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I think if your standup can be async, then it's ineffective, and you should get rid of it. And to be clear, that's fine! Not every team needs standups. The onl

• protonimitate 6y ago
  Agreed. Async stand ups are an agile smell. If you can successfully get unblocked async over slack/email/whatever, there isn't a need a for standups. That just means you have a functioning line of communication for your team. Stand ups should solve the problem of "I need to get unblocked and I can't get my teams attention effectively". If async "standups" solve that, great. But it's not a one size fits all solution, and imo, shouldn't even be called a standup. >But for the life of me, what I can't figure out is why some teams have good ones, and some don't. IME it's the level of interaction of product/management/scrum-masters that make the difference. Good standups consist of just engineer focused updates/requests. Bad ones are progress reports and have participation of anyone not actively contributing to the sprint.
  • mrkurt 6y ago
    Agile is smelly. People getting blocked in a team small enough for a standup is a concerning smell. Bad standups are a smell, and also seem to be the norm.
    • waheoo 6y ago
      I suspect all these smelly meetings might be an agile smell itself. Maybe agile doesnt quite actually support our needs. Maybe some frequent socialising is a need. Maybe sucking every last second out of our day in the name of productivity while having zero benefit on the true goal is just one huge smell.
  • hyperpape 6y ago
    I have had low value standups with groups of just three developers or six developers, so I don't think that's enough. I agree that the feeling of "I have to justify my work to an external party" is a negative.
  • Benjammer 6y ago
    Literally had a manager say "oh, they're supposed to be for unblocking? I just thought it was an easy way for me to report up the chain on what my team is working on, that's why I told people to just write it on Slack to make it easier for them." ugh
    • xref 6y ago
      Stand-ups becoming a status report to justify your employment is a common end state of “going agile”. Meeting gets longer, people add more trivial minutiae, nobody wants to look the laggard
  • jayd16 6y ago
    The unblocking in a standup is almost always async. They're there to have a defined place for public knowledge transfer. You usually shouldn't drag down the standup with a prolonged conversation. You can take care of it after in an async way even with in person standups. Focus on surfacing problems not solving them.
  • hashmal 6y ago
    > Async stand ups are an agile smell. That thinking is an agile smell. Teams choose their own processes.
    • platz 6y ago
      No reason to discuss anything then I guess, everyone needs to just invent their own rules without talking to anyone else.
  • temac 6y ago
    > Stand ups should solve the problem of "I need to get unblocked and I can't get my teams attention effectively". That's an interesting claim, but has it be proven or even seriously studied? I have an extremely hard time with open meetings talking without any depth about various subjects which I don't care about 90% of them; it might make me space out and at risk of missing the parts that I could actually be interested in or contribute. Plus this cultivate the importance of oral transmission, with informations easily lost and inaccessible for people unable to participate for various reasons. Maybe a good structured IM (e.g. dedicating a chatroom exclusively for that) could make it work better? I think it is important that the medium be the same for synchronous and asynchronous people. Daily meetings can be extremely useful in context of routine transmission of info, mostly on always the same well-defined topics + a small amount of random very important things. The important infos must be hierarchized, you can not just drop them in the middle of a stream of boring "I continued to develop X yesterday and will continue to do it tomorrow". So on open engineering subjects, some people may like it and that may be effective for them, but I really want to know if this is the majority of people / for the majority of projects / ...
  • im3w1l-alt 6y ago
    Standups always bored the shit out of me because a huge fraction of time is spent listening to irrelevant stuff. I wonder if speed dating might be more stimulating.
• mrkurt 6y ago
  I think you're redefining what a useful standup is, a little bit. I agree with you though, I'd just phrase it as "standups are pretty useless" and "it's good to have people share context what they're doing". So maybe that's part of the problem, standup means whatever it happens to mean. You could replace the entire title of this post with "context should be shared async".
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > I think if your standup can be async, then it's ineffective, and you should get rid of it. I agree, with one caveat: If you tell engineers that standups can go async or be cancelled if they're ineffective, they will find creative ways to make the standups ineffective. Poorly run standups are bad. Standups where the engineers are half-engaged are bad. But having a well-run standup that synchronizes the team, spreads vital information, and keeps people accountable is truly valuable. However, a good standup requires everyone to put in effort to keep it useful, fast, and on track. If everyone decides that standups are a waste of time, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the leads have to pull unprepared reports out of each individual, summarize things because people aren't listening to each other, start over because people are arriving late, and so on. If you tell people the standup can go away if it's bad, you've accidentally incentivized those people to make it bad enough to get it cancelled.
  • nogabebop23 6y ago
    >> having a well-run standup that synchronizes the team and this is (I believe) the point of stand-ups. Doing this "async" seems at best weird/hard and at worst impossible. The original post is for a prduct selling async status reporting, which is realy not what stand-ups should be about. If you want to have a daily status report, by all means do it remotely or async or whatever works best. If you want to synchronize the team, well the most obvious and effective way is to actually bring them together in the same temporal space (remote or otherwise). You don't need to do this for problem unblocking or status updates, but don't tell me you're doing a distributed async status update as a method of team synchronization.
    • PragmaticPulp 6y ago
      > The original post is for a prduct selling async status reporting, which is realy not what stand-ups should be about. Exactly. Once you've reduced standups to async individual reports, you lose the team communication benefits. In my experience: Once you lose the team communication benefits, people give it even less thought and energy, so the value continues to decline until the concept is abandoned altogether.
  • 6y ago
• jayd16 6y ago
  I disagree. Obviously if they're async we should please stop calling them "standups" but they can still fulfill some of the goals of a standup. You want a way to voice your status, hear other's statuses, hear blockers, and reduce duplicated effort. You can do all this with short, daily, async updates. The synchronous fashion of the standup is mostly a factor of verbal communication, not a feature. Standups are usually partially async as items that arise should be dealt with outside of the meeting. It still needs to be daily and time gated such that the team can consistently read everyone's status. Forcing the team to pay attention is probably harder in an async conversation chain than a meeting but I don't think ineffective is correct.
  • mrkurt 6y ago
    > Forcing the team to pay attention is probably harder in an async conversation chain than a meeting but I don't think ineffective is correct. I think this is a feature. If people aren't paying attention to asynchronous information, there's a problem. Either the information isn't useful or the team isn't functional.
    • jayd16 6y ago
      It might fall under "non-functional team" but active listening/reading of usually banal but sometimes critical information is simply not an easy thing to do in a routine format. The information in a standup is team-wide because you do not know what will be important to who. It takes some amount of skill and discipline from the team.
      • mrkurt 6y ago
        We 1000% agree on this, but it's still fun to talk about. I think that's just low signal to noise. It definitely takes skill and discipline, but it's also a matter of improving habits. Standups were originally a "better habit". There's a cost, though, especially as teams are more distributed (and diverse).
        • jayd16 6y ago
• hidiegomariani 6y ago
  it depends. mostly on team size and workstreams. when the team is working at different unrelated things the standup is near to useless and it's used only to micromanage people. if you are a close-knit team working on the same workstream/feature then yes is beneficial even then in my experience daily standups are overkill. most of the time bi-weekly is more than enough
• pathseeker 6y ago
  >The detailed conversation happens outside the standup, but the purpose of the standup is just to get that moment of "I know about that, let's talk". If the purpose of the standup is to tell people what you're working on and not have any detailed conversations, then that's the best argument for making it async that I've heard. The optimal standup seems to be everyone posts to channel by 10am what they are planning on doing for the day and if they want help. Everyone reads each other's and replies as needed. Done
• jakub_g 6y ago
  The daily status update has different role for different people (devs, scrum master, tech lead). It might be useless for devs but valuable for scrum master, for example. The dynamics also depend on # of people involved - the fewer, the more effective. What we did in my last 2 teams to make standups better: Team 1: move it from 10 AM to 11h45 (just before the lunch). Advantages: 1) Not stressing out people who are late; 2) Not breaking the work of people who arrive early; 3) Keeping it short - since it's before lunch, it can't last forever because people want to eat. Team 2: move to slack e-standup. Advantages: 1) and 2) above; 3) Async, so you can do it early, late, or even the evening before; 4) It takes 2 min for each person, not 20 min and you don't have to stare in the floor while your mind is somewhere else; 5) Avoiding "ummmmm whaaat did I do yesterday ummmm let me think" x 10.
• MuffinFlavored 6y ago
  > The only value in a standup is when team members actually share ideas about what they're working on Or for management to track what you are doing and hold you accountable to deadlines and ask why you are late.
• mstade 6y ago
  Daily standups for status updates and whatever is – in my experience, 15 years at this point – entirely useless. As a way to shoot the breeze in the morning just to say hi though, it's really effective, especially when remote. I've been working 100% remotely for the past five years, give or take, and if I didn't have those 15 minutes of just shooting the breeze with people I'd never get my water cooler fix. Your mileage may vary, I guess.
• the_gipsy 6y ago
  Why would you wait until a specific time of day, if it's so important (blocker)? Why waste everyone's time, every time? Either it's a glorified status update, or it's incredibly inefficient compared to just resolving issues on the spot or at appropriate times.
• ljm 6y ago
  I agree with some of what you say, but not all of it. Back when I first switched to a scrum master role, way back in 2013, I was pretty full on with prescribing the purpose of certain ceremonies. The standup was for X, and the sprint planning was for Y, etc. We had built a successful business model around that back then so it wasn't necessarily being dogmatic about agile and scrum, but knowing our recipe for success and sticking to it, so we ran a tight ship that also allowed us to put our feet up and work more sustainably. I find myself in a similar leadership role now and, perhaps moreso due to us all working from home since the end of February, I've taken a completely different tack. I really appreciate what agile and scrum embody but after several years of doing it and getting comfortable with my own role in that dynamic, I've pretty much tossed the 'rules' out of the window and gone straight back to basics with the original manifesto. My team now does 'asynchronous standups' but we don't call them standups. If my team wants to jump on a call to chat, I'll be there, but otherwise, a quick check in when they come online and start their workday is more than enough. That could be at 7.30am or 12pm for all I care. It still performs the function of a standup, and it fits the purpose we've given it. I'm not really interested in selling proper scrum to my team the way I used to, now I'm far more keen to let them self-organise and let their work, their happiness, and their behaviour speak for itself. They always have the option to introduce more process if they want to.