5 ms·

out of curiosity what value do you see in morning standups? 15 yrs and i still don't see it (i've really tried).

latchkey 7y ago
I agree that the whole typical 'what did you do yesterday' is indeed lacking value. The standups are mostly just pointing the stories that need pointing, covering any questions and picking the pairs for the days work (pivotal is 100% pair programming). The meetings can be done within 5-15 minutes at most. I'm currently living at a yoga retreat center in the mountains of Vietnam. I can see from the practice that the first few minutes of silence is good to clear the mind. I think having standups is a similar good way to start the day with a positive attitude.
- matwood 7y ago
  I also find value in standups, but the problem is they constrain the team to some daily meeting time. For example, I start work around 6am. A co-worker does morning kid duty and tends to start closer to 10am. There is no good way to start our days at the same time, and there really is no need. What we have been trialing for awhile is a simple Slack checkin. Everyone reads them when their day starts, and if there are any questions or comments a Slack thread is started from the checkin message. It's worked quite well.
  - latchkey 7y ago
    Pivotal solved that by requiring everyone to work the same exact hours. It is a bit military in that regard, but it works for them. You don't get a job there unless you buy into it. Their reasoning is more around their culture of pair programming. It sounds like you have found a solution that works for your company and that is great! The way I look at it is that as long as we are shipping software around the time when we say we are going to and the quality is high and people aren't killing themselves (weekends) to make it all happen, all good. =)
koreth1 7y ago
I just asked the same thing because I've had that experience too. I'm curious: are you usually working on things that require close collaboration between team members? My hunch is that standups are pretty useless on teams where each developer is working on an independent change where there isn't much opportunity to get blocked by teammates aside from waiting for code reviews and the like. That's most of the teams I've worked on, and the standups inevitably turn into a verbal form of, "Hey manager, here's my status report for the day even though you already know all this because I've already said it in Slack," because you have nothing to ask of the other people on the team but you're required to say something every day.
- ryanbrunner 7y ago
  Where I've seen standups work effectively is when an engineer has a bit of context on a problem that someone is dealing with, or an insight that might unblock someone. I've had many times I've mentioned in an (async, written in slack) standup status update, and someone's chimed in with something like "Oh, I've dealt with that before - let's pair for 10 minutes so I can walk you through some gotchas". Another plus for me personally is that it has a focusing effect on myself as a developer - if I say I'm going to get something done in standup, I'm going to force myself to focus on that task, and not get distracted by something else unless it's really important. I can see how that's a totally personal thing though - I need to have some sort of external "deadline", even if it's self-imposed and soft, to keep me focused. All of the above can be solved with async updates in Slack though, and that's probably actually a better medium. Having folks get in the same room seems a little pointless to me, especially when you have remote folks and timezones are an issue.
  - Sean1708 7y ago
    The problem I've had with async updates is that they often get ignored because everyone that could help is busy at the time, so you still need the actual standup to just remind them about it. How do you get around this?
    - ryanbrunner 7y ago
ozim 7y ago
Standups are for "weakest" devs, to break silo of "I am working on my thing don't bother me". "weakest" devs - you know not everyone is outspoken and will communicate without issues, new young devs will be afraid to ask an experienced guy. Some experienced guys (also "weak") will be assholes to young devs for asking questions. Just getting team to talk to each other at least once a day is positive. Unless you work only with senior people who are experienced and don't have any issues talking to each other, I would still try to get people to gather for standup.
- latchkey 7y ago
  Weaker? Senior? We have something to learn from every one. Nobody should be an asshole. Nobody should be working alone. Both of these are great ways to create a really toxic working environment, please don't perpetuate it.
  - ozim 7y ago
    How would you express that thought, to get through to a person I replied to who wrote he has 15 years of experience and he did not see any value in standups? Do you think he is not a senior person? Is he a bad person for pointing out his years of experience? Maybe I am bad person trying to express in BOLD that there are people with less experience, social anxiety, assholes and we have to work with all those personalities. With strong emphasis that standups are good tool for getting rid of toxic work environment and getting teams together.
  - shantly 7y ago
    Counterpoint: comment was fine and non-toxic, describing siloing as weak no matter who's doing it is an accurate and a pretty tame criticism, and ensuring that's not happening is indeed the only real point of scheduled daily stand-ups. As long as we're gonna have the term "senior"—and we do have it—I'd abso-friggin'-lutely reserve it for people who can avoid siloing without a formal, daily ritual, and a team of such folks don't need stand-ups. Don't worry about it, ozim. > Nobody should be an asshole. Nobody should be working alone. Ozim advocated neither being an asshole nor working alone, so is perpetuating neither. Standups have a place and it's to fight both of those problems, when some ICs on a team can't handle it on their own.
JohnBooty 7y ago
First off, I'd say that a good daily standup meeting shouldn't be more than 15 minutes. If it's longer than that, you are probably getting bogged down in details that don't belong there. Let's be generous and call the "real" cost 30 minutes of productivity... 15 minutes for the actual meeting/call, and 15 minutes of context switching cost. That is 6% of an 8-hour workday. You can still code up to 94% of the time, not bad. And I think it has been shown many times that most developers don't really pound out code for 8 hours per day. We might work 10+ hours per day but it's not necessarily 10+ hours of coding. So I feel the cost of these daily meetings is very small. What are the benefits? 1. For one thing, it is good to know what the rest of your team is working on and what challenges they are facing. This jogs a lot of useful conversations in my experience, where Developer A turns out to have some experience in the area in which Developer B is stuck. You may be thinking, "good teams communicate and can do this literally any time... why schedule a daily meeting for it?" Yes. If your team is operating and communicating flawlessly, sure, standups are redundant. However, I've been at this for 22 years and this is not typically the case, and the brief daily meetings are a real upgrade. 2. These meetings help prevent "drive-by shootings." That's what I call it when management randomly stops by your desk and wants to know what you're doing and if you're stuck and wants to see your work in progress. I hate hate hate hate these. I would rather just briefly chat with leadership on a predictable basis. And when I am leadership, I would prefer not to subject my team to these "drive-by shootings." A lot of teams are already paying this cost, which I feel is much greater than the cost of a brief morning standup. Again, if your team is already communicating at a super high level, maybe you don't need standups. I feel this is not the case for a majority of teams. 3. For remote teams, these give folks a chance for some regularly scheduled face time and chitchat. We kept our morning call to < 15 minutes today and talked about Star Wars. As a remote worker myself I truly cherish this. If you have a remote team I would call video chat standups more or less a requirement.

I agree that the whole typical 'what did you do yesterday' is indeed lacking value. The standups are mostly just pointing the stories that need pointing, covering any questions and picking the pairs for the days work (pivotal is 100% pair programming). The meetings can be done within 5-15 minutes at most. I'm currently living at a yoga retreat center in the mountains of Vietnam. I can see from the practice that the first few minutes of silence is good to clear the mind. I think having standups is a similar good way to start the day with a positive attitude.

matwood 7y ago
I also find value in standups, but the problem is they constrain the team to some daily meeting time. For example, I start work around 6am. A co-worker does morning kid duty and tends to start closer to 10am. There is no good way to start our days at the same time, and there really is no need. What we have been trialing for awhile is a simple Slack checkin. Everyone reads them when their day starts, and if there are any questions or comments a Slack thread is started from the checkin message. It's worked quite well.
- latchkey 7y ago
  Pivotal solved that by requiring everyone to work the same exact hours. It is a bit military in that regard, but it works for them. You don't get a job there unless you buy into it. Their reasoning is more around their culture of pair programming. It sounds like you have found a solution that works for your company and that is great! The way I look at it is that as long as we are shipping software around the time when we say we are going to and the quality is high and people aren't killing themselves (weekends) to make it all happen, all good. =)

koreth1 7y ago

I just asked the same thing because I've had that experience too. I'm curious: are you usually working on things that require close collaboration between team members? My hunch is that standups are pretty useless on teams where each developer is working on an independent change where there isn't much opportunity to get blocked by teammates aside from waiting for code reviews and the like. That's most of the teams I've worked on, and the standups inevitably turn into a verbal form of, "Hey manager, here's my status report for the day even though you already know all this because I've already said it in Slack," because you have nothing to ask of the other people on the team but you're required to say something every day.

ryanbrunner 7y ago
Where I've seen standups work effectively is when an engineer has a bit of context on a problem that someone is dealing with, or an insight that might unblock someone. I've had many times I've mentioned in an (async, written in slack) standup status update, and someone's chimed in with something like "Oh, I've dealt with that before - let's pair for 10 minutes so I can walk you through some gotchas". Another plus for me personally is that it has a focusing effect on myself as a developer - if I say I'm going to get something done in standup, I'm going to force myself to focus on that task, and not get distracted by something else unless it's really important. I can see how that's a totally personal thing though - I need to have some sort of external "deadline", even if it's self-imposed and soft, to keep me focused. All of the above can be solved with async updates in Slack though, and that's probably actually a better medium. Having folks get in the same room seems a little pointless to me, especially when you have remote folks and timezones are an issue.
- Sean1708 7y ago
  The problem I've had with async updates is that they often get ignored because everyone that could help is busy at the time, so you still need the actual standup to just remind them about it. How do you get around this?
  - ryanbrunner 7y ago

ozim 7y ago

Standups are for "weakest" devs, to break silo of "I am working on my thing don't bother me". "weakest" devs - you know not everyone is outspoken and will communicate without issues, new young devs will be afraid to ask an experienced guy. Some experienced guys (also "weak") will be assholes to young devs for asking questions. Just getting team to talk to each other at least once a day is positive. Unless you work only with senior people who are experienced and don't have any issues talking to each other, I would still try to get people to gather for standup.

latchkey 7y ago
Weaker? Senior? We have something to learn from every one. Nobody should be an asshole. Nobody should be working alone. Both of these are great ways to create a really toxic working environment, please don't perpetuate it.
- ozim 7y ago
  How would you express that thought, to get through to a person I replied to who wrote he has 15 years of experience and he did not see any value in standups? Do you think he is not a senior person? Is he a bad person for pointing out his years of experience? Maybe I am bad person trying to express in BOLD that there are people with less experience, social anxiety, assholes and we have to work with all those personalities. With strong emphasis that standups are good tool for getting rid of toxic work environment and getting teams together.
- shantly 7y ago
  Counterpoint: comment was fine and non-toxic, describing siloing as weak no matter who's doing it is an accurate and a pretty tame criticism, and ensuring that's not happening is indeed the only real point of scheduled daily stand-ups. As long as we're gonna have the term "senior"—and we do have it—I'd abso-friggin'-lutely reserve it for people who can avoid siloing without a formal, daily ritual, and a team of such folks don't need stand-ups. Don't worry about it, ozim. > Nobody should be an asshole. Nobody should be working alone. Ozim advocated neither being an asshole nor working alone, so is perpetuating neither. Standups have a place and it's to fight both of those problems, when some ICs on a team can't handle it on their own.

JohnBooty 7y ago

First off, I'd say that a good daily standup meeting shouldn't be more than 15 minutes. If it's longer than that, you are probably getting bogged down in details that don't belong there. Let's be generous and call the "real" cost 30 minutes of productivity... 15 minutes for the actual meeting/call, and 15 minutes of context switching cost. That is 6% of an 8-hour workday. You can still code up to 94% of the time, not bad. And I think it has been shown many times that most developers don't really pound out code for 8 hours per day. We might work 10+ hours per day but it's not necessarily 10+ hours of coding. So I feel the cost of these daily meetings is very small. What are the benefits? 1. For one thing, it is good to know what the rest of your team is working on and what challenges they are facing. This jogs a lot of useful conversations in my experience, where Developer A turns out to have some experience in the area in which Developer B is stuck. You may be thinking, "good teams communicate and can do this literally any time... why schedule a daily meeting for it?" Yes. If your team is operating and communicating flawlessly, sure, standups are redundant. However, I've been at this for 22 years and this is not typically the case, and the brief daily meetings are a real upgrade. 2. These meetings help prevent "drive-by shootings." That's what I call it when management randomly stops by your desk and wants to know what you're doing and if you're stuck and wants to see your work in progress. I hate hate hate hate these. I would rather just briefly chat with leadership on a predictable basis. And when I am leadership, I would prefer not to subject my team to these "drive-by shootings." A lot of teams are already paying this cost, which I feel is much greater than the cost of a brief morning standup. Again, if your team is already communicating at a super high level, maybe you don't need standups. I feel this is not the case for a majority of teams. 3. For remote teams, these give folks a chance for some regularly scheduled face time and chitchat. We kept our morning call to < 15 minutes today and talked about Star Wars. As a remote worker myself I truly cherish this. If you have a remote team I would call video chat standups more or less a requirement.