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I've found the retrospectives to be the most valuable part of the scrum ceremonies, taking the time to talk through what could be improved etc. Stand-ups tend

I've found the retrospectives to be the most valuable part of the scrum ceremonies, taking the time to talk through what could be improved etc. Stand-ups tend to be too much of a status report to the manager and are more valuable when its the developers talking between themselves and sharing knowledge of their work. My biggest dislike for Scrum is how managers can use it to turn "agile" into basically a MS Project plan from the estimates.

systemvoltage 6y ago
> are more valuable when its the developers talking between themselves and sharing knowledge of their work This is the biggest lie of standups. No one gives a shit about standups. Everyone is waiting for their turn and then not listening to others. Let's stop pretending. If they need help, they'll reach out to the expert on 1:1 basis. Way more productive, way more concise, better bonds, privacy and learning experience. No one waits until standup and be like "Gee.. I should ask this help in front of 8 others and waste everyone's time".
- lmm 6y ago
  This is completely false for the majority of places I've worked. Plenty of people don't notice how much they've got stuck, or don't know who the right expert is, or feel self-conscious about interrupting them to ask a question. Having a daily scheduled time where all the experts are available and everyone should check whether they're getting bogged down is a big help. I've experienced the kind of "standup" you describe too, but it usually coincided with not actually following the rules for what a standup is (e.g. not actually standing up) and a bunch of other fake agile.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Huh? How are people not contacting the experts or reaching out for help? Seems fundamental to being a professional, doesn’t matter what profession. That seems like a bad culture more than anything else.
    - lmm 6y ago
      Most developers are introverts, everyone has their own pride, and a lot of the time the difference between a getting stuck because you're missing something and getting stuck because what you're doing is just genuinely hard is not at all obvious - especially when you're in the tunnel-vision of trying to solve the problem and in a workplace where you've deliberately eliminated distractions and interruptions (which is a very good thing on the whole, but comes with its own costs).
      - systemvoltage 6y ago
        I empathize with devs that are introverts. They'd rather not be in the stand up in the first place.
        Mauricebranagh 6y ago
        Well that is something they will need help in learning to overcome software is a team endeavour.
        Thetawaves 6y ago
        Stop conflating introversion with whether or not somebody is a 'team player'.
        Mauricebranagh 6y ago
        Did I say "team player"
      - BigJono 6y ago
        What? How is the best situation for a prideful introvert to have a scheduled meeting every morning where they can make it known to the entire team exactly how stuck they are? If anything those are the exact traits that make devs prefer 1-on-1 communication.
        6y ago
  - addicted 6y ago
    Except this is completely anti thetical to the idea of stand ups which are supposed to be peer to peer as opposed to a more expert to non expert relationship. What you’re really looking for is office hours. If you’re self conscious about asking questions, how is it easier to do it in the moment with your entire team also listening in, as opposed to a direct IM, or email if you’re worried about disturbing the busy expert? And how often do people have questions for experts? More often during the beginning of a project, then there’s a lull, then maybe some more questions as you find things you hadn’t thought of, then another lull, and then more questions towards the end where you are trying to close all the loose ends. Daily standup requires you take up the expert’s valuable time in equal amounts during all those periods. And you have a bunch of people listening in who have no reason to be in that conversation. (A single 15 minute standup with a team of 8 is straight up 2 hours down the drain. And that does not include any of the context switching costs, or the cost of interrupting someone doing deep work). Wouldn’t it be much bette to setup a 1 hour meeting on day 1 of the project with the expert (doesn’t stand up add a whole role, scrum master, whose only purpose is to direct people to the correct experts, basically? Well, use them if you don’t know who the expert is...prior to scrum we simply went to our team lead for situations like that). A 30 minute follow up at the end of the week. Then another 30 minute follow up a week later and a 1 hour meeting a week later close to the end of the project. That’s 3 hours worth of time from the expert in a span of 3 weeks, but the expert gets to hold forth for those entire 3 hours, without having to waste 12 out of 15 mins listening to useless crap. That’s a straight up 20% saving over the stand ups, gets you a full 3 hours from them, as opposed to 20% of the time, gets their attention in decent chunks of times, where you can have a real discussion, interrupts them 4 times over 15 working days as opposed to 15 times, and only includes those who are directly relevant to the discussion as opposed to everybody.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      You're not asking 'the expert', you're asking everyone in the team. 'The expert' may turn out to be the junior you just hired. It's also about flagging issues. Sometimes 'This is not working' is not synonymous with '...because I haven't figured out how to do it.' It can also mean 'This is actually broken' and the team hasn't realised.
- alifaziz 6y ago
  This is the truth.
- campers 6y ago
  That's where the retrospectives are good again, having that time every 2 or 3 weeks to ask questions like "Are we getting any value from the stand-ups?" Then could try not having stand-ups for a sprint, or indefinitely, and see if they're missed or not. Or try not having the project manager present at them for a sprint. If a team has a good culture around knowledge sharing etc then quite possibly its not required, while for other teams that short time all together is better than nothing.
  - lostdog 6y ago
    In what percent of real-world scrum situations do you think the team has control over their own processes?
- dev777 6y ago
  The entire idea of "standups" is one most people get wrong about scrum. There is no such concept as a standup in scrum, but rather, it's called the Daily Scrum: https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#daily-scrum https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#daily-scrum > The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work. The Daily Scrum is not a status meeting, nor a place to ask the "3 questions", it's a planning meeting, plain and simple. You don't have to walk the board and not everyone needs to take a turn saying what they're up to. It's a communication tool that provides an opportunity to inspect and adapt. The structure of it is totally up to the team.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Seems overkill since plan is to execute the plan we discussed in the sprint. So, why do we need to remind everyone daily that we're just following the plan? If I am blocked, I don't need the rest of the team. I will fire an email or document and tag people on Github that its blocked. Also, why are emails not a thing anymore? Email is amazing. Apparently, its old fashioned now. Whatever is happening in tech companies, we need to stop and evaluate what the hell are we doing. It would be a great experiment (I think Gumroad is doing it? I don't remember) where there are no meetings, no slack, and only email, adhoc 1:1s. I feel like we're not talking about the elephant in the room here and finding ways to justify stand ups or scrum or whatever.
    - MrGilbert 6y ago
      > Seems overkill since plan is to execute the plan we discussed in the sprint. So, why do we need to remind everyone daily that we're just following the plan? It's the question whether we can adjust "things" to be able to reach the sprint goal. It's the goal that counts, not the way imho. > Also, why are emails not a thing anymore? Emails have their Pro's & Con's - I prefer them, but not everyone is able to be precise and on-point in written language. Also, you need to be able to express your feelings in written language. That's one of the reasons I use emojis even in emails. The ascii-ones, but still... > I feel like we're not talking about the elephant in the room here and finding ways to justify stand ups or scrum or whatever. Well, I can see the elephant. But people have different opinions on this topic - something you need to accept.
- Scarblac 6y ago
  I've been in a team that didn't let people talk in turns, but instead quickly went through all the unfinished tickets and asked if they were still going well. That worked better.
- mattlondon 6y ago
  I partially agree but have found it useful to just air my thoughts briefly as there is not always an obvious expert for every subject "I am not sure about the best way to proceed..." Or "I think I am going to try X not Y..." Or "I got some weird error I don't understand so I am going to be trying to work that out today..." Often someone will pipe up and say they've had some experience there or faced same issue before and let's talk after the standup or they have a fix in the pipeline for that so don't worry about it until next Tuesday etc etc. I guess if your colleagues don't listen in meetings though you have a different problem. I personally find that standups that focus on the outstanding tickets help me to focus on actually working on the tickets themselves :) rather than getting distracted onnbusy work or investigating some curious bug or refactoring something if I have to standup the next day and say "I did nothing on those tickets assigned to me".
  - the_gipsy 6y ago
    But why would you wait to ask until the next day, at a fixed time?
    - simiones 6y ago
      You're looking at this from the long angle. Of course you shouldn't wait. However, many people, without explicit prompting, will in fact never ask these types of questions at all. That is the value of the daily stand-up: it ensures that everyone is prompted to as these things AT LEAST once every day, rather than holding onto them for who knows how long. I'd also note that, without dailys, it's rather rare to have the entire team together in the same room, especially now with Covid. Ideally you'd ask this type of thing on email or slack, but lots of people just don't bother unless you give them this explicit time for it.
      - tchalla 6y ago
        Is there another way to achieve this objective without a daily standup?
        6y ago
- freetime2 6y ago
  I admit I often don’t pay attention during standup. But I definitely do save non-urgent questions for standup vs. interrupting team members (and myself) from whatever they are working on.
- addicted 6y ago
  Let’s say you have a stand up that is developer only and has only 5 developers. Well within the 2 pizza box limit and really how much smaller can a team get. A standup where developers are sharing what they are working on and people are actually paying attention means that as a developer I have to pay attention to 4 different technical discussions in the span of 15 mins. The context switching and mental energy required to do that is tremendous especially when you may already be in the midst of working on your own complicated and mentally taxing project. And this is the best case scenario. Throw in larger teams, throw in non devs, etc and it only gets exponentially more complicated from there. The whole idea behind daily stand ups is broken. What you want, at most, is a 1-2 per week regular status update, at the end of the day, when you’re already mentally tired so the time wouldn’t be better spent elsewhere, and good enough team relation building that you can approach each other directly when you need something. Agile/scrum tries to replace team building with status updates. When in reality, what one needs is team members to get familiar enough with each other so they know that Jack really gets the post lunch slowdown, so after lunch is probably the best time to approach him because he may not be actively working on anything, while Jill likes to sort out all her emails and communications first thing in the morning and then focus on her work in long uninterrupted stretches, so that’s when I should reach out to her for questions/discussions. And you need to build the ability in your teammates to be able to think about the bigger picture, and decide whether the question they need answered by Jill right now while she is in the middle of her deep work is really urgent and important enough that it warrants breaking her flow or not, or if it can wait till the next day or if it’s short and simple enough, till you guys get lunch together today. The Big Lie is that team building can be replaced by process. And the Big Lie is pushed (with the best intentions) because team building cannot be packaged and sold as a 3 day workshop (well, it is, but that comes across as inauthentic and doesn’t usually work well, and team retreats have lost the majority of their flavor because honestly I don’t want to get to know the vast majority of my colleagues outside of our work lives). What it comes down to is good leadership to build a strong team culture, and that’s harder to find and develop. So instead of making the effort and learning to accept that you will have failures where the wrong person is made team leader, or they were made team leader too early and building feedback mechanisms to identify such mistakes and hopefully correct them ASAP, we resort tom3 day workshops that teach agile and that you can replace culture with regular stand up meetings.
- Too 6y ago
  The biggest value is not asking for help, it's about synchronizing work. Hey guys, in order to complete this library upgrade task today i need to do a major refactoring in common.js, so if you all could avoid tasks in this area until tomorrow so we all can avoid nasty merge conflicts it would be great, thanks. Or hey, looks like this this test case from nightly is failing? Did anyone change something here recently? Who will take a look at it? If your standups don't sound like this and only becomes a place to report status and excuses for being stuck (asking for help) to your PO or scrum master, then you have a lot to work on. Unfortunately the later version is very common and often hard to get out of.
davidw 6y ago
> ceremonies That has always sounded super pretentious to me. It's a damn meeting, not a wedding or a funeral.
- a3n 6y ago
  "Ceremony," back in the day, was used to imply a certain stodginess, as in a "high ceremony process." Agile seems very ceremonious to me.
- lmm 6y ago
  It was a self-conscious joke, at least originally. Like "we're aware this looks like a useless waste of time".
  - davidw 6y ago
    People seem to use it in all earnestness.
milesvp 6y ago
I will second retros. I have seen team cohesion go up and down based on the quality of the retros. It is really hard to do a good retro, and ideally no one from management should be present for at least half of it. Making a space where people feel comfortable airing grievances and feel supported can really smooth out a lot of friction. Bonus points when common pain points are made known so tooling and process can be identified to make everyone’s job easier too.
- pracer 6y ago
  > I will second retros. I have seen team cohesion go up and down based on the quality of the retros. Could it be the other way? That the quality of the retros went up and down based on the team cohesion? If that's the case (and I believe it is most of the times, in my experience), the retros are just an artifact, not the real mechanism.
  - milesvp 6y ago
    There’s a lot to this, bad moral lead to bad retros. But I’ve seen a team with very high cohesion shut down completely when a particularly toxic manager was present in a single retro. It was very illuminating to watch. When no one feels safe to talk in a retro that’s going to bleed into the rest of the interactions at the company. And while the reverse is true too, it can be set up to be slightly assymmetrical. If you can make a safe space for the group somewhere even if it’s only an hour twice a month it can really help alleviate toxicity elsewhere. It’s not a magic bullet, and honestly I don’t know how repeatable what I’ve experienced is. We had a really good facilitator on loan from another team at one point, and I’m not sure we could have kicked off some of our changes without this person.
Rapzid 6y ago
> I've found the retrospectives to be the most valuable part of the scrum ceremonies Sprints are just the periods of time between retros.
- rgblambda 6y ago
  I've found the opposite. Retrospectives consist of a bunch of bland statements with any actionable items getting discarded immediately after. It doesn't help that few people take it seriously. And there's always one or two people that talk out the entire meeting, ruining any chance of it working for the rest.
  - midasz 6y ago
    No offense but it seems like you're part of the problem then. I've also had retrospectives where bland statements were the norm but as a team you should be able to say to each other, alright nice that the teamwork was great but is there anything new? > any actionable items getting discarded immediately after Except that, that's bad and honestly I've never experienced it that way. Maybe because I'm vocal and harp on about things if they don't change but yeah. An actionable item either becomes an email (which we will follow up on during the sprint, if nothing happens it comes back next retro) or an issue in a sprint / kanban board. > And there's always one or two people that talk out the entire meeting You've got to claim a stage here. Or if it doesn't pertain to you specifically, help teammates who do get snowed under by explicitly asking them. I'd really not want to work in the environment you're describing, but I think I'd give it a shot to change it before leaving.
pdyck 6y ago
The biggest improvement we made to our dailies was to break up the traditional three question structure. Nobody really cares about your status from yesterday. Especially since we work together every day and are a self-organizing team that does not need to report to a manager on a daily basis. Instead we talk about our plans for the day, ask a lot of questions and plan our collaboration and problem solving sessions. These dailies are usually shorter and I feel like I get much more value from them.
- rpmiskin 6y ago
  The ‘correct form’ for the stand up is tricky, and probably varies on team size. For a small team (e.g. 4 devs) you probably care a lot about what the others are doing as you’ll likely be interacting with it closely (reviewing it, building on it), sometimes larger teams (e.g. 7 devs) then it might never come your way. I’ve found that people who stick to the classic “what I did yesterday, what I’m doing today, what blockers are there” set tend to provide really short ‘bland’ updates e.g. “I was working on task foo, I’ll be doing more on foo today and possibly starting work on bar, I don’t have any blockers”. If you’re not paying attention you can miss the fact that the same update has been reported for 3 days in a row and actually there is some unexpected complexity and/or a simpler solution has been missed. For me, the best stand ups give a little more information and can be a trigger for a follow up chat after the standup. “Yesterday I was working on task foo, today I’ll be doing a bit more because I found doing XXX is a little trickier than expected - but I’m still hoping to get onto bar, no blockers - unless my idea for XXX doesn’t work” I’ve also found this sort of issue made worse on projects where the Project Management have decided that we shall be “Agile” and do scrum. You then end up with a non-technical PM acting as the scrum master and mandated “best practice”. This always stifles any technical discussion as it is ‘noise’ to them, despite being ‘signal’ for technical folk....
cbzbc 6y ago
IME the first thing to go out of the window in any company of any reasonable size are retrospectives. Especially when they start to suggest change. At best you get the chance of feedback with nothing implemented out of it.
midasz 6y ago
>Stand-ups tend to be too much of a status report to the manager Why is your manager present at the stand-up? It's just for the developers.
ant1oz 6y ago
Then you've got lucky, last retro I went.... Managers were present, tech lead sucking leaking asses with their wide ears opened, and best devs leaving to better horizons.

systemvoltage 6y ago

> are more valuable when its the developers talking between themselves and sharing knowledge of their work This is the biggest lie of standups. No one gives a shit about standups. Everyone is waiting for their turn and then not listening to others. Let's stop pretending. If they need help, they'll reach out to the expert on 1:1 basis. Way more productive, way more concise, better bonds, privacy and learning experience. No one waits until standup and be like "Gee.. I should ask this help in front of 8 others and waste everyone's time".

lmm 6y ago
This is completely false for the majority of places I've worked. Plenty of people don't notice how much they've got stuck, or don't know who the right expert is, or feel self-conscious about interrupting them to ask a question. Having a daily scheduled time where all the experts are available and everyone should check whether they're getting bogged down is a big help. I've experienced the kind of "standup" you describe too, but it usually coincided with not actually following the rules for what a standup is (e.g. not actually standing up) and a bunch of other fake agile.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Huh? How are people not contacting the experts or reaching out for help? Seems fundamental to being a professional, doesn’t matter what profession. That seems like a bad culture more than anything else.
  - lmm 6y ago
    Most developers are introverts, everyone has their own pride, and a lot of the time the difference between a getting stuck because you're missing something and getting stuck because what you're doing is just genuinely hard is not at all obvious - especially when you're in the tunnel-vision of trying to solve the problem and in a workplace where you've deliberately eliminated distractions and interruptions (which is a very good thing on the whole, but comes with its own costs).
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      I empathize with devs that are introverts. They'd rather not be in the stand up in the first place.
      - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
        Well that is something they will need help in learning to overcome software is a team endeavour.
        Thetawaves 6y ago
        Stop conflating introversion with whether or not somebody is a 'team player'.
        Mauricebranagh 6y ago
        Did I say "team player"
    - BigJono 6y ago
      What? How is the best situation for a prideful introvert to have a scheduled meeting every morning where they can make it known to the entire team exactly how stuck they are? If anything those are the exact traits that make devs prefer 1-on-1 communication.
      - 6y ago
- addicted 6y ago
  Except this is completely anti thetical to the idea of stand ups which are supposed to be peer to peer as opposed to a more expert to non expert relationship. What you’re really looking for is office hours. If you’re self conscious about asking questions, how is it easier to do it in the moment with your entire team also listening in, as opposed to a direct IM, or email if you’re worried about disturbing the busy expert? And how often do people have questions for experts? More often during the beginning of a project, then there’s a lull, then maybe some more questions as you find things you hadn’t thought of, then another lull, and then more questions towards the end where you are trying to close all the loose ends. Daily standup requires you take up the expert’s valuable time in equal amounts during all those periods. And you have a bunch of people listening in who have no reason to be in that conversation. (A single 15 minute standup with a team of 8 is straight up 2 hours down the drain. And that does not include any of the context switching costs, or the cost of interrupting someone doing deep work). Wouldn’t it be much bette to setup a 1 hour meeting on day 1 of the project with the expert (doesn’t stand up add a whole role, scrum master, whose only purpose is to direct people to the correct experts, basically? Well, use them if you don’t know who the expert is...prior to scrum we simply went to our team lead for situations like that). A 30 minute follow up at the end of the week. Then another 30 minute follow up a week later and a 1 hour meeting a week later close to the end of the project. That’s 3 hours worth of time from the expert in a span of 3 weeks, but the expert gets to hold forth for those entire 3 hours, without having to waste 12 out of 15 mins listening to useless crap. That’s a straight up 20% saving over the stand ups, gets you a full 3 hours from them, as opposed to 20% of the time, gets their attention in decent chunks of times, where you can have a real discussion, interrupts them 4 times over 15 working days as opposed to 15 times, and only includes those who are directly relevant to the discussion as opposed to everybody.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    You're not asking 'the expert', you're asking everyone in the team. 'The expert' may turn out to be the junior you just hired. It's also about flagging issues. Sometimes 'This is not working' is not synonymous with '...because I haven't figured out how to do it.' It can also mean 'This is actually broken' and the team hasn't realised.
alifaziz 6y ago
This is the truth.
campers 6y ago
That's where the retrospectives are good again, having that time every 2 or 3 weeks to ask questions like "Are we getting any value from the stand-ups?" Then could try not having stand-ups for a sprint, or indefinitely, and see if they're missed or not. Or try not having the project manager present at them for a sprint. If a team has a good culture around knowledge sharing etc then quite possibly its not required, while for other teams that short time all together is better than nothing.
- lostdog 6y ago
  In what percent of real-world scrum situations do you think the team has control over their own processes?
dev777 6y ago
The entire idea of "standups" is one most people get wrong about scrum. There is no such concept as a standup in scrum, but rather, it's called the Daily Scrum: https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#daily-scrum https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#daily-scrum > The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work. The Daily Scrum is not a status meeting, nor a place to ask the "3 questions", it's a planning meeting, plain and simple. You don't have to walk the board and not everyone needs to take a turn saying what they're up to. It's a communication tool that provides an opportunity to inspect and adapt. The structure of it is totally up to the team.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Seems overkill since plan is to execute the plan we discussed in the sprint. So, why do we need to remind everyone daily that we're just following the plan? If I am blocked, I don't need the rest of the team. I will fire an email or document and tag people on Github that its blocked. Also, why are emails not a thing anymore? Email is amazing. Apparently, its old fashioned now. Whatever is happening in tech companies, we need to stop and evaluate what the hell are we doing. It would be a great experiment (I think Gumroad is doing it? I don't remember) where there are no meetings, no slack, and only email, adhoc 1:1s. I feel like we're not talking about the elephant in the room here and finding ways to justify stand ups or scrum or whatever.
  - MrGilbert 6y ago
    > Seems overkill since plan is to execute the plan we discussed in the sprint. So, why do we need to remind everyone daily that we're just following the plan? It's the question whether we can adjust "things" to be able to reach the sprint goal. It's the goal that counts, not the way imho. > Also, why are emails not a thing anymore? Emails have their Pro's & Con's - I prefer them, but not everyone is able to be precise and on-point in written language. Also, you need to be able to express your feelings in written language. That's one of the reasons I use emojis even in emails. The ascii-ones, but still... > I feel like we're not talking about the elephant in the room here and finding ways to justify stand ups or scrum or whatever. Well, I can see the elephant. But people have different opinions on this topic - something you need to accept.
Scarblac 6y ago
I've been in a team that didn't let people talk in turns, but instead quickly went through all the unfinished tickets and asked if they were still going well. That worked better.
mattlondon 6y ago
I partially agree but have found it useful to just air my thoughts briefly as there is not always an obvious expert for every subject "I am not sure about the best way to proceed..." Or "I think I am going to try X not Y..." Or "I got some weird error I don't understand so I am going to be trying to work that out today..." Often someone will pipe up and say they've had some experience there or faced same issue before and let's talk after the standup or they have a fix in the pipeline for that so don't worry about it until next Tuesday etc etc. I guess if your colleagues don't listen in meetings though you have a different problem. I personally find that standups that focus on the outstanding tickets help me to focus on actually working on the tickets themselves :) rather than getting distracted onnbusy work or investigating some curious bug or refactoring something if I have to standup the next day and say "I did nothing on those tickets assigned to me".
- the_gipsy 6y ago
  But why would you wait to ask until the next day, at a fixed time?
  - simiones 6y ago
    You're looking at this from the long angle. Of course you shouldn't wait. However, many people, without explicit prompting, will in fact never ask these types of questions at all. That is the value of the daily stand-up: it ensures that everyone is prompted to as these things AT LEAST once every day, rather than holding onto them for who knows how long. I'd also note that, without dailys, it's rather rare to have the entire team together in the same room, especially now with Covid. Ideally you'd ask this type of thing on email or slack, but lots of people just don't bother unless you give them this explicit time for it.
    - tchalla 6y ago
      Is there another way to achieve this objective without a daily standup?
      - 6y ago
freetime2 6y ago
I admit I often don’t pay attention during standup. But I definitely do save non-urgent questions for standup vs. interrupting team members (and myself) from whatever they are working on.
addicted 6y ago
Let’s say you have a stand up that is developer only and has only 5 developers. Well within the 2 pizza box limit and really how much smaller can a team get. A standup where developers are sharing what they are working on and people are actually paying attention means that as a developer I have to pay attention to 4 different technical discussions in the span of 15 mins. The context switching and mental energy required to do that is tremendous especially when you may already be in the midst of working on your own complicated and mentally taxing project. And this is the best case scenario. Throw in larger teams, throw in non devs, etc and it only gets exponentially more complicated from there. The whole idea behind daily stand ups is broken. What you want, at most, is a 1-2 per week regular status update, at the end of the day, when you’re already mentally tired so the time wouldn’t be better spent elsewhere, and good enough team relation building that you can approach each other directly when you need something. Agile/scrum tries to replace team building with status updates. When in reality, what one needs is team members to get familiar enough with each other so they know that Jack really gets the post lunch slowdown, so after lunch is probably the best time to approach him because he may not be actively working on anything, while Jill likes to sort out all her emails and communications first thing in the morning and then focus on her work in long uninterrupted stretches, so that’s when I should reach out to her for questions/discussions. And you need to build the ability in your teammates to be able to think about the bigger picture, and decide whether the question they need answered by Jill right now while she is in the middle of her deep work is really urgent and important enough that it warrants breaking her flow or not, or if it can wait till the next day or if it’s short and simple enough, till you guys get lunch together today. The Big Lie is that team building can be replaced by process. And the Big Lie is pushed (with the best intentions) because team building cannot be packaged and sold as a 3 day workshop (well, it is, but that comes across as inauthentic and doesn’t usually work well, and team retreats have lost the majority of their flavor because honestly I don’t want to get to know the vast majority of my colleagues outside of our work lives). What it comes down to is good leadership to build a strong team culture, and that’s harder to find and develop. So instead of making the effort and learning to accept that you will have failures where the wrong person is made team leader, or they were made team leader too early and building feedback mechanisms to identify such mistakes and hopefully correct them ASAP, we resort tom3 day workshops that teach agile and that you can replace culture with regular stand up meetings.
Too 6y ago
The biggest value is not asking for help, it's about synchronizing work. Hey guys, in order to complete this library upgrade task today i need to do a major refactoring in common.js, so if you all could avoid tasks in this area until tomorrow so we all can avoid nasty merge conflicts it would be great, thanks. Or hey, looks like this this test case from nightly is failing? Did anyone change something here recently? Who will take a look at it? If your standups don't sound like this and only becomes a place to report status and excuses for being stuck (asking for help) to your PO or scrum master, then you have a lot to work on. Unfortunately the later version is very common and often hard to get out of.

davidw 6y ago

> ceremonies That has always sounded super pretentious to me. It's a damn meeting, not a wedding or a funeral.

a3n 6y ago
"Ceremony," back in the day, was used to imply a certain stodginess, as in a "high ceremony process." Agile seems very ceremonious to me.
lmm 6y ago
It was a self-conscious joke, at least originally. Like "we're aware this looks like a useless waste of time".
- davidw 6y ago
  People seem to use it in all earnestness.

milesvp 6y ago

I will second retros. I have seen team cohesion go up and down based on the quality of the retros. It is really hard to do a good retro, and ideally no one from management should be present for at least half of it. Making a space where people feel comfortable airing grievances and feel supported can really smooth out a lot of friction. Bonus points when common pain points are made known so tooling and process can be identified to make everyone’s job easier too.

pracer 6y ago
> I will second retros. I have seen team cohesion go up and down based on the quality of the retros. Could it be the other way? That the quality of the retros went up and down based on the team cohesion? If that's the case (and I believe it is most of the times, in my experience), the retros are just an artifact, not the real mechanism.
- milesvp 6y ago
  There’s a lot to this, bad moral lead to bad retros. But I’ve seen a team with very high cohesion shut down completely when a particularly toxic manager was present in a single retro. It was very illuminating to watch. When no one feels safe to talk in a retro that’s going to bleed into the rest of the interactions at the company. And while the reverse is true too, it can be set up to be slightly assymmetrical. If you can make a safe space for the group somewhere even if it’s only an hour twice a month it can really help alleviate toxicity elsewhere. It’s not a magic bullet, and honestly I don’t know how repeatable what I’ve experienced is. We had a really good facilitator on loan from another team at one point, and I’m not sure we could have kicked off some of our changes without this person.

Rapzid 6y ago

> I've found the retrospectives to be the most valuable part of the scrum ceremonies Sprints are just the periods of time between retros.

rgblambda 6y ago
I've found the opposite. Retrospectives consist of a bunch of bland statements with any actionable items getting discarded immediately after. It doesn't help that few people take it seriously. And there's always one or two people that talk out the entire meeting, ruining any chance of it working for the rest.
- midasz 6y ago
  No offense but it seems like you're part of the problem then. I've also had retrospectives where bland statements were the norm but as a team you should be able to say to each other, alright nice that the teamwork was great but is there anything new? > any actionable items getting discarded immediately after Except that, that's bad and honestly I've never experienced it that way. Maybe because I'm vocal and harp on about things if they don't change but yeah. An actionable item either becomes an email (which we will follow up on during the sprint, if nothing happens it comes back next retro) or an issue in a sprint / kanban board. > And there's always one or two people that talk out the entire meeting You've got to claim a stage here. Or if it doesn't pertain to you specifically, help teammates who do get snowed under by explicitly asking them. I'd really not want to work in the environment you're describing, but I think I'd give it a shot to change it before leaving.

pdyck 6y ago

The biggest improvement we made to our dailies was to break up the traditional three question structure. Nobody really cares about your status from yesterday. Especially since we work together every day and are a self-organizing team that does not need to report to a manager on a daily basis. Instead we talk about our plans for the day, ask a lot of questions and plan our collaboration and problem solving sessions. These dailies are usually shorter and I feel like I get much more value from them.

rpmiskin 6y ago
The ‘correct form’ for the stand up is tricky, and probably varies on team size. For a small team (e.g. 4 devs) you probably care a lot about what the others are doing as you’ll likely be interacting with it closely (reviewing it, building on it), sometimes larger teams (e.g. 7 devs) then it might never come your way. I’ve found that people who stick to the classic “what I did yesterday, what I’m doing today, what blockers are there” set tend to provide really short ‘bland’ updates e.g. “I was working on task foo, I’ll be doing more on foo today and possibly starting work on bar, I don’t have any blockers”. If you’re not paying attention you can miss the fact that the same update has been reported for 3 days in a row and actually there is some unexpected complexity and/or a simpler solution has been missed. For me, the best stand ups give a little more information and can be a trigger for a follow up chat after the standup. “Yesterday I was working on task foo, today I’ll be doing a bit more because I found doing XXX is a little trickier than expected - but I’m still hoping to get onto bar, no blockers - unless my idea for XXX doesn’t work” I’ve also found this sort of issue made worse on projects where the Project Management have decided that we shall be “Agile” and do scrum. You then end up with a non-technical PM acting as the scrum master and mandated “best practice”. This always stifles any technical discussion as it is ‘noise’ to them, despite being ‘signal’ for technical folk....

cbzbc 6y ago

IME the first thing to go out of the window in any company of any reasonable size are retrospectives. Especially when they start to suggest change. At best you get the chance of feedback with nothing implemented out of it.

midasz 6y ago

>Stand-ups tend to be too much of a status report to the manager Why is your manager present at the stand-up? It's just for the developers.

ant1oz 6y ago

Then you've got lucky, last retro I went.... Managers were present, tech lead sucking leaking asses with their wide ears opened, and best devs leaving to better horizons.