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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 a

by 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
    From a pure engineering standpoint, you're correct. But after starting my own company I have a different opinion: The idea that any work is "Worth doing" more than 10 minutes ahead of time is kinda specious. Everything needs to be evaluated against what's going on RIGHT NOW. People aren't necessarily being unreasonable to interrupt, it's just that the whole picture might not be obvious. Of course there are those who interrupt when they know better, but no process will stop that.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      We get stuck on arguments of 'yes/no' a lot and the healthier discussion is usually about degrees. One developer per team getting pre-empted every day, a little sketch but probably okay (as long as it's not the same couple of people). Most developers getting pre-empted every day? Management theory suggests that the managers are supposed to worry about strategy and the developers about tactics. I can't say I agree (because blocking senior devs out of strategy conversations is suicide), but I've watched and heard of many managers who either do neither, or can't take of the developer hat and spend a lot of time talking about tactics (which is a particularly upsetting form of micro-managing). The 'deal' with Agile was to put a lower bound on the project shifting priorities measured in days, not hours, or failing that, to paint a giant target on the organization's complete lack of strategic thinking. If you can't strategize a couple of days out, that's not the developers' fault. That's you not being able to do your most important job.

by Olumde 6y ago

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
  From a pure engineering standpoint, you're correct. But after starting my own company I have a different opinion: The idea that any work is "Worth doing" more than 10 minutes ahead of time is kinda specious. Everything needs to be evaluated against what's going on RIGHT NOW. People aren't necessarily being unreasonable to interrupt, it's just that the whole picture might not be obvious. Of course there are those who interrupt when they know better, but no process will stop that.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    We get stuck on arguments of 'yes/no' a lot and the healthier discussion is usually about degrees. One developer per team getting pre-empted every day, a little sketch but probably okay (as long as it's not the same couple of people). Most developers getting pre-empted every day? Management theory suggests that the managers are supposed to worry about strategy and the developers about tactics. I can't say I agree (because blocking senior devs out of strategy conversations is suicide), but I've watched and heard of many managers who either do neither, or can't take of the developer hat and spend a lot of time talking about tactics (which is a particularly upsetting form of micro-managing). The 'deal' with Agile was to put a lower bound on the project shifting priorities measured in days, not hours, or failing that, to paint a giant target on the organization's complete lack of strategic thinking. If you can't strategize a couple of days out, that's not the developers' fault. That's you not being able to do your most important job.