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Daily stand-ups have two formats, one is Round Robin that has origins in Scrum, other is Walk the Board that is more Kanban. I highly recommend you switching fr
by kozhevnikov 7y ago
Daily stand-ups have two formats, one is Round Robin that has origins in Scrum, other is Walk the Board that is more Kanban. I highly recommend you switching from "did yesterday/do today" to "walking the board" as it is less about checking what each employee delivered in a day but rather what the team can do to move tickets through the board. It is also more inclusive allowing quiet/introverted/non-native English speaking members of the team to participate in the meeting rather than rehearse their updates in their heads ignoring others.
- mcv 7y agoI like to alternate these. One day we do a round robin, the other we walk the board. It helps to have different perspectives on the work you're doing.
- dx034 7y agoAlso like this method. Walking to board every day isn't always necessary, there shouldn't be that many changes from one day to the next. But by only using round robin every other day, people actually have something to say.
- alfonsodev 7y agoI agree with this, I found that if you go for the Round Robin format, often, people are just thinking about what are they going to say next, and how to make it sound like actual valuable work rather than listen to the colleagues. It gets akward when some people get a lot done (apparently) and others not, also not everyone knows how to "sell" their work, and IMO it can create weird dynamics. Walking the board is much more helpful for the team and retrospectives and one to ones can be used to talk about productivity differences, individualities and other issues.
- andy_boot 7y agoI also noticed this. We came up with a variant to fix this. You have to say what the next person in the circle said they'd do yesterday before your talk. This forced everyone to pay more attention as you don't know who would be standing next to you tomorrow. It wasn't easy to do but I think it did make people more aware of what was going on.
- djKianoosh 7y agowow this would suck in a 20 person standup
- TomMarius 7y agoWhy would you have 20 person standups?
- djKianoosh 7y agobecause government project? although I imagine this happens in non-gov settings too, this is just my experience. Here's the reason: managers are so spread thin that they don't want to be in 5-10 standups all morning, so they combine around organizational structures rather than product(s)/deliverable(s). Another case of the software delivery matching org structure...
- TomMarius 7y agoOf course the next question in line is "why is a manager involved in the standup?" > because government project? although I imagine this happens in non-gov settings too, this is just my experience. Why not split into smaller work groups? What's the advantage of 20 person teams?
- djKianoosh 7y agoorganically this is what happens to actually get things done. but mind you, these small work groups are successful despite the large standups. life finds a way...
- bmcfeeley 7y agoI know we tend to have little control over this as ICs, but I think the party line here is that 20 is too many people to effectively make use of most agile/scrum ceremonies. Do you actually need to know all 19 other persons’ updates?
- rumanator 7y agoIt should be noted that the "round robin" format has an important aspect which is to enable each team member to air his/her personal grievances regarding anything related to the project.
- moystard 7y agoI would rather have this kind of discussions in the retrospective. It is a dedicated time for the team to discuss pain points, and to take actions to heal them.
- ses1984 7y agoGrievances should relate to a ticket on the board, if not then make a ticket for it, if not that then is the grievance important?
- rumanator 7y ago> Grievances should relate to a ticket on the board, if not then make a ticket for it, if not that then is the grievance important? That mindset is precisely the reason why these meetings are important, because these grievances might not necessarily reflect or deserve a ticket. They might be nothing or they might be something. What's important is that these meetings create a space where they can safely be addressed without creating any burden on the team and on the individual reporting them. I've read somewhere that these meetings work as therapy for the team. Perhaps by putting it this way you might better understand the issues these meetings solve.
- a012 7y agoWalking the board is effective to have all team members in the same page of what's going on. But if the amount of tickets on kanban boards is huge, it could be time consuming. I'd rather have weekly "walking the board" meeting than a daily.
- ljf 7y agoGenuine question - how big is this team and how many work in progress tickets are there? For a 7 person team I'd question how many in progress tickets you genuinely could be working on, unless you are breaking down to a very very low level of task.
- klemola 7y agoGotta try to "walk the board" in place of a daily someday soon. Sounds nice.
- chimprich 7y agoI agree with this. By far the least useful of the standard standup questions is "what did you do yesterday". Focussing on the work to be done puts the emphasis on teamwork and skips the pressure on people to justify themselves or play politics by showing off. That's assuming everyone is doing the work and they're being trusted to do the work. If that's not the case, then you have bigger problems than the format of your daily standup, and standup is not the best time to address them.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 7y agoWe have been trying to show what we did code-wise (or explain if it was something that didn't end up with code). The goal however, is to show some coding practices or new functions created that other team members might find useful, as well as working as a brief "review" of the code itself. The goal is not to explain what you did. Happy with the approach because knowledge is actually spreading across the team currently. Meeting do get much longer though (1 hour usually), but time is recovered mostly on code reviews which become shorter. Usually lot of discussions sprouts out of this, leading to better code overall.
- jeresuikkila 7y ago> rather than rehearse their updates in their heads ignoring others. Personally, I always try to take quick notes ahead of time in order to be able to listen to others during the meeting. I'd highly recommend this to everyone to help focus on what others are saying.
- Antoninus 7y agoThe last few teams I've worked on moved the daily Round Robin into slack. You would have to fill it out an hour after signing in and before you left for the day. Accountability was key and having it in the dev-chat saved a lot of time. Our 'walk the board' process was saved for tuesdays and thursdays and involved product and project managers. We set a 45-minute max so noone would rabbit hole on any one ticket. This has been my favourite process so far because this was the highest level of team accountability I've experienced and you would only spend 1.5 hours a week in meetings.