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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

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

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.