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>complete waste of 30 minutes a day As a former manager I had enormous fun tweaking and tuning the morning stand up to actually get it into a useful state. As

>complete waste of 30 minutes a day As a former manager I had enormous fun tweaking and tuning the morning stand up to actually get it into a useful state. As with anything involving people there are complex dynamics, there are people who talk too much, talk too little, go off on tangents, only talk about what they want to do, don't mention blocks, insist on asking questions, Some talk too much- but only if they're the first to talk, some will always talk as much as the person before them. It is very very difficult to get a group of engineers to have a productive stand up meeting.

kstenerud 6y ago
"It is very very difficult to get a group of engineers to have a productive stand up meeting." Most likely because it's such an artificial construct. There are some people who will only talk when forced to. Others just won't shut up. Others try to embellish because they may not have "enough" to report at that time and don't want to look bad. Ultimately, my experience has been that stand-up meetings slowly devolve over time into status reports, people don't listen during meetings, and if someone needs to know something, you pull them aside later talk with them (because it's almost certainly going to take longer than your stand-up allotment). I just can't see any actual benefit to this process that was invented out of whole cloth (not to say that trying new things is bad - even invented things; rather, they should be tested and measured). What can't be measured can't be invalidated.
- Traster 6y ago
  It's true they're difficult to do well, but there's just as many problems with not having standups. Engineers get stuck and don't ask for help in a timely fashion, projects slowly slip and no one raises it, people start reproducing work someone else has already worked on, people find blockers but they aren't highlighted to everyone to get it fixed etc. etc. etc. And often those problems are more convenient problems to have for the engineers but impact the business badly. The key is being intentional about your process, no matter what that process is. If you can put in place strategies to solve all the problems standups are meant to solve, that's great, but the standups weren't originally designed by middle management, they were designed by engineers for a purpose.

kstenerud 6y ago

"It is very very difficult to get a group of engineers to have a productive stand up meeting." Most likely because it's such an artificial construct. There are some people who will only talk when forced to. Others just won't shut up. Others try to embellish because they may not have "enough" to report at that time and don't want to look bad. Ultimately, my experience has been that stand-up meetings slowly devolve over time into status reports, people don't listen during meetings, and if someone needs to know something, you pull them aside later talk with them (because it's almost certainly going to take longer than your stand-up allotment). I just can't see any actual benefit to this process that was invented out of whole cloth (not to say that trying new things is bad - even invented things; rather, they should be tested and measured). What can't be measured can't be invalidated.

Traster 6y ago
It's true they're difficult to do well, but there's just as many problems with not having standups. Engineers get stuck and don't ask for help in a timely fashion, projects slowly slip and no one raises it, people start reproducing work someone else has already worked on, people find blockers but they aren't highlighted to everyone to get it fixed etc. etc. etc. And often those problems are more convenient problems to have for the engineers but impact the business badly. The key is being intentional about your process, no matter what that process is. If you can put in place strategies to solve all the problems standups are meant to solve, that's great, but the standups weren't originally designed by middle management, they were designed by engineers for a purpose.