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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)

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!

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!