39 ms·

We cancelled standups and let the team build

221 points by thellimist 6y ago

Beldin 6y ago
With JavaScript turned off, the link goes to an empty page. There's some template stuff, but no content. Which could be taken as a rather funny take on "here's what happened" ;)
- rudasn 6y ago
  I know that the whole "it doesn't work without javascript" story sounds like "get off my lawn", but content authors, esp on HN, need to realise that quite a few of us refuse to browse the Web with JS enabled esp on mobile devices. With JS the experience on the mobile web is garbage. It's difficult enough to find quality content as it is, we don't need all the added "benefits" of JS.
  - carlosdp 6y ago
    > but content authors, esp on HN, need to realise that quite a few of us refuse to browse the Web with JS enabled esp on mobile devices. They kind of don't though, given this is such a tiny fraction of visitors
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    I realize it, I just don't care.
  - gowld 6y ago
    Is there any quality content that is hidden behind JS? From the comments here, OP isn't.
- li4ick 6y ago
  I mean, it's time to accept that JS is everywhere. Or, you can do something like Stallman, and have a remote machine send screenshots to you, so you don't have to run non-free JS.
- teh_klev 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.
sabellito 6y ago
A bit click baity. The team experimented with cancelling stand-up AND started doing a version of 20% time with a strict rule about "fun projects only". As with any process experimentation, mixing two initiatives at the same time makes it impossible to understand the results.
- larrik 6y ago
  And only for a week! What does that prove?
  - violetgarden 6y ago
    Exactly! I can enjoy a vacation somewhere for a week, but living there might be a whole different thing.
  - jakupovic 6y ago
    Doesn't prove anything, the whole article is useless. If they did this over at least a few weeks, then maybe.
darrinmn 6y ago
"our standups are growing and spend alot of time chatting / designing new features". So your standups are inefficient and your solution is to cancel them? Talk about a false equivalency. Fix your standups, dont cancel them.
- lovedev 6y ago
  I think the point of the article was to empower changing processes and ACTUALLY listen to the suggestions coming from your team. It's odd that you're bashing that
- paulmooreparks 6y ago
  It sounds more like they asked the devs what would make them productive. You know... empowered the team. Isn't that what agile is about?
Kednicma 6y ago
That heatmap calendar was upside-down from the typical calendar UIs which I've used; it showed time flowing bottom-to-top rather than top-to-bottom. Is this the typical style for Haystack or related tooling?
carterklein13 6y ago
I've found standups to be probably the biggest waste of time of all Agile ceremonies (and I'm really not a fan of Agile as-is, but I'm too young to have experienced anything else so I can't say it's definitively bad). I think the one caveat, though, is that standup is useless IF the team is high-performing, close with one another, and self-motivated. The team I'm currently on probably does not need any sort of formal Agile workflow at all besides setting our current sprint's worth of stories at the beginning of each sprint. But, that's because everyone on the team is very self-motivated and even remotely we're still very close with one another. I've been on other teams where, without standup, people would go for days without working on or talking to anyone. I think, if anything, this is proof that no company should have one method of delivering software. I work at a massive company, and forcing each team into Agile is probably easy at a top-down level, but can be very frustrating at a bottom-up level.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Standups are Scrum (possibly XP), not Agile, but Agile is dead and Scrum is wearing its skin as a macabre disguise. It puts the lotion on its skin... Standups are the first time I ever noticed that "X is ableist" without someone else having to point it out to me. My introduction to standup meetings was a bit after I screwed up my ankle. I spent a lot of time thinking in that meeting about all the injuries and disabilities that would make the forced standing still for 15 (or let's be honest, 30) minutes an imposition. Spines, knees, hips, ankles, toes. In our industry you have to be able to manage sitting at a keyboard for 8 hours, until 'Agile' came along. Writing this out, I'm beginning to wonder if standups (the "Stand Up" part) aren't in fact illegal under US and/or EU law.
  - mellosouls 6y ago
    Yeah a peeve of mine as well, I've always thought the name is insensitive at best. However, I would have thought it's taken as given that you only stand if you are able and the real goal is to keep the meetings short and focused; with physical "discomfort" being an inspired motivator.
    - 6y ago
BrandonM 6y ago
I vaguely recall research about process changes reliably boosting productivity temporarily but eventually reverting to the mean. Does anyone recall if that effect has a name or a canonical study?
- JimDabell 6y ago
  You may be thinking of the novelty effect: https://turnedtwenty.com/productivity-isnt-related-technology-novelty-effect/ https://turnedtwenty.com/productivity-isnt-related-technolog...
  - BrandonM 6y ago
    That's exactly what I had in mind. Great article. Thanks!
BrandonM 6y ago
This article, as with much tech discussion I've seen in the past 5-10 years, seems to take sprints as a given. Are most devs here working in a sprint model? It sounds a bit soul crushing to me to be "continually sprinting". I'm so glad that our company doesn't have them—I think it's a significant factor in me grinding it out for 9+ years. We have feature releases every 4 weeks. If your feature is merged before QA, it goes out in that release. Otherwise, it gets delayed till the next release, and we don't make a big deal about it—several other features will still be in the release. I feel like it gives me a lot more agency and ownership of my work. I think it's the right amount of subtle deadline pressure, relying on my intrinsic motivation to get my feature shipped and move onto the next one. Or to have the freedom to determine that it's not ready yet and spend a little more time to avoid shoving out a pile of technical debt. I'm curious to see what I'm missing, though. Anyone love sprints? Anyone working in a non-sprint model and hate it?
- alfalfasprout 6y ago
  My team doesn't do sprints and honestly thank god. HN is pretty "product eng" focused and sprints do work better there... but for infra projects where the units of work often tend to involve more R&D, exploration, etc. I've found that weekly check-ins work best (scheduling ad-hoc sync when needed). You still get the benefit of a heads-up on what people are working on but you're not trying to shove tasks into arbitrary 2-3 week sprints. At the end of the day, "agile" wasn't originally the monstrosity that scrum-fetishists have turned it into. It was simply these few lines: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan"
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    Sprints that don't ship something (i.e. "deliver user value") are just arbitrary timeboxes. They probably can just be progress checkins without all the overhead of Scrum ceremony.
    - stefanmichael 6y ago
boublepop 6y ago
Honestly, if you think spending 15 minutes (we’re closer to 10 though) talking to your team to ensure that you know what others are working on and they know what you are working on, then I don’t want to work with you. It’s not wasted time, and even if you don’t care what I’m working on I still care that you know so that we don’t spend two weeks building something only for you to go “Oh, that won’t work after the changes I made to the core.... why didn’t you come by my desk and ask me “are you intending to change the core code in a way that invalidates all assumptions we had two weeks ago when we started working on this?” And do so like clockwork every day, even though I’d answer no 6 times before suddenly answering yes? “But we already communicate in the team outside of the Stand-up!” You say. Ok then, tomorrow at your standup, have everyone go though someone else’s points, I’ll say what you did yesterday, if you have blockers and what you’ll do today. If everyone does this flawlessly, then yes the daily is wasted time, but for every mistaken assumption you hear, that is a potential mistake or missed opportunity or just general annoyance you avoided simply by talking 10 minutes together. Now don’t get me started on the number of bad excuses that you avoid by having daily stand ups that’s a whole other subject, but also an extremely valuable element. “I’m waiting on Kevin to finish X” “Does Kevin know this?” “Yes of cause! “ Kevin: “Wait what? Err what am I supposed to be doing? That’s not on the board”. Etc.
- alfalfasprout 6y ago
  There's an in-between here. Daily standups just aren't a great fit in many cases... weekly standups will tend to work better in these cases. At the end of the day it boils down to the difficulty of the tasks to be executed and how much R&D and design work there is. The more R&D heavy your workload the more impractical daily standups tend to be.
  - bobwall 6y ago
    Yea, we did stand-ups Mon, Wed, Fri, which tended to be a good balance. Still able to let people know what you are doing, but not having to be forced to do it everyday as if you are children.
- hinkley 6y ago
blatherard 6y ago
They stopped regular work and had a hack week and morale improved. Now they're back to the regular work and having standups again. What does this show other than taking a break is fun?
- vannevar 6y ago
  Yeah, the "we stopped having standups!" is good click-bait, but simply letting people work on their own projects is always going to improve morale and productivity (if you assume the fun projects are aligned with the organization).
- cassieramen 6y ago
  I thought the productivity data was interesting but then it stopped right after hack week... Definitely agree, the long term implications are a lot more interesting.
syntaxing 6y ago
As hardware engineer that does a hybrid software/hardware role on a team that uses sprint/scrum planning, I find it a terrible idea for a lot of applications. It is great for certain situations but I find the discussions more about what task we should do rather than what problems we should solve and the value added. If things are breaking on a product/project because you didn't know about some upstream or downstream interface, the company itself has an underpinning issue on transparency and ownership. I have rushed hardware projects (expensive mistakes) involving capital equipment (expensive) and everything interfaced correctly given the fact that the ownership and responsibilities were transparent with decent planning in the beginning.
waylandsmithers 6y ago
As someone who has worked mostly in a consulting context, "Fun projects ONLY" is... interesting
gervwyk 6y ago
Since lockdown started, we switched to 3-Ps - everyone post 3 micro tasks they are working on today on a team discord channel before the meeting starts, at 9 we all hop on a team call and go over all the 3ps. short and sweet. and gives enough insight for people to ask for help or just get a feeling of progress... tricky sometime not to list macro tasks, which takes more than a day to complete. but other than that. its also nice to force every on to think about and commit to a few small things they want to work on for the day.
dmitriid 6y ago
There are so many things that are not FUN, but have to be done anyway. And more often than not the not-fun things are the direct consequence of the "FUN" projects.
m3kw9 6y ago
Stand ups are supposed to be good if it has a focused purpose but eventually it morphs into a “I’m continuing to work on X and no blockers”. Then everyone resents what a waste of time it is because the team basically knows 80% of what everyone is already doing. Or the blockers/issues/new features they have won’t be sufficiently explained in the stand up, and everyone pretends to understand or care for it.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  > I’m continuing to work on X Means there is a blocker and the person is stuck or meandering and can't or won't explain it. Major yellow flag.
jkingsbery 6y ago
On the teams I've been on that are actively doing software development (not in some pre-coding phase where we're still figuring out requirements or something like that), if there wasn't a stand-up individuals created an identical coordination mechanism in an ad hoc manner. This tells me that there is something valuable to stand-ups, even if we don't always love them. If a team's stand-ups are not effective, there are lots of things you can try: refocusing the team's attention, have someone other than the normal "stand-up leader" guide the conversation, or change the time so that it's next to another interruption (for example, right before most people get lunch... this has the added bonus of incentivizing people not to ramble).
jurassic 6y ago
Cancelling standups during a "fun projects only" hackweek doesn't say a single thing about the efficacy of the standup meeting. The costs of cancelling it, will only show up over the medium to long term. Also, it makes me cringe a bit to see there are people who think number of pull requests are a good measure of productivity. It incentivizes blasting out a lot of quick, easy changes at the expense of doing more challenging tasks that may be essential for long term code health.
deleted 6y ago
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amgreg 6y ago
https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5ed57622ee14fb96d022d544/5f6cc2313f047785e14bf727_11.png https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5ed57622ee14fb96d022d544/5f6... Is this list representative of the entire scope of the sprint? Unclear from the article. If so, while the sprint was arguably successful in that the engineers felt good about it, it didn't really succeed in improving the customer experience directly.
cj 6y ago
Major caveat: they were never doing stand ups to begin with. From the screenshot, the feedback from the team was “standup are becoming very long, a lot of chatting and designing features” (paraphrased) It sounds like they had a 45-60 minute daily meeting that was not a standup. Rather than cancel the meeting, shorten the meeting with a 15 minute hard stop. I run a 10 person remote SaaS company. We have daily morning stand ups. The standup takes no more than 10-15 minutes, but it sometimes goes 20-25 minutes since we often chat for a few minutes before jumping in to standup. (I can’t imagine us doing feature design during that meeting, as they were in the article) The chatting / socializing is something I encourage before standup starts. As a remote team, it’s necessary to have some group interactions to maintain the group’s working relationship.
- lovedev 6y ago
  I think the point of this article was not to bash standups but to give an example of empowering your team to make decisions. Be bold. Make change. Improve the way you work. Was cancelling standups going to far? Maybe. But that's not the point.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    Everyone is great at pointing out problems. But people are rarely good at coming up with (good) solutions without a level of overall understanding and context.
  - balfirevic 6y ago
    It's pretty hilarious to me that not having standups is even in the same sentence as "going too far". I don't mean to pick on you with this comment - you are accurately describing the state of the industry.
    - bird_monster 6y ago
      My first job was at a very large company where every team was required to have a Product Owner, Scrum Master, Business Analyst, QA and then however many devs were on that project. Our product owner broke her foot one weekend and wanted to sit during Monday's standup meeting. Our scrum master demanded she either stand or leave the meeting. Arguing ensued, loudly. I bring this up only to say, our industry, while being very progressing in some areas, also happens to be extremely dogmatic about some ridiculous concepts without really understanding them.
gumby 6y ago
I wanted to quote something from the “retrospective summary” but it was a photo of the text!
apple4ever 6y ago
Anybody else a infrastructure engineer and do Agile? We do and I just don't think it fits for our work. Maybe it's good for development but our work rarely fits within in a sprint (which is a week for us which I think makes it worse). And I cannot stand stand ups. They feel like a waste of time. I'd much rather do two meetings a week to catch up on things and look at our tracker in between.
- jlintz 6y ago
  We do a "ScrumBan" style. Basically we do backlog grooming, sprint planning with 2 week sprints. We factor in that the oncall engineer will likely have less velocity that sprint and we're ok with carry over of some tickets (try to minimize this as much as possible). If you're having issues with your work fitting into a sprint, have you dug into why? Are you breaking down the task into small enough units that make them more digestable in a sprints worth of time? We also punted on standups, I never found them to be valuable and past experiences felt like they were more of a mechanism to get people into the office at a certain time. We do a once a week team meeting with an agenda that you can add to before hand. We discuss anything that needs to be discussed as a team and unblock anyone then. I trust everyone is doing work daily and I can check our sprint board without having everyone tell me what they worked on daily.
  - apple4ever 6y ago
    I think a ScrumBan style would work much better, with 2 week sprints. Yes - things just take awhile to get done. We split things up as much as possible. If we didn't have daily stand ups I think that would be helpful. BTW I am the Lead who acts as both the product owner and scrum master.
alexmingoia 6y ago
I much prefer stand-downs (I’m claiming the name now). At the end of the day, you tell your team what you accomplished for the day in an email. Everyone already knows what they’re working on next because that’s part of the ticketing and schedule system your company uses, and decided at the beginning of the release period. If you’re blocked you go tell the person whose blocking you, or your manager. When everyone wakes up and goes to work they can just get to work.
- xwdv 6y ago
  I like that better. It’s a pain in the ass waking up and not knowing what’s really gonna happen for the day until your standup meeting.
- paulmooreparks 6y ago
  This. I really like this about Kanban. All of the work was already on the board. The to-do column was kept populated with tasks to be done, and there's complete visibility of what's in progress. As the lead I could look at the aging of each ticket and speak directly to the assignee about any issues. If we needed an ad-hoc meeting to deal with blockers we could do so, and invite the people needed. We'd have at least weekly meetings with the entire team and as many ad-hoc meetings as necessary, but no more.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  What if one day your head is in a different space? You have to call out sick until you are ready for one specific task?
  - alexmingoia 6y ago
    If one day your head is in a different space and you don’t feel like working, you suck it up and work anyway because you’re a professional. If you didn’t accomplish anything for the day, you put that in your end of day email/report and explain why, and what you need to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. If you’re actually sick or need a day off you notify your superior. They will work with the team to pause or reassign your work while you’re gone, and when you get back you resume your work.
baby 6y ago
I don't understand how anyone can tolerate stand ups, how is this not micromanagement?
xupybd 6y ago
Why is there activity 24 hours a day? That can't be accurate?
Deradon 6y ago
Wow, I'm kinda impressed of all the negative comments here. What's making a short and focussed daily synchronization meeting (aka: Daily/Standup) useful for me: * Short and focussed, 15min max, no excuse * Focus on impediments and try to figure out if the team can help. * VERY short update on what I'm planning to do today (to make synergies visible) * And the least important one I'd skip quite often: Short update on what was done yesterday. (Looks like, lot of ppl are focussing on this one)
- dionian 6y ago
  It obviates the need for many more 'project planning' meetings and forces everyone to be present and answer questions. If done right they are excellent. Easily ruined by those with no discipline.
sys_64738 6y ago
The only person that should stand up is the idiot who calls a daily meeting for an hour. These things are only to allow managers to micromanage.
Olumde 6y ago
In my opinion daily standups are pointless when there is no short term delivery goal. In my dream company standups, or better dev meetings, would peter out to about once a week and then ramp up as the team approaches a delivery. I once calculated that daily standups, sprint planning, sprint retrospective, sprint demo, and for some sprint of sprints consume one full day of the week. Now unless the Agile ceremonies make the team at least 25% more productive, to make up for the full day "lost", in my opinion, it is counterproductive. But none of those activities made our team more productive, effective or deliver faster or better. Our dev teams had a built a great product that customers loved and a customer service that customers frequently lauded us for. In fact, customer loved so much they moved some of their staff into our offices and asked if we had any other product/services to sell to them! (Go figure) We had achieved all this without doing the Agile thing. We simply met and talked though issues. Senior engineers were given the freedom to innovate on the modules that they delivered. It was great, and it worked.
- bfuclusion 6y ago
  Your comment is a symptom of a larger problem. Sprints make the assumption that you've got some set block to "work on these things". It's just not true. Business is a live environment and priorities change quicker than that for both good and bad reasons. You should be asking the question "Is this something I should be doing" EVERY time you take a task, so doing that once a sprint isn't often enough.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    One place a standup can help is when saying what you’re doing today is a farce, because the moment you get out of this meeting someone is going to preempt you to do something else. Showing up every morning and saying you’re working on the same thing because you made no progress the day before is supposed to lead to your manager intervening. That’s great during the induction phase, but if that quality is still valuable to you a year later? Run.
    - bfuclusion 6y ago
Sirikon 6y ago
The biggest point for me from the article isn’t the stand ups. It’s that their fun projects are, mostly, improving their quality of life while working. Improving deployments, faster compilation, analytics... those aren’t fun because pure fun, those are just necessities that should have been tackled earlier. Improving that kind of stuff always makes development less frustrating, narrowing the time between something is coded and something is running in production.
dragonwriter 6y ago
Stand-ups are pretty dumb. Yes, the idea is that they exist to surface and resolve impediments, but there are problems with that: (1) impediments shouldn't fester for a significant fraction of a day, and usually don't require synchronous team-wide communication. (2) stand-ups inevitably, even if timeboxed effectively, become either rambling or ritualized status meetings, because people very quickly learn how to resolve, or at least surface and start working to resolve, impediments without waiting for them.
- lmm 6y ago
  > impediments shouldn't fester for a significant fraction of a day, and usually don't require synchronous team-wide communication. It's very hard to make the call about when it's worth interrupting another team member. You're potentially setting back their work a significant amount, and it tends to feel like an admission of failure. Having a regular scheduled time to do it takes a lot of the sting out of it.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > It's very hard to make the call about when it's worth interrupting another team member. If an issue can wait for a daily standup, it can even moreso be communicated and any necessary synchronization planned through asynchronous communication which doesn't require interruption at all.
    - lmm 6y ago
      If your organisation has a good async communication culture, yes. Many don't.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    I would gladly pay the cost of standup in exchange for a team culture that is reluctant about interruptions. Most people get both standup and constant interruption.
    - 6y ago
cadence- 6y ago
The worst thing about standups is that they tend to be scheduled in the morning. Half of the team I manage are night owls. They suffer when they have to wake up in the morning just to attend a short meeting. That’s why I do everything I can to cancel standups. People become more productive because they gain more flexibility. Now they can work on something till the evening if they are in the zone, without worrying that they have to wake up early the next day. Works even better now that everybody is working from home.
- ptmcc 6y ago
  I'm one of those night owls, thank you. I've had to deal with early morning standups in the past and it was soul crushing and a huge net-negative for my work. Fortunately my current team does 11:15 which works great, especially from home.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  Many years ago I read a post-mortem about the Carmageddon game. They had their management, finance, HR etc in London and all their devs in Sydney. This worked extremely well the post-mortem said, because everyone was at work at the same time...
aunty_helen 6y ago
I want to share a core tenant of scrum that isn't in the scrum guide and most people don't cotton on to. Here goes: 'Meetings' are a time to do a specific thing. This seems very simple, but my own experience as a scrum master and in multiple a businesses trying to implement scrum, along with the gripes people have in this thread, show that most people just don't get it. So the answer to "why are we having this meeting?" is often very simple and I'll list all of the meetings and what their purpose is for your benefit. This way, when you find yourself doing something else during one of these meetings, you can safely assume that it's not scrum at fault, it's you and your crappy implementation of the process. > Planning, this is a meeting for planning. > Backlog, this is a meeting for grooming the backlog in preparation for planning. > Retrospective, this is a meeting for retrospectively looking at the sprint to improve the process for the next sprint. > Standup, this is a quick daily checkup for each team member's progress, planned actions and blockers. Notice how Standup doesn't include "this is a meeting for small amounts of planning." That's because it's not there, you're not meant to do planning in standup, there's a meeting for that. So, if you need to do post-planning on a task it's not ready for pickup. Easy so far right? Now the bit that people struggle with. If you've achived the meeting goal, there's no need for a post standup checkup about where someone's at. So people can do their job knowing that the "hey where did you get to with X" question isn't going to disrupt them from 09:15 onwards. Hey! That sounds great... but 15 minutes is 15 minutes I hear you say. The "time to do a specific thing" is the most efficient way of achieving that specific thing. That's the point of these meetings and why a successful implementation of scrum is more efficient that your other crappy process.
ravenide 6y ago
Why are standups even a thing? Like, what is wrong with my reasoning here? Meetings are maximally efficient when the exact set of people who all need to talk to each other are present, and no more. In a team of 7, only 1 or 2 other people might be affected by what I’m working on. The other people are just wasting time pretending to care about what I’m saying. My experience working at tech companies in SF has suggested to me that most meetings, not just standups, suffer from this problem. The time cost of a meeting grows as O(N^2), and yet we routinely have all-hands, weekly syncs, etc. Yes, some level of communication is needed but when the time cost of these things is so tremendous, it seems irresponsible not to at least ask if what we’re getting out of it is worth the cost. Meetings are apparently the one thing that no one tries to optimize, in our industry ostensibly hyperconcerned with optimizing things. Disclaimer: I hate most meetings.
- g051051 6y ago
  When the company I work at decided to become "agile", it all went to hell. Every "innovation" just makes it more and more miserable to work there. Standups are a real pain, and I have yet to see any value whatsoever from this daily ritual that interrupts key work time.
- dionian 6y ago
  Originally, it was supposed to be to minimize meetings and make them more efficient when they do happen.
- optymizer 6y ago
  I've come to realize that stand-ups are generally useful. You're right that out of, say 15 people, only 2 care that you are struggling to import some dependency, but the rest overhear the discussion, they register some keywords and they know what you are working on. Maybe next month Joe Junior Dev goes directly to you with a question about that dependency instead of wasting half a day googling. Then there is also the side effect of our monkey brains to give importance to people you see often. Stand-ups cultivate the feeling of "this is a team". It's important to show members what the team is. Stand-ups however are not a requirement for a good functioning team. I'm leading a small team of senior devs and, despite my praise above, I decided against daily stand-ups. There is sufficient intelligence and communication, and just general professionalism in everyone in the team, that daily stand-ups are not worth the hassle and corporate feeling. As a rule of thumb, if there are junior devs on the team, I would insist on having daily stand-ups on that team.
Zigurd 6y ago
A couple observations: First there is a lot of "no true Scotsman" in the comments here, saying, for example, thaht they were not doing standups correctly. Secondly "Agile metrics" is the "diet snacks" of project management. Yes, their metrics improved. But does that really tell you if they made great high-value software?
maitredusoi 6y ago
TL;DR Top Votes: Cancel Standup Work on 'Fun Projects' Thanks for sharing this experimentation
lovetocode 6y ago
A lot of bologna in this thread. Time boxing works, full stop.
foxfired 6y ago
There is an important piece of information they didn't take into account. They cancelled stand-up right before the Covid lockdown. What they are tracking is not the effect of no stand-up, but the pattern of their workers during the lockdown. The April drop in pull requests can be explained by workers feeling overwhelmed after staying home for a month.
zmmmmm 6y ago
The calendar picture is interesting. One of the problems I have with standups or any meeting first thing in the day is how it affects my mental state. That period directly after I start work is precious. It's when all the things I've had in my mind overnight are ready to be realised, and I'm calm and my mind is receptive to sitting down to a focused session. Splurging a meeting into that period can completely destroy that precious time. I can have a whole morning of work just disappear because I can't focus properly after an interruption like that. Another way of looking at it is that people understimate the cost overhead of having a meeting. For me, you can pad the time around it with about an hour before and after and assume my productivity will be severely impacted. In that context, a 15 minute standup is about the stupidest thing you can do for my productivity. If you're going to have a meeting, make it real and decent and worth the overhead of holding it.
- wolco2 6y ago
  The worst is the end of the day checkins. By that point I'm not sure what I worked on or sometimes where I even am.
andylynch 6y ago
There is a really important part here I don’t is picked up on. One reason why it’s a ‘stand up’ meeting is because you’re supposed to be doing just that - it helps keep the meeting short and to the point. A really good example of this is the Privy Council. Queen Victoria got tired of long meetings with her Council, so she just kept standing during it, meaning everyone had to as well and couldn’t drag on. They still stand up today. This doesn’t translate well to remote working but like others are saying, the idea is to keep things brief and on point. Longer conversations can follow after.
browserface 6y ago
OMG your managers must be feeling like they are losing control and scared their importance is diminishing. Who cares that you are getting more done.... Will somebody please think of the manager's poor egos!
soulchild37 6y ago
The company I am currently in never had standup, everything is communicated in Slack and Jira and everyone works well together for many years already. This article feels more like a promotional piece for their own SaaS lol
creztoe 6y ago
This seems like it's just a click-baity ad for their productivity analysis tools. I struggle to find a single thing of value in this post.
borplk 6y ago
Classic army of apologists with 'you are doing it wrong'. Yes we get your intricate textbook philosophies but the average Joe, works at AverageCo and has an average Schmoe manager that takes your buzzwords, weaponizes it and turns our life into hell. So don't be surprised when people are angry with you. You invented the deadly rituals that an entire industry now suffers from.
winrid 6y ago
During most of the time at <current company> I've had a standup in the morning, one in the afternoon, and I have to put my daily summary in a chat room so that more people (architects, CTO) know what I'm doing. I'm a developer. In the past when I was a manager I hated making my team do standups. In fact, one reason I quit was that I got a new boss who was an agile evangelist and I had to implement things his way. I didn't like how it made us less efficient and eventually quit. One thing I did as a manager was for pre-sprint planning each developer would meet with the product manager for 10mins, one on one, which the team loved by the way. Instead of giant 1-2 hour grooming session. I think I was an effective manager, but no company wanted to hire me because nobody works like that, so I went back into development. I hope that my company keeps growing so I can do the things the way I want and keep as much BS as I want out of my life (or delegate it, I guess).
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Seriously, does anybody do literal standup meetings anymore during coronavirus and work from home? Or any of the other agile busywork chores? It always struck me as ridiculous to create task cards like in kindergarden, especially in IT. The inability to manage projects using computers is totally unconvincing especially when your team is tasked with creating computer programs. I hope we can finally get rid of agile bs rather than skeuomorph physical task boards and cards into team workflow software.
oxfordmale 6y ago
Daily stands ups are the quickest way to waste your time.Even if can limit the stand up to 5 to 10 minutes, a study from the University of California Irvine revealed that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task at hand. That means you lose half an hour of work from each of your team members each day, 20 hours a month. I trust my team to keep me updated if a ticket takes longer than expected. If it does, I can arrange a meeting with the required developers to discuss a way forward.
- bryan0 6y ago
  Well this is kind of a silly metric to validate the efficacy of standups. What you want to look at instead is given 2 teams, one with standups and one without, which one achieves their goals more often and has higher morale.
myspy 6y ago
I'm a scrum master, but I'm happy to not do daily standups anymore. I prefer to work harder on todos and concepts and enabling teams to do their work written without talking.
georgeecollins 6y ago
This sounded like: we changed our routine and then had our most productive week ever. While I think there is a point to what they are saying, I wouldn't take the fact that they had a great week as proof of a better work methodology. If people had voted to have ice cream every morning they might also have had a really productive week because ice cream is fun and changing the routine is fun. But I wouldn't bet the farm on making a company more productive in the long run with ice cream breakfasts.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

221 points by thellimist 6y ago

With JavaScript turned off, the link goes to an empty page. There's some template stuff, but no content. Which could be taken as a rather funny take on "here's what happened" ;)

rudasn 6y ago
I know that the whole "it doesn't work without javascript" story sounds like "get off my lawn", but content authors, esp on HN, need to realise that quite a few of us refuse to browse the Web with JS enabled esp on mobile devices. With JS the experience on the mobile web is garbage. It's difficult enough to find quality content as it is, we don't need all the added "benefits" of JS.
- carlosdp 6y ago
  > but content authors, esp on HN, need to realise that quite a few of us refuse to browse the Web with JS enabled esp on mobile devices. They kind of don't though, given this is such a tiny fraction of visitors
- gridlockd 6y ago
  I realize it, I just don't care.
- gowld 6y ago
  Is there any quality content that is hidden behind JS? From the comments here, OP isn't.
li4ick 6y ago
I mean, it's time to accept that JS is everywhere. Or, you can do something like Stallman, and have a remote machine send screenshots to you, so you don't have to run non-free JS.
teh_klev 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.

sabellito 6y ago

A bit click baity. The team experimented with cancelling stand-up AND started doing a version of 20% time with a strict rule about "fun projects only". As with any process experimentation, mixing two initiatives at the same time makes it impossible to understand the results.

larrik 6y ago
And only for a week! What does that prove?
- violetgarden 6y ago
  Exactly! I can enjoy a vacation somewhere for a week, but living there might be a whole different thing.
- jakupovic 6y ago
  Doesn't prove anything, the whole article is useless. If they did this over at least a few weeks, then maybe.

darrinmn 6y ago

"our standups are growing and spend alot of time chatting / designing new features". So your standups are inefficient and your solution is to cancel them? Talk about a false equivalency. Fix your standups, dont cancel them.

lovedev 6y ago
I think the point of the article was to empower changing processes and ACTUALLY listen to the suggestions coming from your team. It's odd that you're bashing that
paulmooreparks 6y ago
It sounds more like they asked the devs what would make them productive. You know... empowered the team. Isn't that what agile is about?

Kednicma 6y ago

That heatmap calendar was upside-down from the typical calendar UIs which I've used; it showed time flowing bottom-to-top rather than top-to-bottom. Is this the typical style for Haystack or related tooling?

carterklein13 6y ago

I've found standups to be probably the biggest waste of time of all Agile ceremonies (and I'm really not a fan of Agile as-is, but I'm too young to have experienced anything else so I can't say it's definitively bad). I think the one caveat, though, is that standup is useless IF the team is high-performing, close with one another, and self-motivated. The team I'm currently on probably does not need any sort of formal Agile workflow at all besides setting our current sprint's worth of stories at the beginning of each sprint. But, that's because everyone on the team is very self-motivated and even remotely we're still very close with one another. I've been on other teams where, without standup, people would go for days without working on or talking to anyone. I think, if anything, this is proof that no company should have one method of delivering software. I work at a massive company, and forcing each team into Agile is probably easy at a top-down level, but can be very frustrating at a bottom-up level.

hinkley 6y ago
Standups are Scrum (possibly XP), not Agile, but Agile is dead and Scrum is wearing its skin as a macabre disguise. It puts the lotion on its skin... Standups are the first time I ever noticed that "X is ableist" without someone else having to point it out to me. My introduction to standup meetings was a bit after I screwed up my ankle. I spent a lot of time thinking in that meeting about all the injuries and disabilities that would make the forced standing still for 15 (or let's be honest, 30) minutes an imposition. Spines, knees, hips, ankles, toes. In our industry you have to be able to manage sitting at a keyboard for 8 hours, until 'Agile' came along. Writing this out, I'm beginning to wonder if standups (the "Stand Up" part) aren't in fact illegal under US and/or EU law.
- mellosouls 6y ago
  Yeah a peeve of mine as well, I've always thought the name is insensitive at best. However, I would have thought it's taken as given that you only stand if you are able and the real goal is to keep the meetings short and focused; with physical "discomfort" being an inspired motivator.
  - 6y ago

BrandonM 6y ago

I vaguely recall research about process changes reliably boosting productivity temporarily but eventually reverting to the mean. Does anyone recall if that effect has a name or a canonical study?

JimDabell 6y ago
You may be thinking of the novelty effect: https://turnedtwenty.com/productivity-isnt-related-technology-novelty-effect/ https://turnedtwenty.com/productivity-isnt-related-technolog...
- BrandonM 6y ago
  That's exactly what I had in mind. Great article. Thanks!

BrandonM 6y ago

This article, as with much tech discussion I've seen in the past 5-10 years, seems to take sprints as a given. Are most devs here working in a sprint model? It sounds a bit soul crushing to me to be "continually sprinting". I'm so glad that our company doesn't have them—I think it's a significant factor in me grinding it out for 9+ years. We have feature releases every 4 weeks. If your feature is merged before QA, it goes out in that release. Otherwise, it gets delayed till the next release, and we don't make a big deal about it—several other features will still be in the release. I feel like it gives me a lot more agency and ownership of my work. I think it's the right amount of subtle deadline pressure, relying on my intrinsic motivation to get my feature shipped and move onto the next one. Or to have the freedom to determine that it's not ready yet and spend a little more time to avoid shoving out a pile of technical debt. I'm curious to see what I'm missing, though. Anyone love sprints? Anyone working in a non-sprint model and hate it?

alfalfasprout 6y ago
My team doesn't do sprints and honestly thank god. HN is pretty "product eng" focused and sprints do work better there... but for infra projects where the units of work often tend to involve more R&D, exploration, etc. I've found that weekly check-ins work best (scheduling ad-hoc sync when needed). You still get the benefit of a heads-up on what people are working on but you're not trying to shove tasks into arbitrary 2-3 week sprints. At the end of the day, "agile" wasn't originally the monstrosity that scrum-fetishists have turned it into. It was simply these few lines: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan"
- cpeterso 6y ago
  Sprints that don't ship something (i.e. "deliver user value") are just arbitrary timeboxes. They probably can just be progress checkins without all the overhead of Scrum ceremony.
  - stefanmichael 6y ago

boublepop 6y ago

Honestly, if you think spending 15 minutes (we’re closer to 10 though) talking to your team to ensure that you know what others are working on and they know what you are working on, then I don’t want to work with you. It’s not wasted time, and even if you don’t care what I’m working on I still care that you know so that we don’t spend two weeks building something only for you to go “Oh, that won’t work after the changes I made to the core.... why didn’t you come by my desk and ask me “are you intending to change the core code in a way that invalidates all assumptions we had two weeks ago when we started working on this?” And do so like clockwork every day, even though I’d answer no 6 times before suddenly answering yes? “But we already communicate in the team outside of the Stand-up!” You say. Ok then, tomorrow at your standup, have everyone go though someone else’s points, I’ll say what you did yesterday, if you have blockers and what you’ll do today. If everyone does this flawlessly, then yes the daily is wasted time, but for every mistaken assumption you hear, that is a potential mistake or missed opportunity or just general annoyance you avoided simply by talking 10 minutes together. Now don’t get me started on the number of bad excuses that you avoid by having daily stand ups that’s a whole other subject, but also an extremely valuable element. “I’m waiting on Kevin to finish X” “Does Kevin know this?” “Yes of cause! “ Kevin: “Wait what? Err what am I supposed to be doing? That’s not on the board”. Etc.

alfalfasprout 6y ago
There's an in-between here. Daily standups just aren't a great fit in many cases... weekly standups will tend to work better in these cases. At the end of the day it boils down to the difficulty of the tasks to be executed and how much R&D and design work there is. The more R&D heavy your workload the more impractical daily standups tend to be.
- bobwall 6y ago
  Yea, we did stand-ups Mon, Wed, Fri, which tended to be a good balance. Still able to let people know what you are doing, but not having to be forced to do it everyday as if you are children.
hinkley 6y ago

blatherard 6y ago

They stopped regular work and had a hack week and morale improved. Now they're back to the regular work and having standups again. What does this show other than taking a break is fun?

vannevar 6y ago
Yeah, the "we stopped having standups!" is good click-bait, but simply letting people work on their own projects is always going to improve morale and productivity (if you assume the fun projects are aligned with the organization).
cassieramen 6y ago
I thought the productivity data was interesting but then it stopped right after hack week... Definitely agree, the long term implications are a lot more interesting.

syntaxing 6y ago

As hardware engineer that does a hybrid software/hardware role on a team that uses sprint/scrum planning, I find it a terrible idea for a lot of applications. It is great for certain situations but I find the discussions more about what task we should do rather than what problems we should solve and the value added. If things are breaking on a product/project because you didn't know about some upstream or downstream interface, the company itself has an underpinning issue on transparency and ownership. I have rushed hardware projects (expensive mistakes) involving capital equipment (expensive) and everything interfaced correctly given the fact that the ownership and responsibilities were transparent with decent planning in the beginning.

waylandsmithers 6y ago

As someone who has worked mostly in a consulting context, "Fun projects ONLY" is... interesting

gervwyk 6y ago

Since lockdown started, we switched to 3-Ps - everyone post 3 micro tasks they are working on today on a team discord channel before the meeting starts, at 9 we all hop on a team call and go over all the 3ps. short and sweet. and gives enough insight for people to ask for help or just get a feeling of progress... tricky sometime not to list macro tasks, which takes more than a day to complete. but other than that. its also nice to force every on to think about and commit to a few small things they want to work on for the day.

dmitriid 6y ago

There are so many things that are not FUN, but have to be done anyway. And more often than not the not-fun things are the direct consequence of the "FUN" projects.

m3kw9 6y ago

Stand ups are supposed to be good if it has a focused purpose but eventually it morphs into a “I’m continuing to work on X and no blockers”. Then everyone resents what a waste of time it is because the team basically knows 80% of what everyone is already doing. Or the blockers/issues/new features they have won’t be sufficiently explained in the stand up, and everyone pretends to understand or care for it.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
> I’m continuing to work on X Means there is a blocker and the person is stuck or meandering and can't or won't explain it. Major yellow flag.

jkingsbery 6y ago

On the teams I've been on that are actively doing software development (not in some pre-coding phase where we're still figuring out requirements or something like that), if there wasn't a stand-up individuals created an identical coordination mechanism in an ad hoc manner. This tells me that there is something valuable to stand-ups, even if we don't always love them. If a team's stand-ups are not effective, there are lots of things you can try: refocusing the team's attention, have someone other than the normal "stand-up leader" guide the conversation, or change the time so that it's next to another interruption (for example, right before most people get lunch... this has the added bonus of incentivizing people not to ramble).

jurassic 6y ago

Cancelling standups during a "fun projects only" hackweek doesn't say a single thing about the efficacy of the standup meeting. The costs of cancelling it, will only show up over the medium to long term. Also, it makes me cringe a bit to see there are people who think number of pull requests are a good measure of productivity. It incentivizes blasting out a lot of quick, easy changes at the expense of doing more challenging tasks that may be essential for long term code health.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

amgreg 6y ago

https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5ed57622ee14fb96d022d544/5f6cc2313f047785e14bf727_11.png https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5ed57622ee14fb96d022d544/5f6... Is this list representative of the entire scope of the sprint? Unclear from the article. If so, while the sprint was arguably successful in that the engineers felt good about it, it didn't really succeed in improving the customer experience directly.

cj 6y ago

Major caveat: they were never doing stand ups to begin with. From the screenshot, the feedback from the team was “standup are becoming very long, a lot of chatting and designing features” (paraphrased) It sounds like they had a 45-60 minute daily meeting that was not a standup. Rather than cancel the meeting, shorten the meeting with a 15 minute hard stop. I run a 10 person remote SaaS company. We have daily morning stand ups. The standup takes no more than 10-15 minutes, but it sometimes goes 20-25 minutes since we often chat for a few minutes before jumping in to standup. (I can’t imagine us doing feature design during that meeting, as they were in the article) The chatting / socializing is something I encourage before standup starts. As a remote team, it’s necessary to have some group interactions to maintain the group’s working relationship.

lovedev 6y ago
I think the point of this article was not to bash standups but to give an example of empowering your team to make decisions. Be bold. Make change. Improve the way you work. Was cancelling standups going to far? Maybe. But that's not the point.
- p1necone 6y ago
  Everyone is great at pointing out problems. But people are rarely good at coming up with (good) solutions without a level of overall understanding and context.
- balfirevic 6y ago
  It's pretty hilarious to me that not having standups is even in the same sentence as "going too far". I don't mean to pick on you with this comment - you are accurately describing the state of the industry.
  - bird_monster 6y ago
    My first job was at a very large company where every team was required to have a Product Owner, Scrum Master, Business Analyst, QA and then however many devs were on that project. Our product owner broke her foot one weekend and wanted to sit during Monday's standup meeting. Our scrum master demanded she either stand or leave the meeting. Arguing ensued, loudly. I bring this up only to say, our industry, while being very progressing in some areas, also happens to be extremely dogmatic about some ridiculous concepts without really understanding them.

gumby 6y ago

I wanted to quote something from the “retrospective summary” but it was a photo of the text!

apple4ever 6y ago

Anybody else a infrastructure engineer and do Agile? We do and I just don't think it fits for our work. Maybe it's good for development but our work rarely fits within in a sprint (which is a week for us which I think makes it worse). And I cannot stand stand ups. They feel like a waste of time. I'd much rather do two meetings a week to catch up on things and look at our tracker in between.

jlintz 6y ago
We do a "ScrumBan" style. Basically we do backlog grooming, sprint planning with 2 week sprints. We factor in that the oncall engineer will likely have less velocity that sprint and we're ok with carry over of some tickets (try to minimize this as much as possible). If you're having issues with your work fitting into a sprint, have you dug into why? Are you breaking down the task into small enough units that make them more digestable in a sprints worth of time? We also punted on standups, I never found them to be valuable and past experiences felt like they were more of a mechanism to get people into the office at a certain time. We do a once a week team meeting with an agenda that you can add to before hand. We discuss anything that needs to be discussed as a team and unblock anyone then. I trust everyone is doing work daily and I can check our sprint board without having everyone tell me what they worked on daily.
- apple4ever 6y ago
  I think a ScrumBan style would work much better, with 2 week sprints. Yes - things just take awhile to get done. We split things up as much as possible. If we didn't have daily stand ups I think that would be helpful. BTW I am the Lead who acts as both the product owner and scrum master.

alexmingoia 6y ago

I much prefer stand-downs (I’m claiming the name now). At the end of the day, you tell your team what you accomplished for the day in an email. Everyone already knows what they’re working on next because that’s part of the ticketing and schedule system your company uses, and decided at the beginning of the release period. If you’re blocked you go tell the person whose blocking you, or your manager. When everyone wakes up and goes to work they can just get to work.

xwdv 6y ago
I like that better. It’s a pain in the ass waking up and not knowing what’s really gonna happen for the day until your standup meeting.
paulmooreparks 6y ago
This. I really like this about Kanban. All of the work was already on the board. The to-do column was kept populated with tasks to be done, and there's complete visibility of what's in progress. As the lead I could look at the aging of each ticket and speak directly to the assignee about any issues. If we needed an ad-hoc meeting to deal with blockers we could do so, and invite the people needed. We'd have at least weekly meetings with the entire team and as many ad-hoc meetings as necessary, but no more.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
What if one day your head is in a different space? You have to call out sick until you are ready for one specific task?
- alexmingoia 6y ago
  If one day your head is in a different space and you don’t feel like working, you suck it up and work anyway because you’re a professional. If you didn’t accomplish anything for the day, you put that in your end of day email/report and explain why, and what you need to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. If you’re actually sick or need a day off you notify your superior. They will work with the team to pause or reassign your work while you’re gone, and when you get back you resume your work.

baby 6y ago

I don't understand how anyone can tolerate stand ups, how is this not micromanagement?

xupybd 6y ago

Why is there activity 24 hours a day? That can't be accurate?

Deradon 6y ago

Wow, I'm kinda impressed of all the negative comments here. What's making a short and focussed daily synchronization meeting (aka: Daily/Standup) useful for me: * Short and focussed, 15min max, no excuse * Focus on impediments and try to figure out if the team can help. * VERY short update on what I'm planning to do today (to make synergies visible) * And the least important one I'd skip quite often: Short update on what was done yesterday. (Looks like, lot of ppl are focussing on this one)

dionian 6y ago
It obviates the need for many more 'project planning' meetings and forces everyone to be present and answer questions. If done right they are excellent. Easily ruined by those with no discipline.

sys_64738 6y ago

The only person that should stand up is the idiot who calls a daily meeting for an hour. These things are only to allow managers to micromanage.

Olumde 6y ago

In my opinion daily standups are pointless when there is no short term delivery goal. In my dream company standups, or better dev meetings, would peter out to about once a week and then ramp up as the team approaches a delivery. I once calculated that daily standups, sprint planning, sprint retrospective, sprint demo, and for some sprint of sprints consume one full day of the week. Now unless the Agile ceremonies make the team at least 25% more productive, to make up for the full day "lost", in my opinion, it is counterproductive. But none of those activities made our team more productive, effective or deliver faster or better. Our dev teams had a built a great product that customers loved and a customer service that customers frequently lauded us for. In fact, customer loved so much they moved some of their staff into our offices and asked if we had any other product/services to sell to them! (Go figure) We had achieved all this without doing the Agile thing. We simply met and talked though issues. Senior engineers were given the freedom to innovate on the modules that they delivered. It was great, and it worked.

bfuclusion 6y ago
Your comment is a symptom of a larger problem. Sprints make the assumption that you've got some set block to "work on these things". It's just not true. Business is a live environment and priorities change quicker than that for both good and bad reasons. You should be asking the question "Is this something I should be doing" EVERY time you take a task, so doing that once a sprint isn't often enough.
- hinkley 6y ago
  One place a standup can help is when saying what you’re doing today is a farce, because the moment you get out of this meeting someone is going to preempt you to do something else. Showing up every morning and saying you’re working on the same thing because you made no progress the day before is supposed to lead to your manager intervening. That’s great during the induction phase, but if that quality is still valuable to you a year later? Run.
  - bfuclusion 6y ago

Sirikon 6y ago

The biggest point for me from the article isn’t the stand ups. It’s that their fun projects are, mostly, improving their quality of life while working. Improving deployments, faster compilation, analytics... those aren’t fun because pure fun, those are just necessities that should have been tackled earlier. Improving that kind of stuff always makes development less frustrating, narrowing the time between something is coded and something is running in production.

dragonwriter 6y ago

Stand-ups are pretty dumb. Yes, the idea is that they exist to surface and resolve impediments, but there are problems with that: (1) impediments shouldn't fester for a significant fraction of a day, and usually don't require synchronous team-wide communication. (2) stand-ups inevitably, even if timeboxed effectively, become either rambling or ritualized status meetings, because people very quickly learn how to resolve, or at least surface and start working to resolve, impediments without waiting for them.

lmm 6y ago
> impediments shouldn't fester for a significant fraction of a day, and usually don't require synchronous team-wide communication. It's very hard to make the call about when it's worth interrupting another team member. You're potentially setting back their work a significant amount, and it tends to feel like an admission of failure. Having a regular scheduled time to do it takes a lot of the sting out of it.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It's very hard to make the call about when it's worth interrupting another team member. If an issue can wait for a daily standup, it can even moreso be communicated and any necessary synchronization planned through asynchronous communication which doesn't require interruption at all.
  - lmm 6y ago
    If your organisation has a good async communication culture, yes. Many don't.
- closeparen 6y ago
  I would gladly pay the cost of standup in exchange for a team culture that is reluctant about interruptions. Most people get both standup and constant interruption.
  - 6y ago

cadence- 6y ago

The worst thing about standups is that they tend to be scheduled in the morning. Half of the team I manage are night owls. They suffer when they have to wake up in the morning just to attend a short meeting. That’s why I do everything I can to cancel standups. People become more productive because they gain more flexibility. Now they can work on something till the evening if they are in the zone, without worrying that they have to wake up early the next day. Works even better now that everybody is working from home.

ptmcc 6y ago
I'm one of those night owls, thank you. I've had to deal with early morning standups in the past and it was soul crushing and a huge net-negative for my work. Fortunately my current team does 11:15 which works great, especially from home.
magicalhippo 6y ago
Many years ago I read a post-mortem about the Carmageddon game. They had their management, finance, HR etc in London and all their devs in Sydney. This worked extremely well the post-mortem said, because everyone was at work at the same time...

aunty_helen 6y ago

I want to share a core tenant of scrum that isn't in the scrum guide and most people don't cotton on to. Here goes: 'Meetings' are a time to do a specific thing. This seems very simple, but my own experience as a scrum master and in multiple a businesses trying to implement scrum, along with the gripes people have in this thread, show that most people just don't get it. So the answer to "why are we having this meeting?" is often very simple and I'll list all of the meetings and what their purpose is for your benefit. This way, when you find yourself doing something else during one of these meetings, you can safely assume that it's not scrum at fault, it's you and your crappy implementation of the process. > Planning, this is a meeting for planning. > Backlog, this is a meeting for grooming the backlog in preparation for planning. > Retrospective, this is a meeting for retrospectively looking at the sprint to improve the process for the next sprint. > Standup, this is a quick daily checkup for each team member's progress, planned actions and blockers. Notice how Standup doesn't include "this is a meeting for small amounts of planning." That's because it's not there, you're not meant to do planning in standup, there's a meeting for that. So, if you need to do post-planning on a task it's not ready for pickup. Easy so far right? Now the bit that people struggle with. If you've achived the meeting goal, there's no need for a post standup checkup about where someone's at. So people can do their job knowing that the "hey where did you get to with X" question isn't going to disrupt them from 09:15 onwards. Hey! That sounds great... but 15 minutes is 15 minutes I hear you say. The "time to do a specific thing" is the most efficient way of achieving that specific thing. That's the point of these meetings and why a successful implementation of scrum is more efficient that your other crappy process.

ravenide 6y ago

Why are standups even a thing? Like, what is wrong with my reasoning here? Meetings are maximally efficient when the exact set of people who all need to talk to each other are present, and no more. In a team of 7, only 1 or 2 other people might be affected by what I’m working on. The other people are just wasting time pretending to care about what I’m saying. My experience working at tech companies in SF has suggested to me that most meetings, not just standups, suffer from this problem. The time cost of a meeting grows as O(N^2), and yet we routinely have all-hands, weekly syncs, etc. Yes, some level of communication is needed but when the time cost of these things is so tremendous, it seems irresponsible not to at least ask if what we’re getting out of it is worth the cost. Meetings are apparently the one thing that no one tries to optimize, in our industry ostensibly hyperconcerned with optimizing things. Disclaimer: I hate most meetings.

g051051 6y ago
When the company I work at decided to become "agile", it all went to hell. Every "innovation" just makes it more and more miserable to work there. Standups are a real pain, and I have yet to see any value whatsoever from this daily ritual that interrupts key work time.
dionian 6y ago
Originally, it was supposed to be to minimize meetings and make them more efficient when they do happen.
optymizer 6y ago
I've come to realize that stand-ups are generally useful. You're right that out of, say 15 people, only 2 care that you are struggling to import some dependency, but the rest overhear the discussion, they register some keywords and they know what you are working on. Maybe next month Joe Junior Dev goes directly to you with a question about that dependency instead of wasting half a day googling. Then there is also the side effect of our monkey brains to give importance to people you see often. Stand-ups cultivate the feeling of "this is a team". It's important to show members what the team is. Stand-ups however are not a requirement for a good functioning team. I'm leading a small team of senior devs and, despite my praise above, I decided against daily stand-ups. There is sufficient intelligence and communication, and just general professionalism in everyone in the team, that daily stand-ups are not worth the hassle and corporate feeling. As a rule of thumb, if there are junior devs on the team, I would insist on having daily stand-ups on that team.

Zigurd 6y ago

A couple observations: First there is a lot of "no true Scotsman" in the comments here, saying, for example, thaht they were not doing standups correctly. Secondly "Agile metrics" is the "diet snacks" of project management. Yes, their metrics improved. But does that really tell you if they made great high-value software?

maitredusoi 6y ago

TL;DR Top Votes: Cancel Standup Work on 'Fun Projects' Thanks for sharing this experimentation

lovetocode 6y ago

A lot of bologna in this thread. Time boxing works, full stop.

foxfired 6y ago

There is an important piece of information they didn't take into account. They cancelled stand-up right before the Covid lockdown. What they are tracking is not the effect of no stand-up, but the pattern of their workers during the lockdown. The April drop in pull requests can be explained by workers feeling overwhelmed after staying home for a month.

zmmmmm 6y ago

The calendar picture is interesting. One of the problems I have with standups or any meeting first thing in the day is how it affects my mental state. That period directly after I start work is precious. It's when all the things I've had in my mind overnight are ready to be realised, and I'm calm and my mind is receptive to sitting down to a focused session. Splurging a meeting into that period can completely destroy that precious time. I can have a whole morning of work just disappear because I can't focus properly after an interruption like that. Another way of looking at it is that people understimate the cost overhead of having a meeting. For me, you can pad the time around it with about an hour before and after and assume my productivity will be severely impacted. In that context, a 15 minute standup is about the stupidest thing you can do for my productivity. If you're going to have a meeting, make it real and decent and worth the overhead of holding it.

wolco2 6y ago
The worst is the end of the day checkins. By that point I'm not sure what I worked on or sometimes where I even am.

andylynch 6y ago

There is a really important part here I don’t is picked up on. One reason why it’s a ‘stand up’ meeting is because you’re supposed to be doing just that - it helps keep the meeting short and to the point. A really good example of this is the Privy Council. Queen Victoria got tired of long meetings with her Council, so she just kept standing during it, meaning everyone had to as well and couldn’t drag on. They still stand up today. This doesn’t translate well to remote working but like others are saying, the idea is to keep things brief and on point. Longer conversations can follow after.

browserface 6y ago

OMG your managers must be feeling like they are losing control and scared their importance is diminishing. Who cares that you are getting more done.... Will somebody please think of the manager's poor egos!

soulchild37 6y ago

The company I am currently in never had standup, everything is communicated in Slack and Jira and everyone works well together for many years already. This article feels more like a promotional piece for their own SaaS lol

creztoe 6y ago

This seems like it's just a click-baity ad for their productivity analysis tools. I struggle to find a single thing of value in this post.

borplk 6y ago

Classic army of apologists with 'you are doing it wrong'. Yes we get your intricate textbook philosophies but the average Joe, works at AverageCo and has an average Schmoe manager that takes your buzzwords, weaponizes it and turns our life into hell. So don't be surprised when people are angry with you. You invented the deadly rituals that an entire industry now suffers from.

winrid 6y ago

During most of the time at <current company> I've had a standup in the morning, one in the afternoon, and I have to put my daily summary in a chat room so that more people (architects, CTO) know what I'm doing. I'm a developer. In the past when I was a manager I hated making my team do standups. In fact, one reason I quit was that I got a new boss who was an agile evangelist and I had to implement things his way. I didn't like how it made us less efficient and eventually quit. One thing I did as a manager was for pre-sprint planning each developer would meet with the product manager for 10mins, one on one, which the team loved by the way. Instead of giant 1-2 hour grooming session. I think I was an effective manager, but no company wanted to hire me because nobody works like that, so I went back into development. I hope that my company keeps growing so I can do the things the way I want and keep as much BS as I want out of my life (or delegate it, I guess).

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Seriously, does anybody do literal standup meetings anymore during coronavirus and work from home? Or any of the other agile busywork chores? It always struck me as ridiculous to create task cards like in kindergarden, especially in IT. The inability to manage projects using computers is totally unconvincing especially when your team is tasked with creating computer programs. I hope we can finally get rid of agile bs rather than skeuomorph physical task boards and cards into team workflow software.

oxfordmale 6y ago

Daily stands ups are the quickest way to waste your time.Even if can limit the stand up to 5 to 10 minutes, a study from the University of California Irvine revealed that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task at hand. That means you lose half an hour of work from each of your team members each day, 20 hours a month. I trust my team to keep me updated if a ticket takes longer than expected. If it does, I can arrange a meeting with the required developers to discuss a way forward.

bryan0 6y ago
Well this is kind of a silly metric to validate the efficacy of standups. What you want to look at instead is given 2 teams, one with standups and one without, which one achieves their goals more often and has higher morale.

myspy 6y ago

I'm a scrum master, but I'm happy to not do daily standups anymore. I prefer to work harder on todos and concepts and enabling teams to do their work written without talking.

georgeecollins 6y ago

This sounded like: we changed our routine and then had our most productive week ever. While I think there is a point to what they are saying, I wouldn't take the fact that they had a great week as proof of a better work methodology. If people had voted to have ice cream every morning they might also have had a really productive week because ice cream is fun and changing the routine is fun. But I wouldn't bet the farm on making a company more productive in the long run with ice cream breakfasts.

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