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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 ke

by 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.
    - DougBTX 7y ago
      On the other hand, the Scrum Guide[1] recommends that teams have 3-9 people in them, and that more leads to poor coordination. Seems like an inverse "Goldilocks problem", Scrum standups are best when there are more than 10 people and less than 10 people in the team. [1] https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum... - page 7
      - solidasparagus 7y ago
        I am absolutely not a believer in anyone who talks about agile techniques as having 'Rules'. That is a trademark of agile gone wrong to me. Small teams are better, but not always possible. Agile is about having team mechanics that make your specific team more productive and changing them as your team changes.
      - EdwardDiego 7y ago
        That aligns with my experiences, we aimed for 6, with a max of 8, with a min of 4. I will say, Scrum was really helpful for us, but only because we took "iterate on your process" seriously, and had a culture where teams could experiment with their process. In the end we outgrew it, but Scrum helped us reach the point where we could do so.
    - andreygrehov 7y ago
      What’s the point of knowing what the rest of 10 people are working on? You won’t remember all of it anyway. There is no need to add so much cognitive load to your brain every single morning. Engineers should imho start their day with clear mind.
- wannabag 7y ago
  I second the above comment, this is indeed the difference between a team and what shouldn't be a team. If people at a standup are talking about unrelated things then they indeed shouldn't be having standups, much less be considered a team in the first place. What's happening in standups and probably other meetings are symptoms of a structural issue people are either not seeing or failing address. My rule of thumb for assessing a team is based on two simple questions: 1. Do people in the team work towards the same goal? 2. Do people in the team depend on each other? If the response to both questions is positive then by all means, have standups. In other cases, have a good look at whether it makes sense to call them a team in the first place.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    unrelated is relative. If I'm working on bug A and bob id working on bug B, I don't give a shit that bob is having to go talk to cathy in accounting about something. They're unrelated tasks because there are no dependencies between them, and there is absolutely no reason why I should have to sit through bob talking about his day.
    - bradstewart 7y ago
      But the point of these, at least to me, is that someone on the team may know a way to get the problem solved without talking to Cathy in accounting. Sure, sometimes you listen to unrelated tasks, but many times (in my experience), somebody on the team can offer a bit of advice that helps everyone move faster. EDIT: Spelling.
      - celticmusic 7y ago
        and now the "standup" has devolved to a design session, and I don't want to have to stand there while bob and betty have a discussion about it.
        bradstewart 7y ago
        It certainly can. We try to take those types of discussions offline though--Bob and Betty can have that talk after the standup. And to clarify, I also find daily standups to be tedious and generally unhelpful. Once or twice a week seems to be the sweet spot (for me/my team).
sime2009 7y ago
> What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other If that is the case, then why are you even in the same scrum team? What you have there is not a team by the sounds of it.
mcv 7y ago
> "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." If you're still working on the same issue, then just say that. Keep the standup short. Of course this can also be a good time to notice a lack of progress; if you're spending days on an issue with little progress, are you stuck? Was the story badly defined? There could be very good reasons why it's taking longer, but again, the standup is a great time to notice these things and check if there's a way to help the issue along.
sime2009 7y ago
> Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them. I haven't ever felt this kind of pressure from management in my stand ups. We very rarely have anyone from management present anyway. The stand up exists for the benefit of the team, not management. It is not a status report for management.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  A lot of HN commenters have a tendency to project what ever experience they have with poor management onto all management in general. Poorly run teams have problems, poorly run projects have problems, poorly designed apps have problems... But well runs teams exist, and they use a lot of the same management tools as the bad ones. I’ve had both great and terrible experiences with standups. In a well run team, I love them. But in a poorly run team, getting frustrated with the idea of standup is about is misguided as getting upset with Jira for your managers shortcomings.
- EdwardDiego 7y ago
  It is a status report in companies doing "Scrum" - usually after CTO paid an Agile-with-a-capital-A consultant. I've been a bit of volunteer agile coaching in my area, and yeah, one example that always stuck with me was that the product managers and BAs just got renamed product owners, and they sat in every retro and attended every stand-up. Funnily enough they were never available to the team during planning. They had important meetings on a Monday... I tried to empathise to them that "stand-up and retro are solely for the team", but no dice. They still wanted that command and control.
- isoskeles 7y ago
  For some people, the manager-employee relationship is a strictly adversarial one, to the point that they make it a self-fulfilling prophecy by viewing every act of their manager (or employees) as malicious if not a perceived slight.
rmetzler 7y ago
I’ve seen standups with 20 people where 2 or 3 talked for more than 10 minutes. That’s not what it’s meant to be. While I would also like to do the daily status email, I see value in doing a synchronized standup. It helps planning for the day. Not all people are great communicators and I’ve seen lots of developers spend days on tasks which should take 1 or 2 hours max. Standups highlight these issues, but you need to listen and go to these people in private to understand their problems. And you should absolutely take up people if they offer to help you. I tend to bring pen and paper to remember what I wanted to say and to note when I here something that’s relevant to me.
- diamondo25 7y ago
  Standups with more than 6 people will already create a meeting of at least an hour. I mean, standups help is small teams to keep everyone excited (if you all agree on it!), and nobody likes meetings, so if it looks like a meeting and people need a 'token' to speak, then the point of the get-together is already far gone. Why not join the meetup with afterwork drinks? That way you can really say what blocked you ánd talk about the things that you'd do in a standup...
  - dagw 7y ago
    Why not join the meetup with afterwork drinks? Mandatory after work 'fun' can be highly controversial.
  - EdwardDiego 7y ago
    > Why not join the meetup with afterwork drinks? That excludes certain segments of your workforce in ways that make HR sweat. Parents, alcoholics, people of faith... you've made attending the meetup more difficult.
  - antisemiotic 7y ago
    So the way to fix dysfunctional meetings is not to split them into manageable sizes, but rather shift them into some sort of impromptu unpaid overtime, and bribe your staff with alcohol in hopes that they won't notice?
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them. Spot on. In many companies standup are used to put people on the spot and pressuring them to show progress and so on. It's amazing how many people on HN don't realize that.
Angostura 7y ago
I wonder if an end-of day stand-up might have benefits. A chance to briefly set out any blockers you anticipate for tomorrow/stuff you will need from other people. But just as important; an end of day marker 'we're done - piss off home now - no working late'.
- dagw 7y ago
  I feel that end of day is more variable than start of day, especially if end of day means "Go Home!". Some people have kids to pick up from school/day care and leave at 3, while others like to come in later and/or take a long lunch and work until 6-7. Saying everybody must be in by 9.30 is probably easier to coordinate that saying everybody must stay until 5 and then go home at 5.15.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  I've done both and I personally prefer beginning of day. Standups are usually (in my experience) the beginning of a conversation or a brainstorm and that works better when there is time left to continue after standup. If they are just reporting what you did then end of day might be better, but that sounds like a bad standup.
- ProZsolt 7y ago
  I worked in a Boston based team from Budapest. I did EOD standups all the time. It was nice I did not have a hard time remembering what I did during a day. I usually had one hour to short out any blockers before I finished working.
- jsight 7y ago
  There are just as many issues with that as the beginning of the day, IMO. What constitutes the end of the day, for example? It isn't unusual for teams to have someone who comes in really early and leaves early. Or someone else who comes in late and leaves late. Early enough for the 6-3 worker might be well before the end of the day for a lot of others.
cryptica 7y ago
>> Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them. So true. At the last company I worked, the daily standups became absurd. We were forced to use a physical board which was always out of synch with GitHub and we were just repeating the same stuff that we already knew everything about. Also, we had scrum retrospectives in which the new scrum master was throwing a yellow ball at someone when it was their turn to talk. WTF?! Does management think our brains stopped growing after the age of 5? You have a room filled with potentially brilliant engineers and you're treating them like toddlers. Do they seriously think that this is the right way to build a company which will make an impact on society? What the hell is wrong with managers these days? Is there some kind of virus going around which is turning them into idiots or is there a global conspiracy to only promote idiots into positions of power?
kdelok 7y ago
This just sounds like a bad/inappropriate use of a tool. I wouldn't think that a team of people working on unconnected items should have any meetings at all, let alone a daily stand-up. As others have said, when you're working on a team where there is significant interplay or varied, related experience, they're really useful. We work on an OS and have members of the team who happen to have experience using infra and tooling. There's no way you would necessarily know this without saying "Oh, I was struggling with this bit of stats collection infra" and somebody else says "Yeah, I worked on that on x project, y years ago. Let's chat after stand-up." There are obviously other ways to seed this kind of thing, but brief stand-ups seem a good way of doing it. The other thing that we tend to do is just say "Oh, I did x that doesn't really relate to the project yesterday, but that's not very interesting" and leave it at that.
mschaef 7y ago
> 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. If you can't find something to say for a minute about a day's worth of work then you probably need to be rethinking how you're spending your days.
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
Back when I first started doing daily standups at jobs almost 20 years ago -- when agile/xp was first starting to buzz -- it honestly felt like a breath of fresh air and explicitly something that management would _not_ want. Quick, informal, brief checkpoint with your coworkers, then back to work. We had a group of almost 20 engineers & QA people in a circle, but it went quickly and inobtrusively... nobody spoke for more than a few seconds. We all knew what everyone else was doing, and could go offline and have a discussion afterwards if necessary. It was a meeting for ourselves, not for management. There were no status reports to management, no gantt charts, no percentage estimates of completion, etc. Just: here's what I'm doing/not doing. Fast forward a decade or two and I've seen good and bad use of this meeting form. But I still think it's a good idea, it just requires discipline to stop people from hogging air space or veering off into tangents.
- ubermonkey 7y ago
  "It was a meeting for ourselves, not for management. There were no status reports to management, no gantt charts, no percentage estimates of completion, etc. Just: here's what I'm doing/not doing." That's my understanding of what a standup is supposed to be, and it's what my experience of them has been. THIS is useful. It's in particular useful if you have devs on the team who tend to get kinda "wound around the axle" on problems rather than speak up or seek help. There will always be devs who think any meeting is by definition a waste of time, and you can't make those people happy, but a true brief standup meeting as described here is SUPER useful. (Daily's probably too much though.)
  - ownagefool 7y ago
    Like many things, if it works for you and doesn't turn negative, then that's great and more power too you. Personally, when I lead a team, I keep abreast of what people are working on and ask them if they need help, or tell one of the more suited senior guys to offer a hand if it's an area I can't easily help in. I imagine the standup helps more when you're lead is a non-technical scrum master guy who doesn't have much of a personal relationship with the team. On the latter point I typically buy my team members fancy coffees and the occasional lunch, and it's easy to get on with them if you care about their careers, so I've never needed a standup.
skohan 7y ago
> 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. > if you need help you ask it anyway on the spot, there is no need to wait for the next standup for that. I thought part of the reasoning for standups was to synchronize your interruptions, so instead of breaking people's flow throughout the day, you can line up all the cross-cutting concerns at the beginning of the day.
rawoke083600 7y ago
"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." Exactly this... I couldn't care less what dev-no-3 is working on since its not impacting me and I could bet no one cared much what I said except the scrum-master.
megous 7y ago
> I even saw once a developer on his last day throwing the speaker's token (a teddy bear) to the trash can LOL! Are we talking adult employees here? :D Anyway, if I ever become employed, and will have to work on-site, I want the comfort token to be a stuffed baby gnu. https://shop.fsf.org/gear/stuffed-baby-gnu https://shop.fsf.org/gear/stuffed-baby-gnu
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  I like that symbolism - it's the optimism of the open source community being soiled, manhandled, and molested all in an effort to please management.
jb3689 7y ago
> Everyone on the teams I worked on seemed to think that standups where useless It sounds like a bigger a problem then standups; if everyone feels they are useless why is there no forum in which this meeting is being discussed and removed or recalibrated? It sounds like the team doesn't own their own process or doesn't talk to each other about process
protonimitate 7y ago
We started just doing our daily "standups" via slack. The whole point (imo) of the meeting is to identify blockers and/or slowdowns for what you're working on, and getting help if necessary. Reporting this status async over slack is great because it fulfills these needs without wasting anyone's time. If you need help or are block, you report that. Otherwise, no need for a "status update". It also helps that we do this in our eng-only channel, where no product/upper management are in, so only our team is privy to the information. The one downside is that it can be a bit more difficult to get help on something highly important if everyone is tunnel-visioned. Luckily, we have a great engineering manager who helps orchestrate help in those situations or steps in personally if someone is blocked.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sverige 7y ago
> Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them. When I was a manager, I always found it to be far more effective to have team members apply psychological pressure to their peers, rather than apply pressure from the top down. Standups are best avoided by managers. I never felt the need for yet another meeting. In fact, an excessive number meetings are one of the main reasons I got out of the management business.
fsloth 7y ago
"What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other," It sounds like you are not a team in the sense of a coherent body creating added value, but a line organization mandated agglomeration of talent under a specific manager. When actually working together quick stand ups make sense, but for individual contributors they add very little added value. However, the only way to know if the dailys are unnecessary or not, is not how they feel like, but what happens when you remove them. All coordination work feels unproductive. But after a specific complexity is reached coordinated efforts of communication are the only way in which a large body of talent can function in a sensible way together.
- convolvatron 7y ago
  when really working together, standups are superfluous.
invalidOrTaken 7y ago
I commented on another post a while ago that the simplest way to "do Agile right" is to give the developers more power. There's just no other way. Whether that means: ownership, reporting direction, I don't know, but people can feel it, power is power. I don't mean to imply this is a panacea. "Doing Agile right" is one thing, but business is about more than software development, and an engineering-led organization can of course ignore financial or marketing realities. But there's an expertise-for-the-job phenom going here. Managing software development is a skill. It requires "navigating ambiguity," that favorite phrase of managers. It requires being able to expect and roll with punches, and chart a new course---every few minutes to every few months, depending on the context. I suspect the best thing would be for boards to take a more active interest in their company's SD activities. Bring the CTO in, figure out the tech landscape the company is confronting. "Giving devs more power" is probably a no-sell, but "boards taking software seriously" might fly. And when you do that, you unavoidably become the devs who already have power. I know, a digression, sorry. But it's just night-and-day, the diff between technical and non-technical management.

by vfc1 7y ago

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.
  - DougBTX 7y ago
    On the other hand, the Scrum Guide[1] recommends that teams have 3-9 people in them, and that more leads to poor coordination. Seems like an inverse "Goldilocks problem", Scrum standups are best when there are more than 10 people and less than 10 people in the team. [1] https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum... - page 7
    - solidasparagus 7y ago
      I am absolutely not a believer in anyone who talks about agile techniques as having 'Rules'. That is a trademark of agile gone wrong to me. Small teams are better, but not always possible. Agile is about having team mechanics that make your specific team more productive and changing them as your team changes.
    - EdwardDiego 7y ago
      That aligns with my experiences, we aimed for 6, with a max of 8, with a min of 4. I will say, Scrum was really helpful for us, but only because we took "iterate on your process" seriously, and had a culture where teams could experiment with their process. In the end we outgrew it, but Scrum helped us reach the point where we could do so.
  - andreygrehov 7y ago
    What’s the point of knowing what the rest of 10 people are working on? You won’t remember all of it anyway. There is no need to add so much cognitive load to your brain every single morning. Engineers should imho start their day with clear mind.
wannabag 7y ago
I second the above comment, this is indeed the difference between a team and what shouldn't be a team. If people at a standup are talking about unrelated things then they indeed shouldn't be having standups, much less be considered a team in the first place. What's happening in standups and probably other meetings are symptoms of a structural issue people are either not seeing or failing address. My rule of thumb for assessing a team is based on two simple questions: 1. Do people in the team work towards the same goal? 2. Do people in the team depend on each other? If the response to both questions is positive then by all means, have standups. In other cases, have a good look at whether it makes sense to call them a team in the first place.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  unrelated is relative. If I'm working on bug A and bob id working on bug B, I don't give a shit that bob is having to go talk to cathy in accounting about something. They're unrelated tasks because there are no dependencies between them, and there is absolutely no reason why I should have to sit through bob talking about his day.
  - bradstewart 7y ago
    But the point of these, at least to me, is that someone on the team may know a way to get the problem solved without talking to Cathy in accounting. Sure, sometimes you listen to unrelated tasks, but many times (in my experience), somebody on the team can offer a bit of advice that helps everyone move faster. EDIT: Spelling.
    - celticmusic 7y ago
      and now the "standup" has devolved to a design session, and I don't want to have to stand there while bob and betty have a discussion about it.
      - bradstewart 7y ago
        It certainly can. We try to take those types of discussions offline though--Bob and Betty can have that talk after the standup. And to clarify, I also find daily standups to be tedious and generally unhelpful. Once or twice a week seems to be the sweet spot (for me/my team).

sime2009 7y ago

> What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other If that is the case, then why are you even in the same scrum team? What you have there is not a team by the sounds of it.

mcv 7y ago

> "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." If you're still working on the same issue, then just say that. Keep the standup short. Of course this can also be a good time to notice a lack of progress; if you're spending days on an issue with little progress, are you stuck? Was the story badly defined? There could be very good reasons why it's taking longer, but again, the standup is a great time to notice these things and check if there's a way to help the issue along.

sime2009 7y ago

> Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them. I haven't ever felt this kind of pressure from management in my stand ups. We very rarely have anyone from management present anyway. The stand up exists for the benefit of the team, not management. It is not a status report for management.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
A lot of HN commenters have a tendency to project what ever experience they have with poor management onto all management in general. Poorly run teams have problems, poorly run projects have problems, poorly designed apps have problems... But well runs teams exist, and they use a lot of the same management tools as the bad ones. I’ve had both great and terrible experiences with standups. In a well run team, I love them. But in a poorly run team, getting frustrated with the idea of standup is about is misguided as getting upset with Jira for your managers shortcomings.
EdwardDiego 7y ago
It is a status report in companies doing "Scrum" - usually after CTO paid an Agile-with-a-capital-A consultant. I've been a bit of volunteer agile coaching in my area, and yeah, one example that always stuck with me was that the product managers and BAs just got renamed product owners, and they sat in every retro and attended every stand-up. Funnily enough they were never available to the team during planning. They had important meetings on a Monday... I tried to empathise to them that "stand-up and retro are solely for the team", but no dice. They still wanted that command and control.
isoskeles 7y ago
For some people, the manager-employee relationship is a strictly adversarial one, to the point that they make it a self-fulfilling prophecy by viewing every act of their manager (or employees) as malicious if not a perceived slight.

rmetzler 7y ago

I’ve seen standups with 20 people where 2 or 3 talked for more than 10 minutes. That’s not what it’s meant to be. While I would also like to do the daily status email, I see value in doing a synchronized standup. It helps planning for the day. Not all people are great communicators and I’ve seen lots of developers spend days on tasks which should take 1 or 2 hours max. Standups highlight these issues, but you need to listen and go to these people in private to understand their problems. And you should absolutely take up people if they offer to help you. I tend to bring pen and paper to remember what I wanted to say and to note when I here something that’s relevant to me.

diamondo25 7y ago
Standups with more than 6 people will already create a meeting of at least an hour. I mean, standups help is small teams to keep everyone excited (if you all agree on it!), and nobody likes meetings, so if it looks like a meeting and people need a 'token' to speak, then the point of the get-together is already far gone. Why not join the meetup with afterwork drinks? That way you can really say what blocked you ánd talk about the things that you'd do in a standup...
- dagw 7y ago
  Why not join the meetup with afterwork drinks? Mandatory after work 'fun' can be highly controversial.
- EdwardDiego 7y ago
  > Why not join the meetup with afterwork drinks? That excludes certain segments of your workforce in ways that make HR sweat. Parents, alcoholics, people of faith... you've made attending the meetup more difficult.
- antisemiotic 7y ago
  So the way to fix dysfunctional meetings is not to split them into manageable sizes, but rather shift them into some sort of impromptu unpaid overtime, and bribe your staff with alcohol in hopes that they won't notice?

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

> Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them. Spot on. In many companies standup are used to put people on the spot and pressuring them to show progress and so on. It's amazing how many people on HN don't realize that.

Angostura 7y ago

I wonder if an end-of day stand-up might have benefits. A chance to briefly set out any blockers you anticipate for tomorrow/stuff you will need from other people. But just as important; an end of day marker 'we're done - piss off home now - no working late'.

dagw 7y ago
I feel that end of day is more variable than start of day, especially if end of day means "Go Home!". Some people have kids to pick up from school/day care and leave at 3, while others like to come in later and/or take a long lunch and work until 6-7. Saying everybody must be in by 9.30 is probably easier to coordinate that saying everybody must stay until 5 and then go home at 5.15.
solidasparagus 7y ago
I've done both and I personally prefer beginning of day. Standups are usually (in my experience) the beginning of a conversation or a brainstorm and that works better when there is time left to continue after standup. If they are just reporting what you did then end of day might be better, but that sounds like a bad standup.
ProZsolt 7y ago
I worked in a Boston based team from Budapest. I did EOD standups all the time. It was nice I did not have a hard time remembering what I did during a day. I usually had one hour to short out any blockers before I finished working.
jsight 7y ago
There are just as many issues with that as the beginning of the day, IMO. What constitutes the end of the day, for example? It isn't unusual for teams to have someone who comes in really early and leaves early. Or someone else who comes in late and leaves late. Early enough for the 6-3 worker might be well before the end of the day for a lot of others.

cryptica 7y ago

>> Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them. So true. At the last company I worked, the daily standups became absurd. We were forced to use a physical board which was always out of synch with GitHub and we were just repeating the same stuff that we already knew everything about. Also, we had scrum retrospectives in which the new scrum master was throwing a yellow ball at someone when it was their turn to talk. WTF?! Does management think our brains stopped growing after the age of 5? You have a room filled with potentially brilliant engineers and you're treating them like toddlers. Do they seriously think that this is the right way to build a company which will make an impact on society? What the hell is wrong with managers these days? Is there some kind of virus going around which is turning them into idiots or is there a global conspiracy to only promote idiots into positions of power?

kdelok 7y ago

This just sounds like a bad/inappropriate use of a tool. I wouldn't think that a team of people working on unconnected items should have any meetings at all, let alone a daily stand-up. As others have said, when you're working on a team where there is significant interplay or varied, related experience, they're really useful. We work on an OS and have members of the team who happen to have experience using infra and tooling. There's no way you would necessarily know this without saying "Oh, I was struggling with this bit of stats collection infra" and somebody else says "Yeah, I worked on that on x project, y years ago. Let's chat after stand-up." There are obviously other ways to seed this kind of thing, but brief stand-ups seem a good way of doing it. The other thing that we tend to do is just say "Oh, I did x that doesn't really relate to the project yesterday, but that's not very interesting" and leave it at that.

mschaef 7y ago

> 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. If you can't find something to say for a minute about a day's worth of work then you probably need to be rethinking how you're spending your days.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

Back when I first started doing daily standups at jobs almost 20 years ago -- when agile/xp was first starting to buzz -- it honestly felt like a breath of fresh air and explicitly something that management would _not_ want. Quick, informal, brief checkpoint with your coworkers, then back to work. We had a group of almost 20 engineers & QA people in a circle, but it went quickly and inobtrusively... nobody spoke for more than a few seconds. We all knew what everyone else was doing, and could go offline and have a discussion afterwards if necessary. It was a meeting for ourselves, not for management. There were no status reports to management, no gantt charts, no percentage estimates of completion, etc. Just: here's what I'm doing/not doing. Fast forward a decade or two and I've seen good and bad use of this meeting form. But I still think it's a good idea, it just requires discipline to stop people from hogging air space or veering off into tangents.

ubermonkey 7y ago
"It was a meeting for ourselves, not for management. There were no status reports to management, no gantt charts, no percentage estimates of completion, etc. Just: here's what I'm doing/not doing." That's my understanding of what a standup is supposed to be, and it's what my experience of them has been. THIS is useful. It's in particular useful if you have devs on the team who tend to get kinda "wound around the axle" on problems rather than speak up or seek help. There will always be devs who think any meeting is by definition a waste of time, and you can't make those people happy, but a true brief standup meeting as described here is SUPER useful. (Daily's probably too much though.)
- ownagefool 7y ago
  Like many things, if it works for you and doesn't turn negative, then that's great and more power too you. Personally, when I lead a team, I keep abreast of what people are working on and ask them if they need help, or tell one of the more suited senior guys to offer a hand if it's an area I can't easily help in. I imagine the standup helps more when you're lead is a non-technical scrum master guy who doesn't have much of a personal relationship with the team. On the latter point I typically buy my team members fancy coffees and the occasional lunch, and it's easy to get on with them if you care about their careers, so I've never needed a standup.

skohan 7y ago

> 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. > if you need help you ask it anyway on the spot, there is no need to wait for the next standup for that. I thought part of the reasoning for standups was to synchronize your interruptions, so instead of breaking people's flow throughout the day, you can line up all the cross-cutting concerns at the beginning of the day.

rawoke083600 7y ago

"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." Exactly this... I couldn't care less what dev-no-3 is working on since its not impacting me and I could bet no one cared much what I said except the scrum-master.

megous 7y ago

> I even saw once a developer on his last day throwing the speaker's token (a teddy bear) to the trash can LOL! Are we talking adult employees here? :D Anyway, if I ever become employed, and will have to work on-site, I want the comfort token to be a stuffed baby gnu. https://shop.fsf.org/gear/stuffed-baby-gnu https://shop.fsf.org/gear/stuffed-baby-gnu

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
I like that symbolism - it's the optimism of the open source community being soiled, manhandled, and molested all in an effort to please management.

jb3689 7y ago

> Everyone on the teams I worked on seemed to think that standups where useless It sounds like a bigger a problem then standups; if everyone feels they are useless why is there no forum in which this meeting is being discussed and removed or recalibrated? It sounds like the team doesn't own their own process or doesn't talk to each other about process

protonimitate 7y ago

We started just doing our daily "standups" via slack. The whole point (imo) of the meeting is to identify blockers and/or slowdowns for what you're working on, and getting help if necessary. Reporting this status async over slack is great because it fulfills these needs without wasting anyone's time. If you need help or are block, you report that. Otherwise, no need for a "status update". It also helps that we do this in our eng-only channel, where no product/upper management are in, so only our team is privy to the information. The one downside is that it can be a bit more difficult to get help on something highly important if everyone is tunnel-visioned. Luckily, we have a great engineering manager who helps orchestrate help in those situations or steps in personally if someone is blocked.

deleted 7y ago

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sverige 7y ago

> Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them. When I was a manager, I always found it to be far more effective to have team members apply psychological pressure to their peers, rather than apply pressure from the top down. Standups are best avoided by managers. I never felt the need for yet another meeting. In fact, an excessive number meetings are one of the main reasons I got out of the management business.

fsloth 7y ago

"What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other," It sounds like you are not a team in the sense of a coherent body creating added value, but a line organization mandated agglomeration of talent under a specific manager. When actually working together quick stand ups make sense, but for individual contributors they add very little added value. However, the only way to know if the dailys are unnecessary or not, is not how they feel like, but what happens when you remove them. All coordination work feels unproductive. But after a specific complexity is reached coordinated efforts of communication are the only way in which a large body of talent can function in a sensible way together.

convolvatron 7y ago
when really working together, standups are superfluous.

invalidOrTaken 7y ago

I commented on another post a while ago that the simplest way to "do Agile right" is to give the developers more power. There's just no other way. Whether that means: ownership, reporting direction, I don't know, but people can feel it, power is power. I don't mean to imply this is a panacea. "Doing Agile right" is one thing, but business is about more than software development, and an engineering-led organization can of course ignore financial or marketing realities. But there's an expertise-for-the-job phenom going here. Managing software development is a skill. It requires "navigating ambiguity," that favorite phrase of managers. It requires being able to expect and roll with punches, and chart a new course---every few minutes to every few months, depending on the context. I suspect the best thing would be for boards to take a more active interest in their company's SD activities. Bring the CTO in, figure out the tech landscape the company is confronting. "Giving devs more power" is probably a no-sell, but "boards taking software seriously" might fly. And when you do that, you unavoidably become the devs who already have power. I know, a digression, sorry. But it's just night-and-day, the diff between technical and non-technical management.