone can take you more than 10 minutes depending on the depth of your work. If that's not bad enough then what you talked about in the meeting can also linger. You'll think of problems others have had and it causes your mind to lose focus, now you have thoughts about your problem mixed with other problems. These meetings also tend to happen during the mornings, smack in the middle of the most productive hours of the day. No, a daily standup takes much more time than 10 minutes.
    • Quarrelsome 7y ago
      Your job is more than just code. Your job is other people too. Live in a box all you like but you're completely discounting the value of ensuring other members of the team know what's going on with you over your current work item. FWIW, imagine how a greenhorn might feel working on a team with you. If you feel like giving them some time of your day is a waste or that listening to their problems is a waste they're not going to feel enthused working on your team. Sure, that doesn't necessarily influence your current work item but it might contribute to overwork later if they leave for a team that actually makes them feel like they matter.
• rolltiide 7y ago
  What a strange rant about blockers. Standups are supposed to take a few minutes and everyone becomes aware of what everyone is working on or blocked by. The person that controls the gate should become cognizant that its effecting someone else, and then it gets solved. I love this. I hate when standups are long winded. That removes the usefulness. People dont need to interrupt the whole team and fish out who can help with the blockage, it just comes up and out. Thats the point anyway. I use logs of standups and git commits to track dev progress.
• arkh 7y ago
  Move the daily to just before noon: it does not stop you during work and people tend to keep it short because they're hungry. And you can have people coming in late in the morning and not be a problem. They're a good way to handle people who don't communicate well: if it looks like a junior is blocked on something and does not like to ask for help another dev can easily propose a pair-coding session. But you need to only have devs or former devs so you don't get the feeling you get judged because your "what have I done last day" is "mainly nothing, this ticket is not exciting so I'm going slow".
• sanitycheck 7y ago
  I've had daily standup calls spanning multiple time zones (US, India, UK) with 30+ people in which take an hour. I've had in-person standups which regularly turn into design meetings between two people, which everyone else has to listen to for half an hour. I've had 5 minute 9:30am daily standups which always start between 5 and 20 minutes late, thus are significantly disruptive. Arrive at 9, get a drink, try to pick up where I left off yesterday, oh it's time for the standup. Not yet? OK, where was I? Oh now? But Dan is on the phone? Alright, in 5 mins? ...First hour of the day down the toilet. I've had standups where people are told off for trying to communicate any sort of useful information - so people just list the people they need to talk to that day. And of course in a small company there might only be 8 developers, often working on 4 totally separate things for different clients, but there has to be a standup with everyone just because management can't figure out how to use Jira properly. I've had enough of standups. I've switched to working afternoons only for my current client so I can avoid the bloody things.
• philipps 7y ago
  Standups can be great. And they can be useless. It depends on how they are designed and used. For example, the frequency should be matched to the needs of the team. It only makes sense to meet when there is relevant new information. For example, at the Broad institute at MIT, lab teams meet daily to discuss the output from the last day to identify bottlenecks. It’s important to identify problems quickly so meeting every day makes sense. In other systems, meeting every two or three days would make more sense. It’s not that standups are useless, but that poorly designed stand ups are useless.
• Ensorceled 7y ago
  I've taken over management of a few scrum teams now, and in every case, I've also had to take over standups. One team had somebody who used a time tracker and showed me that the average length of standups before I arrived was something like 37 minutes. Another team, standup was run by the PM and they reviewed EVERY story in the sprint, triaged all new bugs, talked about new features and, worse, pressured developers who were falling behind at EVERY standup. Given how badly many standups are run, I completely understand why most developers hate them.
• EdwardDiego 7y ago
  Stand ups had one real value for me - maintaining my accountability to my team. Having to say "yesterday I was too busy arguing online so didn't do anything" was something helpfully painful.
• tudorizer 7y ago
  I strongly disagree and would like to apologise on the behalf of devs + managers that gave you this impression. I was fortunate to work with people that ran proper stand-ups (5-15 minutes at the beginning of the day, actually standing up). Senior, junior, management, devs, it felt like we all benefited from a quick huddle before starting dev. Even if we Slack troughout the day and raise issues, having a quick sync session seemed to have a bigger impact.
• GoToRO 7y ago
  Standups (as implemented) or another way management thought they can do the same work without hiring real developers. You can come up with any process you want, if you don't have the people, you have nothing.
• romankolpak 7y ago
  Daily standups while being mostly useless on the surface, have an implicit value of enforcing a daily face to face communication between team members who work remotely. In remote teams I often find that people who don't interact face to face frequently, but work on the same part of the system, are more likely to run into communication problems down the road - doing duplicate work, passive aggressive attitudes in PR reviews, poor communication in general which impacts the system in a very direct and negative way. Here's a thing -- people rarely become friends over email or slack conversations, unfortunately. And a team of friendly people who trust each other and communicate efficiently (e.g. feel absolutely comfortable setting up a quick video conferencing call to talk about an issue) is a lot more valuable than a team of people who rarely talk to each other and mostly prefer texting over anything else. Those are my findings when working with remote teams only. I don't think standups are necessary for colocated teams, which can sync at will anytime they want.
  • segmondy 7y ago
    Exactly. I have some remote folks on my team, and folks rotate in and out of being remote on a daily basis. So we do that, but I renamed it to "daily status" since we are not standing up and no one is. We conduct it all 100% over the computer, so those remote don't feel left out. We keep it on track and for us we do it right after around lunch. So people have things they have worked on for the day and things they need to do after. Doing it in the beginning of the day forces everyone to come early defeating flexible time. Doing it at end is the same, and if you're blocked it's silly to wait till the end of the day to tell the team. It's just another tool in the box, if it works for your team great. if it doesn't, shed it. Attitude can determine how useful things are.
• hagnat 7y ago
  let me start with some piece of wisdom: scrum is not a silver bullet. It may not solve your problem, and create additional ones if done improperly. Also, scrum is not written on stone. If something from scrum does not work for your team/company culture, don't use it. Dont like standups ? dont have them. Dont like poker planning ? Don't play it. The process should help you achieve your goals easier and quicker. If the process is hindering your work, just don't follow it.
• deleted 7y ago
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• antoinevg 7y ago
  How about we just stop generalising across each others projects, teams and environments? This stuff is always highly context dependent and the ongoing efforts of everyone to pretend it isn't makes it extremely difficult to have adult conversations on the topic.
  • h0h0h0h0111 7y ago
    For me, "agile" has always been about constantly trying new ways of doing things, keeping the ones that work and culling the ones that don't, fast. It's a process that changes as your team changes, as your goals change, and never works the same for two different teams. It amazes me that people can come along and unironically decry some process as outright bad or pointless
  • mikorym 7y ago
    > context dependent Exactly. If you work for a financial company where a manager has to check every analysis, then of course you need such meetings. I don't think efficient people spend all their time reading about how to be efficient.
  • vfc1 7y ago
    The use of unnecessary daily standups is an industry-wide practice that few teams escape, and it's important to talk about their general unusefulness and hidden costs. It has been proposed originally as an agile "let's do what makes sense for each case" practice, and as quickly been adopted by companies as a common micromanagement practice. Yes its context-dependent, but at the same time, its something so pervasive that most developers can relate to it and have or will experience it one way or the other.
  • debt 7y ago
    “This stuff is always highly context dependent” Well I think standups, on average across all possible developer contexts, are useless. To put another way, standups are likely to be useless regardless of context.
• wccrawford 7y ago
  We've been doing daily free-form standups for years. Initially, it was in-person because nobody was working remote. Recently, one of our people moved to another state and we decided to shift towards remote work to accommodate that, with the eventual shift towards enabling it for everyone. That shift has meant that all meetings now have a video component. Our weekly meeting is everyone in a room, except the remote person who is on video. Daily meetings are all-video, everyone participating from their desk via video chat. Previously, our "meeting" was really a chat session that we talked about work a little and other stuff a lot. Now, our meeting starts with what everyone did and will be doing, working through some issues anyone has, and then talking about whatever until we run out of stuff to talk about, which is usually shorter than I expected, given our previous in-person meeting length. We have 4 developers, and this seems to be working very well for us. Without the daily meetings, we'd not get some of these issues resolved as quickly and we wouldn't have as much team-building time. We initially tried an afternoon meeting for that team-building time, but it didn't work for various people for a number of reasons. The person writing this article seems very hostile towards the rest of the organization. They just want to be in their little box and not have to deal with others. They think everything can work out easily just by using Slack. I think they're terribly mis-guided. What I've seen instead is that people tend to try to own their problems instead of asking for help, but daily standups give them a chance to easily mention their issue and for others to help off-handedly. Things that people previously held onto for days are now taking no more than a day to resolve. I think the problem has 2 parts: Ego, and puzzles. Nobody wants to ask for help, and they'd rather solve it themselves. And puzzles are fun. Most of the great developers I've met love working through problems and figuring out a solution, even if it's not an ideal one. The best developers also work past these problems, but nobody is perfect, and standups definitely help. tl;dr - Standups work for us and our team is closer for it.
• mharroun 7y ago
  I come to prefer standup over slack, 10:30amish everyday a 30 second message of. -I did x yesterday and am doing y today. - I am blocked/need a (answer, code review, dependency completed, ect). -reminder of OOO or WFH. This minor message keeps everyone in the loop and takes little time. If you feel pressure to deliver because of standup I would say that's a cultural issue... or a self performance one (aka why have you been working on x for 2 weeks).
  • vfc1 7y ago
    It's not a cultural issue, it's human nature. You are being asked about your performance daily in front of your group of peers. This will obviously psychologically pressure you to finish things ASAP, so that you can say that its done on the next standup. And that is why management like standups so much, I mean why not say what it is actually for, instead of coming up with all these other side explanations.
• aazaa 7y ago
  > Jira, Trello, Asana, the stickies on your wall, or reach out on Slack In a nutshell, the article claims that these electronic tools render a daily standup pointless and/or disruptive. First, note how many different tools are mentioned. If your project uses one or more of them, you'll need to monitor them all to understand what's happening around you. Second, the constant interruptions of Slack can be extremely disruptive to workflow, as has been noted in a few articles posted here. Third, the article makes an assumption I've seen elsewhere and cannot relate to at all: that project members don't need a high-level snapshot of the project on a day-to-day basis. That it doesn't improve what they do and only sucks time away from the more important job of getting stuff done. As the author puts it: > I'd argue the loss of your focus more probable than the benefit of knowing what someone else is working on. This is a recipe for the entire team heading off a waterfall, each in their own hermetically-sealed, technologically sublime barrels. This is not to say that a daily standup can save you if the team is determined to do it. But getting that daily overview can help build consensus for changes in direction that simply can't come about by monitoring Jira. I always wonder how effective team members showing the tendency to minimize the bigger picture while maximizing the importance of their own contribution will be on a team. The answer usually turns out to be "not very."
• obfk 7y ago
  Agree with the notion that turning standup into a static status meeting is a poor use of time. If you're blocked you should speak up. If the team wants to know the state of your work, they should defer to project management tool. That said, "standup" is less to do with what you did or immediate blockers. It's about planning for the day. "Here's what's going to get done today, and here's the relevant information for my team." It's a tool for synchronizing, getting on the same page, setting you and your team up for success on a daily basis. If you don't feel like that's the case, you're probably right in that going async would be a better use of your time. I suspect this is a process dysfunction that has less to do with standup and more to do with a misunderstanding of the value proposition associated with a properly executed standup. Edit: not everything is an immediate "oh sh*t" type of blocker. If you're working in a collaborative organization, you most like have "low tier" blockers or knowledge that can and should be shared with the team. Face to face makes this easy.
• xborns 7y ago
  Yes, distractions are not great - but communicating with your team is important. Even if the manager is not there the team does it and they do it usually < 5 minutes. Some days I literally don't talk to my team except for that 5 minutes. But as a leader you want to make sure the team is rowing the same direction - it doesn't matter if it takes you longer on a ticket but it also helps in a team to know what others are working on in case you end up working on it later yourself. (We discussed at standup to implement it X way because of Y factors). Many engineers (myself included) don't like asking others for help. But guess what when someone says they are stuck - it is easy to point them to a person or direction and not waste time debugging a problem already solved in the past. If they were so horrible and unproductive, managers (who mostly were engineers in the past would get rid of them).
• combatentropy 7y ago
  I would not mind a stand-up once a week. In fact on a team that never had meetings, I suggested to my manager to have a half-hour meeting every week or two. And I hate meetings!
• leroman 7y ago
  Just a token of systemic conformism to start the morning, as a cog in the machine..
• seibelj 7y ago
  The hubris of the software profession never ceases to amaze me. You have thousand-word screeds about the injustice of being required to attend a daily 15 minute meeting to catch up with your teammates, while being paid six figure salaries. I suggest getting a job in food service, or even construction if you want to see how the average laborer works. Tech is the softest industry ever created.
  • Uhuhreally 7y ago
    oh this one. "X isn't as bad as Y (where Y is worse) therefore X is OK, deal with it" X and Y are completely unconnected and X is still bad and should be fixed. Imagine if you went to the doctor with a fractured ankle and they said "well, it's not as bad as this baby I saw last week who was dying of sepsis. I suggest you count your blessings and deal with it" And 6-figure salaries ? choose the value from the tail of the distribution to support your argument why don't you
  • tlowrimore 7y ago
    Or, you could view this as being a developer addressing an inefficiency in a process. I, for one, view that as a positive trait for someone in this profession. I’m not nuts about standups, Slack or the multitude of distractions dressed up as productivity tools, but I understand their value as a means for helping distributed teams feel some sense of camaraderie, even if that’s not the original intent.
  • efa 7y ago
    As a well paid developer I'm very thankful to be in tech (I kinda just fell into it). IMO, being a developer doesn't require the intensive training of a doctor or lawyer yet pays really well (especially when you have 10-20 years experience). Personally I learned all I know on the job or on my own at home (my undergrad degree was Math and I did very little coding). Plus there are so many job options. Almost every company of a certain size needs software developers (or some type of IT staff). I've worked at companies where I had to work really hard with long hours, but I've also worked places with a very light workload (lots of screwing around time on HNs and Reddit). My son is adept at math and computers. I hope he goes the Computer Science route. He should be able to find a good job and live where he wants.
• buf 7y ago
  I work remotely, have the last 5 years. I love daily standups. Here's why: 1. We do all of our work business async. (e.g. what did you do? what are you working on? All that stays in slack) 2. We use our standups for ice-breaker questions and company-wide announcements. (e.g. Everyone talks about what their favorite vacation was, which usually creates quite the conversation. And then afterwards, the team heads will give any critical updates they have, which usually are none)
  • nerdponx 7y ago
    Everyone talks about what their favorite vacation was Getting to the office "on time" (9 AM) takes an extra 30 minutes compared to arriving "late" (10 AM) due to rush hour mass transit congestion. I would be very pissed off if I had to show up on time just to hear about my coworkers' vacations.
    • buf 7y ago
      > I work remotely I have no commute. Hearing another human being is a welcome change from sitting in my home office all day.
  • thrower123 7y ago
    I am pretty sure that I would commit some kind of X-icide if I had to take productive time out of my day for forced social chit-chat of this nature. They had best have at least donuts available as recompense for inflicting this kind of atrocity. Pizza or Chinese takeout would be more appropriate.
• 0027 7y ago
  To some extent I find standups useful for joining a team. It helps me understand how to team operates, who the experts are, the team's struggle points, etc. But yes, after a short while they do begin to feel mostly pointless.
• stephc_int13 7y ago
  I can't agree more. I've never done standups in the teams I managed. But I chuckled a lot when seeing other teams/companies destroying the morale of their employees with this childish and borderline cult-like parade.
• pradn 7y ago
  Standups are only good if they're used for a very specific, time-critical task that requires coordination among several people. Ex: a major feature is being launched that requires a lot of coordination, but is going to be done in 10 days. Standups should not be used as tack-on "agile" or as a way for management to keep up with what devs are doing or to pressure devs to do more. Ex: daily standup at 11 am. The original purpose of standups in "agile" was to help devs get unblocked. But the expectation should be that others should help devs get unblocked whenever they hit a block, instead of waiting til the next standup! What are they wasting time being blocked when they can simply send an email or IM to a colleague?
  • zoomablemind 7y ago
    Indeed, to make a standup more straightforward we usually just fix 3 questions to everyone: 1. What are you working on? 2. Are you having any blockers? 3. What are you going to work on next? In reality it's just about blockers and seeing the next direction. No need to embellish or 'stuff' any of these responses. It was kind of natural when we used to have a real storyboard, the one with post-it stickies. So the standup would be a good time to move the stories to done or todo side. Well, the whole idea kind of sputters when there're significant status disbalances on the team. For one, the dev members get into status-report mode, while the managers get into i'm-busy-with-important-meetings mode. For the other, it's harder for mangement members of a team to align their ways of staying busy with 'ant-like' activity of devs. Also in such context a 'blocker' suddenly signals a kind of a failure, lack of efficiency that has to be owned, instead of a usual work issue. Who wants to own a failure?Ironically, the management can be instrumental in resolving intra-dept blockers. Any team is about mutual trust, so if the standup does not serve the needs of the whole team, I'd just reserve that time to those members that see a benefit from it. Find another way to interface with other members (mgmt?), maybe a questions queue or some briefs pipeline.
• redhale 7y ago
  > "Maybe its naiveté or maybe just being on teams where, remarkably, nobody knew how to do an effective standup (myself included)" Nailed it. Please don't "ping me on slack" to find out what I'm working on. And please don't force me to document to the nth degree in JIRA. Let's just have a quick chat in the morning and move on with the day.
• rajacombinator 7y ago
  They’re a means of “controlling the code monkeys.” Everyone knows this. (Except the naive devs who have bought into “agile.”)
• 0x70dd 7y ago
  I had the exact same feeling when we started having daily standups about 4 years ago for a green field project. Now that most of the original developers are no longer in the company I feel glad that I actually paid attention. It turns out that I have a very good knowledge about how and what every micro-service in our stack does. What's discussed in those standups might not be relevant for day-to-day work, but on a higher level it can help developers understand the architecture of a complex system better.
• mti27 7y ago
  Refreshing take on standups: https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ?t=105 https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ?t=105
• hansdieter1337 7y ago
  We replaced our daily standups with a chat room. Now, everyone can come in whenever they like and the “standup” can happen totally asynchronous.
• jonbronson 7y ago
  In the very spirit of agile, if standups are not providing your team value, then by all means stop doing them. But, if you are not able to perform a quick functional standup that informs your team about the important work each person is doing, their blockers, etc, might I suggest this is a sign of a deeper team disfuction, rather than some inherent issue with standups generically. I'd go further to say that if your standups consist merely of parroting words verbatim from JIRA, you're letting your team down by not providing additional detail and context that could be provided more easily in person than on such a tool. Lastly, reading between the lines of your text, you seem very much "over it". Not standups, but team engineering. Possibly time to find a new environment better suited to what you enjoy.
• jcutrell 7y ago
  I get the frustration, I really do. But I think part of the issue here is the idea that time is fungible like money. That saving time by looking at Trello cards instead of meeting face to face is somehow more effective. It might be. It might not be. But simply saving a few minutes of time doesn’t necessarily equate to “more productive.” This kind of optimization of behavior assumes everyone will consume information uniformly. Ever sent up a smoke signal for help on a blocker in slack, only for the comment to be lost in a bunch of messages and you stay blocked? Again, in a perfect world, we could just record everything and do it all asynchronously. Wonderful ideal. But the stand up, in my experience, accomplished more than just cold task management. It gives a point for each person to consider what they’ve done, compose it, and to raise in a higher resolution environment the blockers they have. It’s silly to think that we can replace every interaction with an async version of the same interaction, at least on my team. At the same time, I don’t recommend dogma in either direction. Don’t find value in the standup? Do something different.
• thrower123 7y ago
  The only time I have ever seen value in a daily standup meeting is when I worked in a blue-collar industrial job. Everybody had to clock in by 6:30 AM, so there was none of this shit where it is time for the standup, and two or three people haven't dragged in yet, so you delay and waste time. The foreman told each person what they were doing that day. And that was what they needed to get done. If there was a blocker or a safety issue, you threw the shutoff switch and jumped on the radio right away.
• wreath 7y ago
  We started having standups are user stories instead of individuals. Reading the article through this lense made it irrelevant.
• TallGuyShort 7y ago
  >> Okay so, basically, the only unique point to standups is that they "keep everyone excited"? Skipping right past the part about "flag team blockers" in what they just quoted. I don't much care for the other nonsense, but sometimes I'm stuck on a problem, and I'll keep working on it if no one else knows, but it's nice to just broadcast where I'm at and see who thinks they have helpful insight. That happens a lot in my stand ups.
  • scruple 7y ago
    Do you not have async channels for this? I've never thought to myself, "Well, shit, guess I'll keep banging my head against this problem until I can get some help in tomorrow's standup." I have a hard time taking that seriously.
    • TallGuyShort 7y ago
      That too, but do you find that everyone in the team eventually reads everything on the async channel?
      • scruple 7y ago
        I tend to, as a team lead, yes. There's also @ mentions in things like Slack or regular old email to get people's attention.
        • smileysteve 7y ago
          "As a team lead, yes"; 1 goal of scrum is to allow the team to function, to avoid having a single point of quarterbacking, and messages going up and down a chain of command. Moreover, from a psychology perspective, the act of reaching out for help require significant humility and is often delayed. As a lead, I've found it useful to be able to ask questions about updates, and, demonstrate "quarterbacking" by delegating myself or other to pair or split work off. Sometimes it's to ensure that there is better shared knowledge gained, sometimes it's to better parallelize work.
• czbond 7y ago
  Yes, daily detailed standups are not useful. BUT, since development teams tend to be slightly to very introverted, it helps ease 'department wide' communication and 'solutioning' that wouldn't happen otherwise. The underlying goal is to help personality types that often don't like to communicate outside of a small group, and often don't like to ask for help, and in some cases helps the few developers who 'cannot see the forest for the trees' that focus on trivialties when they need to look past them. Edit: It also helps product or leadership types who may not be well versed in technology.
  • therealdrag0 7y ago
    This is where I've seen value. Building comraderie/comfort within the team, where otherwise devs might not talk to each other. Provides a sandbox for brainstorming/reviewing strategies ("Oh did you try this framework/class" or "oh I wrote the same code in X service 4 months ago, go take a look) and making sure everyone is on the same page about what is going in the next cloud release. I will say that only 2/3 times a week is the best bang for your buck, and often switching to "Slack-up" instead of "stand-up", when people are busy with other things or can't be bothered.
• raldi 7y ago
  They're even worse when the team stops standing up for them. Then they turn into a daily agendaless mandatory half-hour meeting.
• it 7y ago
  I cannot upvote this enough. Why do these companies pay us all this money and then burn it with this nonsense?
• seanwilson 7y ago
  Agree with this! Standups are so much worse when you're remote and working different timezones too. It's so disruptive knowing you've got to set up a voice call at a certain time most days. It's completely against async working and takes away your freedom to work the hours that work best for you.
• SavageBeast 7y ago
  So many things to say in response to this article but lets start here: "Your standups are killing your velocity." Agile in general is about predictability first and measuring a predictable velocity. Predictable velocity answers a very important question for product management which is "When can we release". Additionally, Agile Methodology touts Cross Functional Teams where each developer is not a specialist in any one area of the product necessarily. The daily standup is a good place to indicate that a dev has run into an obstacle and seek guidance from someone else on the cross functional team who may in fact be the in house expert on that issue. Guidance in this case typically comes in the form of "Oh, XYZ Thing, I built that - the code you're looking for is in /secret/stuff and if you look in there I think you will find what you're looking for". What guidance is not: "Im having trouble with XYZ - will someone else on the team TOTALLY DROP THEIR SPRINT COMMITMENTS AND DO MY JOB FOR ME". Agile and its daily standups are not about increasing velocity. They are about ensuring predictable velocity at the cost of absolute velocity (the max the team may be capable of performing at which itself will vary from sprint to sprint). Now, all that aside, the real value of the daily standup is obviously accountability. That little 15 minute meeting forces a slacker to stand up in front of the rest of the team and clearly indicate that they either are or are not pulling their weight. Used properly it can be a very motivating practice. Perhaps the author works in a place where every team member is a one person gang capable of independently completing any task whatsoever in the bounds of a sprint. In such an environment Agile itself does become a bottleneck. In the prefect world Agile is absolutely unnecessary - but most of us live in a world thats far from perfect. In summary, Agile as a whole and certainly daily standups can and do act as a drag on the velocity of a proficient team. However the purpose of these practices is not to maximize velocity but rather to ensure a floor for velocity such that a team may never achieve its maximum potential but will instead continue to reliably deliver a velocity that is constant and predictable. Think of this as a sort of Productivity Insurance Policy and it makes a lot more sense. *Additionally - I know of no law that restricts a developer from reaching out for assistance/additional guidance immediately on discovery of a blocking issue. The daily standup is just a convenient place where you have a crack at communicating with the whole team in one place. Typically with some manager type lurking quietly on the call like a parent keeping an ear on the kids playing in the other room.
  • 7y ago
• luord 7y ago
  I wouldn't mind stand-ups (well, not as much ) if they actually stuck to their mission statement. My biggest problem is that almost always someone (usually the product owner/manager) starts droning on and on about stuff that has little to do with daily work, usually by repeating stuff already said the day before.
• stakhanov 7y ago
  In a recent client engagement I witnessed scrum-gone-badly-wrong. It happened underneath the department manager in the line organization of a large corporate (not project manager, line manager). He managed about a dozen people doing about a dozen projects at any one time. A project was usually staffed by one person working it fulltime, and drawing support from the rest of the group here and there. The manager held a daily standup involving the whole dozen people. With everybody doing a five-minute status report on their project, that meant five minutes of speaking time for everybody and 55 minutes of sitting through status reports on projects that you had zero involvement with, where you couldn't possibly have anything useful to say. I suggested numerous times that it would be better to have devs have a 1-hour blocker in their calendar without an actual meeting. They would do an e-mail update, and if the manager saw the need for any clarification he could use the 1-hour timeslot to turn up at their desk and talk 1-on-1. It would have been so much more efficient, but the manager didn't go for the suggestion. Paying lip service to the scrum quasi religion, the manager repeatedly emphasized that the point of the standup was not to check on people's productivity or make them face repercussions for not meeting daily commitments. But he never missed an opportunity to make a passive-aggressive joke when a dev's productivity was called into question. Like a dev might say "I thought I would be able to do X yesterday, but didn't manage, because problem Y turned up. I solved Y, but X is still not done". The manager might jokingly say something like "Well, I hope you enjoyed your beachtime and will be able to finish X today." So not funny. I'm thoroughly convinced that shaming people was the method he was using to pressure people into doing overtime or otherwise doing whatever was necessary to meet daily goals every day, and that that was the real reason he wanted the whole department in the room. Because shaming is so much more effective when you shame somebody in front of a lot of people than just making a bad joke in a 1-on-1 situation.
• sbochins 7y ago
  I usually take note of what I did at the end of the day to give me an idea of how productive / unproductive I was. On a previous time I got everyone to just post their standup updates on Slack. It was quick and asynchronous. If you wanted to follow up with someone you could just talk to them afterwards. It also gives you a history of the past week, month, etc if interested. Data is useful and daily meetings are often pointless. Let’s all evolve our standup routine.
• specialist 7y ago
  "Your standups are killing your velocity." "Velocity"? It'll be hard to start a revolution while still using the enemy's terminology. -- Gods, I'm miss PMI, critical path, the trilemma (time, cost, scope), quality, rationality. And before any ankle biters whinge about "water fall", just stop. We were so much more iterative, nimble back when we acted like professionals. The Agile Methodology is to argue about the Agile Methodology. Pop-biz psychology. Tech's own post-modernist rejection of anything older than a week. And just as useful.
• kthejoker2 7y ago
  Stand ups are the modern mashup of two great comedian quotes: Pascal's "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter" And Carlin's "Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?"
• utopkara 7y ago
  It is hard for one to appreciate the value of a process that helps teams operate well in the long run, in the face of disruptions, pivots, failures, growth, etc. If you can do without standups, good for you.
• polkduran 7y ago
  We do standups so people arrive early in the morning. I was once told that when requesting the standup to be reschedule one hour later.