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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 chat
by 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 agoI 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 agoEveryone 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 agoIt'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 agoMy 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.
- geofft 6y agoHm, is this illegal in the US? From a brief search, I think that since the 2008 amendments to the ADA, temporary but severe injuries give you protection under the ADA, and being able to sit during standup seems like an entirely reasonable accomodation.
- pubkraal 6y agoSometimes someone can also just be reasonable without it being legally mandated, methinks
- geofft 6y agoYes, that's obviously the preferred option, but in this particular case it seems like it didn't happen.
- bird_monster 6y agoThe devs were a part of the loud arguing, and eventually the SM just kinda pouted while the PO sat and we all just had a normal standup meeting.
- geocar 6y agoYour scrum master is a tool and a liability and if they worked for me this would result in a documented disciplinary action. Don’t tolerate power-trippers.
- bird_monster 6y agoUltimately his contract wasn't renewed because everyone had generally had enough of his schtick. Wrt that meeting though, several of the devs (including me) got pretty loud and ultimately our PO sat and our Scrum Master pouted.
- hackerm0nkey 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xtracto 6y agoI remember in 1999 when i had my first programming job while i was in the Uni. It was simple, i had a part of the software to built, i estimated how much time it was going to take and i built it. No stupid time consuming ceremonies. I guess that the new "gamerization" has been partly caused by millennials and other contemporary generations need for constant recognition.
- hackerm0nkey 6y agothat's exactly my reluctance to question Agile processes, because people will think I am pushing it too far.
- cj 6y agoI think good management takes employee input and uses it to influence decisions while also considering the needs of the entire group of employees and the company. But either way, I’m not bashing you, just disagreeing :) No harm in trying things and experimenting to find what works for you.
- golemiprague 6y agoI don't understand why it needs to be formalised like this, what if people are working on something for a bit longer than one day and got no news to tell or talk about? I think each company and product got its own rhythm and meetings should be adjusted to match that, we are human beings, not robots.
- pengaru 6y agoWhen I last worked in an org with standups, whenever I intended to go head-down on something substantial I'd simply tell the vp of eng to not expect to hear from me or even see me for at least a few days until I have something substantial worth sharing on the subject. There was never any resistance there, and I've never encountered friction in that vein anywhere. No cto or vpe above me has ever wanted to get in the way of someone productive getting into a multi-day flow state anywhere I've bothered to work that hard. Peers or underlings however, the competition that is, it's a different story I mostly ignored. Having said that, I found standups to be a very obnoxious, passive-aggressive tool management used for dealing with folks unable to maintain a relevant and correctly prioritized todo list, and stay on task day-to-day. It's a group I've dabbled in being part of at some employers, and found quite unfulfilling and frustrating because management is way more meddlesome in that mode and individual leverage is practically nonexistent without playing the politics game well. YMMV
- yowlingcat 6y ago> It's a group I've dabbled in being part of at some employers, and found quite unfulfilling and frustrating because management is way more meddlesome in that mode and individual leverage is practically nonexistent without playing the politics game well. YMMV No kidding. Seeing this failure mode is unfortunate because it's not an immediate killer but it's a lethal one once it sinks its teeth in un-opposed.
- lostcolony 6y agoThen they say "I worked on X, still working on X, no blockers" and move on. A well run standup is a minute per person, max. It ensures everyone pulls their head up out of their work long enough to highlight obstacles that might effect delivery, or that someone else on the team might be able to help with, while also ensuring there aren't constant interruptions throughout the day.
- zmmmmm 6y ago> they were never doing stand ups to begin with that's true, but it just turns the question into the one of "is it possible to do real standups?". My experience is that I've never managed to do real standups. It's just not possible to relay complex information about what you're doing in 1 minute. You either do it so superficially it's worthless or you it in depth and it takes longer than a standup should.
- dchuk 6y agoSo that’s the thing: a standup isn’t for discussing what you’re doing, it’s to ensure that things are on track (which the default assumption is they are) and a forum for surfacing blockers/impediments to sort out offline. Assuming you have a Kanban board for your work, and assuming the work is actually accurate on the board in terms of status (which most teams are terrible at without practice) AND assuming you properly have “waiting for testing” “testing” “waiting for review” “reviewing” columns (those waiting for columns are critical to seeing the true state of work), then you simply just “walk the wall” from right to left. As you scan through each column, team members call out if shit is a mess, otherwise you just get a thumbs up and move to the next thing. Then, just use some analytics to highlight tickets stuck in a status too long, and bubble those up in the standup. “You keep saying this is on track, but it’s been here for a week, what’s the deal?”. STANDUPS ARE NOT STATUS UPDATES. They’re for resolving blockers in person without letting shit linger too long. As long as your board is accurate and respected as the source of truth, it is the status update mechanism. It’s no longer a human job. (And yes, this is actually possibly, my agility team does this with 15+ scrumban teams right now)
- andrewcarter 6y agoI hated standups until we eventually got a great PM who moved to something like this, and now I try hard and make standup run like this on any project I'm on. Jira has this nice feature where it puts a little dot on something for each day it's in a column. Standups largely turned into scanning for things that had > 2 dots on a ticket from right to left, and discussing what we needed to do to keep things moving through the system. Love it!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- m463 6y agoI think during a standup you have to - literally stand up. That's the point. It is mindfully uncomfortable/physical work for both speaker and listener, so important communication gets sort of selected in a darwinian way. Compare that to hourly <n>-people's time is profligately spent and it has advantages for everyone. If something needs more discussion, then the interested parties - only - can have their own meeting.
- toxik 6y agoThis seems wholly non-Darwinian to me, what do you mean would be the evolutionary process here?
- m463 6y agoI mean subjects. Everybody - speaker and listener alike - gets tired and cranky from standing so long that only the actually important subjects are discussed.
- p_l 6y agoDon't worry, a manager's advantage is big enough to make a hour long standing up meeting... Sincerely, someone who at some point decided to start stand ups early with unofficial goal of "finish before manager gets in"
- hackerm0nkey 6y agoor do it from a plank position
- watwut 6y agoI can stand for two hours no problem. If the deal is to make it uncomfortable, don't be surprised people dislike it. This sounds like someone bad at moderation punishing not healthy team members. Our hoping people are not fit enough to stand for long.
- tummler 6y agoThis. Just because your standups are inefficient (and not actually standups) does not mean the process/practice is inherently bad.
- sdevonoes 6y agoIn theory yes, but if the majority of the teams are doing standups the wrong way, then perhaps there is something inherently wrong with standups.
- tupputuppu 6y agoI think it's more likely that no amount of good practices and process will work if people don't understand them. The process still improves things compared to doing things ad hoc.
- imafish 6y agoEven if the standup is short and concise, I still think the meeting negatively impacts a team’s ability to do deep work. Why? Because no matter when you schedule a daily meeting, it will be in the middle of someones deep work hours, and they will have to context switch for 15 minutes just to tell “No impediments”.
- Uberphallus 6y agoStrongly agree. I arrive first one in the office because I also want to leave early, it takes me a while to get warmed up and productive. When I'm peaking it's stand up time because it's the earliest time when everybody is available. The best standups I had were at a previous job, after lunch: 1. A major interruption already happened. 2. Your "mind cache" is fresh and you know what blocks you, compared to remembering what you were doing the day before. People systematically forget stuff during early morning stand up then come interrupt you for questions hours later.
- hackerm0nkey 6y agoI can't agree with this strongly enough also with the parent comment. I think it's the constant conflict between the 'maker schedule' and the 'manager schedule' I firmly believe that I can be way more productive when having no standups and when I control my time rather than satisfy an ill thought about ritual, but more often than not you can't change much about it. When I can, I always do.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 02020202 6y agodaily standups were my favourite thing. i always tried to make them as long as possible by acking innocent questions, since i got literally paid for not working. best idea some moron ever came up with.
- akerro 6y agoAgile, standup, iteration have became buzzwords with very little meaning now. Agile with had deadline for big project delivery (teams working in sprints, PO getting cold water for having major features late by a few days), standups that include breakfast and chit-chat, iteration on major features that take 3 months to deliver. My ex-LM is now working for major finance processing company. They went trough major agile transformation everyone in the city was talking about how big success it was. He's a tech-lead. He has to estimate feature development in man-hours to the board and investors. Everyone below him (SM, PO, devs, QAs) estimate in story points. He gets shit for features being late by days (eg. sprint finishes on Thursday next week, board meeting is on Tuesday this week). They cancelled something they were doing completely wrong, because they never reached for quality material how to do it right. Good for them, it was a waste of time to begin with.