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The Daily Standup Is a Waste of Time

102 points by strife25 6y ago

mytailorisrich 6y ago
> The problems with the traditional daily standup is a lack of focus and off-topic discussions. This is not a problem with daily standups. This is a general problem with all meetings and discussions that are not ruthlessly kept on-topic and to the point by someone of authority who should be ready to interrupt as soon as the discussion goes off-track.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> It goes awry when the team gets larger than seven or so people. Everything does. Teams don’t scale, its not a special feature of daily standups. Beyond that, you need teams of teams. But, sure, the standup format is a waate, because the filler is stuff that should be evident from a status board, and the meat—impediments—should be addressed as they emerge, not delated for a daily meeting. > Now, you may be thinking that this format takes a lot of time. It doesn’t! I think that it just means that the dominant personalities that have touched any given ticket will be the only ones who talk, which is part of my the reason the classic format is organized by people, not tickets. It also has the same redundancy issues as the classic format, and while it may have a linear improvement in time over the classic format, when both formats are followed equally well, the scaling is exactly the same as classic. So, the problem it seems to solve is “standups aren’t adequately venues for social dominance displays”, not “standups don’t scale”.
beaconstudios 6y ago
Any process is worthless if it doesn't exist to solve a problem, doesn't solve the problem, or targets an imaginary problem. It could be better if it solves the problem inoptimally. What problem does the standup solve? in my experience it solves the manager's desire to know what each team member is doing every day, ie its a trendy rename of the status report meeting. It is an inefficient solution because you are setting up a parallel resource consumption (everybody's time) and then using those resources in serial (one person speaks at a time). Either the format should change to a parallel one (everybody emails a report to the manager) or its supposed to be solving a different problem (you'd have to ask the organiser what the intent of the meeting is).
- ratsbane 6y ago
  It also can solve the problem of helping team members know what each other are doing. If standup were only what this essay describes, it would be a waste of time, but it's a lot more than that. It's also a chance for team members to describe problems they're having and benefit from the collective experience. I'm a big fan of morning standup, but I suppose there are good standups and bad standups.
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    I'm not sure why that would have to be a process though. When I worked in a bigger team, if anyone needed help they'd just ask a deskmate if they didn't look too deep in flow, or drop a message in slack.
  - danjac 6y ago
    You can use Slack. If you have a problem, raise it in the relevant channel or reach out to the relevant expert. There's no reason to make that something that has to be done once a day. If you want to know who is working on what, again there are tools for that (Trello, Jira, whatever). If you need to reach out to a manager/team lead to escalate an issue, then reach out to the manager. Morning standups quickly devolve into "I'll say what I'm up to while everyone else checks their email". I fail to see what problem they solve, really.
    - redisman 6y ago
      We have a standup channel and its very easy to track and timezone insensitive. "Here's what I did, this didn't get done, blocked on this, planning to tackle Y next". We still do just kind of general 1h meetings couple of times a week because it's just easy to dive into a few tricky problems we have that week with the stakeholders and all devs present. These could probably be removed if someone did messaging between the devs and stakeholders as a full time job.
  - jonathankoren 6y ago
    In my experience, there’s rarely a reason why an entire team needs to know what everyone is doing. Tasks are decomposed. You may need an update from a single person, but you never need an update from eight people. Encourage people to communicate directly. Share noteworthy progress and problems in the weekly meeting. Just make sure the meeting doesn’t devolve into a dramatic reading of the status reports.
thrower123 6y ago
If you do the standup the way it's supposed to be done, it'd be quicker and easier to just send an email. Assuming you've got people who can read and write intelligibly, which is a big if. The biggest thing that I hate about standups is that it ends up being the de facto start of the work day. If you're supposed to start work at 9am, you can't do the standup at 9AM, because a third of the people who are supposed to be there will be running late any given day. So you do it at 9:30, or 10:00, or, god help you, at 10:30. And then it just works out that you can't actually do any real work in the morning with that hanging over you, so you diddle around doing email, or everybody just starts planning on getting to the office five minutes before the standup is scheduled to start. And then it's just a big waste of time because nobody has read their email or thought about what they are supposed to be discussing, and you start getting pressure behind your eyes and the irrepressible urge to scream.
- shalmanese 6y ago
  > The biggest thing that I hate about standups is that it ends up being the de facto start of the work day. If you're supposed to start work at 9am, you can't do the standup at 9AM, because a third of the people who are supposed to be there will be running late any given day. So you do it at 9:30, or 10:00, or, god help you, at 10:30. And then it just works out that you can't actually do any real work in the morning I've been a deep proponent that standups should be done at lunchtime. Every place I've worked, I've tried to set the expectation that meetings are to be discouraged in the morning. Leave the morning aside for a chunk of deep work, use the standup to communicate where you're blocked and then segue directly into afternoon time where people can co-ordinate to unblock.
srswtf123 6y ago
IME, daily standups exist primarily for management to take attendance. This is usually framed as "removing any immediate blockers to keep employees productive".
- TuringNYC 6y ago
  I've seen worse actually. I had a customer that had 7:15am daily scrum standups, it was a way to force employees to come in early. This was a hospital, so granted, there was a culture of coming in early. Except IT doesn't get paid doctor salaries, neither do they have the growth of residents/fellows, so why should they come in early? Quite obviously the problem was not with scrum nor with agile nor with stand-ups. Rather, agile weaponized into an enforcement mechanism. Whips do not work in the long term. The most productive teams, in my experience, are ones where either: 1. The work/team/problem is interesting enough that people want to come to work OR 2. The pay is high enough such that people want to come to work, perform well, and earn that paycheck OR 3. The mission is important enough that people want to come to work to fulfill the mission
jonathankoren 6y ago
I’ve been looked at as a madman or a heretic for calling daily stand ups a waste of time for years. I’d include this person’s “walk the board” idea as also a waste of time. There’s only one situation where a daily stand up makes sense, and that’s when you have a small group on a very tight deadline, ie an emergency situation. A daily standup is a many to one communication meeting. The implementing engineers are telling a project manager how much progress they made. Engineer to engineer communication is rarely meaningful. So many daily stand ups I’ve attended I either had no need to know what anyone else was working on, or I wanted an update from exactly one person at the meeting, yet I had to stand around and wait for for a bunch of irrelevant updates. What works better? Let the engineers self organize their communication. As long as everyone knows who is doing what, then they know who to ask. Have each engineer write an update a team doc at the end of the week saying how much was done, then update the tickets. Quickly review the doc at your team meeting, and move on.
eloff 6y ago
I'm fully aware that the standup could be done on slack or email with similar effectiveness most of the time. However, I still think it's worth it in remote teams. The daily standup is that morning coffee pot discussion with my teammates, before we get on to what we're working on. We make smalltalk and banter a bit. There aren't as many chances to do that in a remote setting, I think it's worth it for that alone. However, often times I'm having a problem that my teammates give valuable ideas or feedback about and visa versa. Or we discuss some hairy edge case and come to a decision about what the behavior should be. So some percent of standups are really valuable.
- closeparen 6y ago
  One person has a barking dog, the next a screaming child, the next a jackhammer. Several people have no headphones, so there’s brutal echo cancellation. Someone else is on Bluetooth, so there’s half a second latency. At least three are connected by potato. Each word exchanged with a remote team is excruciating. I cannot imagine smalltalk or banter ever being a reasonable thing to do on Zoom.
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    If a year into this thing, you can’t manage to get headphones for the whole team, I have no idea how you manage to release software.
    - closeparen 6y ago
      It’s not really in the company’s DNA to be so paternalistic as “you must use wired headphones when connecting to a company Zoom meeting” although perhaps it would help. I’m sure everyone has headphones, but a lot of people choose not to use them or choose to use Bluetooth headphones that are great for music but wreck conversation. Only a few audio nerds have an inkling that this matters, let alone the boldness and clout to change others’ behavior.
      - nilkn 6y ago
duxup 6y ago
>It goes awry when the team gets larger than seven or so people. Agreed generally. With my current employer we do it every day. 5 people, just a few / maybe one minute each... maybe a tangent here or there to discuss something that came up as a group that would benefit from more than one person on the team's input, etc.
wideareanetwork 6y ago
Daily stand ups seem a waste of time to me. Maybe once a week or perhaps Monday and Friday. Still, I’m being paid for what I see as a waste of time so that’s the upside..... and it’s the boss who values it, so if they want to pay me well whatever I guess.
spacemanmatt 6y ago
My team of 3 finds it very useful.
avelis 6y ago
Title was a little clickbaity but the solution and conclusions are how I have run standups and I can't see any other way than forms of walking the board, unblocking, & working to solutions in real time. We also have come up with a form of this called Library Time where we stay on one feature as a team for 2 hours. No outside interruptions. We hone in on architecture or bug bashing and solve it together as a team distributed.
rm_-rf_slash 6y ago
I like to type my standup update into Teams and read from it when I’m on the mic. I tried to get the rest of my team to try that so we could skip the meeting itself but it didn’t stick.
borvo 6y ago
His "walk the board" section is what modern standups are supposed to do. https://agileforall.com/7-tips-for-a-more-effective-daily-scrum/ https://agileforall.com/7-tips-for-a-more-effective-daily-sc...
jiveturkey 6y ago
Author doesn't understand the unstated point of standups, even though he does allude to it when describing his thought process. > I start thinking about my update to prove I should keep my job In non-contract-work development, the entirety of Agile is micro or maybe "mini" management so that less performant people are managed into average performance. (The downside is that high performance people are dragged down to average. This is acceptable because it's infinitely easier to hire average and below average people who don't live and breathe the product.) The standup specifically puts very public, social pressure, on people who would otherwise be happy to be the slack that others have to constantly take up. As such, it serves a critical function and is not a waste of time at all. The author just isn't seeing the forest for the trees.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Or maybe it isn't necessary or sufficient in the author's experience.
  - thendrill 6y ago
    Well yeh but the author is wrong. Most children think that school isnt necessary. But from a social stand point, we don't need some ace students. We just need all students to be good enough to finish certain simple tasks. So yeh, agile and standups are necessary social constructs, like taxes and insurance.
    - pseudalopex 6y ago
      Your analogy is insulting, patronizing, and inapplicable. Unmotivated workers have existed forever. No methodology is a panacea.
thendrill 6y ago
It is not a waste of time if you are getting payed for that time.
- erik_seaberg 6y ago
  I expect to build valuable skills at work. If they waste a lot of my time I may have to reconsider.
vletal 6y ago
After reading the negative comments I feel like a misfit. We have two standups a day and it has been great so far. After a year into this social appocalipse I am just happy to see faces. We do not have any issues with severe noise or hardware though. For the usual noise, like keyboard, Krisp [1] has been a pleasure to use (beware, shameless referal link plug)! [1] https://ref.krisp.ai/u/u2fa290c46 https://ref.krisp.ai/u/u2fa290c46
flr03 6y ago
I like my daily stand ups. To be honest, I need it to get my day started, and I also care about what my teammates are up to. Team of 7 we usually get this done around 15/20mins. In the office we used to grab a coffee after. We can't do that these days, but still nice to see each other face and hear each other voice (we all have the camera on).
surfsvammel 6y ago
The pandemic has made the morning stand ups valuable again! Before the pandemic my mornings felt pretty useless. First a face-to-face standup and then an online stand-up with another team. An hour in total. Since the pandemic started that hour has proven more valuable than ever. I do these meetings on my phone now, while taking a brisk walk in the forrest. The morning check-in meetings now feel more valuable than ever, as a means to socialise.
ineptech 6y ago
It seems like the title of this essay should be "My Daily Standup is a Waste of Time." To which the obvious answer is: ok, so change it. That (in my humble opinion) is the basic core feature of agile, that teams own their own processes. So, if your standup is too long/short/etc, bring it up at retro, propose a fix, try that for a while, and iterate until it's working well. And if you're not empowered to change your process, well, change the title of your essay to, "Agile-in-name-only is a waste of time."
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  If the agile solution to the standup is to remove the stand-up, and this solution is repeated across many times, then the standup is a waste of time. No need to feel that "agile" is threatened.
- heymijo 6y ago
  The author circles back on himself though and notes that even though the 15 minute stand up itself is "a waste of time" the conversation it catalyzes amongst employees afterwards is of value.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    The ceremony to cast the magic spell is a waste of time. But without the ceremony the spell won't work. The ceremony is part of the spell.
- SkyPuncher 6y ago
  My team runs a daily stand and it's the highlight of our day. * It cuts about a bunch of other noise and meetings because we hash a lot out during daily stand. * It a fun watecooler some days. * We have engineering, product management, and design in stand up. Great opportunity to understand and build empathy for other specialities.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Strange criticism. They suggest changes!
throwaway823882 6y ago
Honestly, as both a regular engineer and a team lead, I now understand the point of stand-ups. They are a blunt tool to micro-manage work. And I love it. In daily stand-ups, I go over all our current in-progress & blocked issues in Kanban. I ask about every task someone is working on or is blocked. Besides helping people unblock work, I also ask questions about in-progress work when something seems unusual. I can often either identify duplicate work, give someone information they would have spent time trying to find, or ask someone to rework something if a given solution looks like it will be a dead end. There is no more efficient way for me to do all of those things in one place. Using this method, I can constantly help prune work in progress in one short spurt of time. It benefits junior engineers who are still learning how to juggle tasks. And it helps the team in general, as a lead is making sure there are tickets on the board and pushing when no progress is being made. As long as someone is actually doing something at the stand-up, it is definitely useful. If you do it poorly, it's going to suck. I've been part of a lot of sucky, pointless stand-ups. I now make a point to ask more questions in those stand-ups if I think the lead/scrum master/etc isn't probing enough. It often starts a brief discussion that leads to meaningful work.
flyingchipmann 6y ago
Daily Standup is wrong if you are doing it wrongly. It shouldn't take more that few minutes for each person to do a briefing. Any other meetings with substantial scope are scheduled with later time. It's like shell scripting of the meeting, use it when you need to. You don't use bash as your primary language
- ethbr0 6y ago
  The problem with this, and why there's such a wide variety of opinions, is that this is an individual skill. Either you're good at keeping yourself to a short summary, or you're not. If you're not, most teams lack the social bludgeon / care to push back on you, to the degree that should happen. Consequently, one person who sucks at summarizing ruins standup for everyone. And whether or not 1+ of those people are on your team is a dice roll.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    Standup is a wedge into the calendars of people with impossible calendars. If there is something to discuss with them the options are talk about it in standup, wait for the next weekly sync on the topic, or try to play calendar tetris to get an ad hoc meeting in the next couple of weeks. Talking about it in standup clearly wins here. So standups get long.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      To OP's point, 9/10 times that happens... everyone in standup doesn't need to be in that conversation. E.g. https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-projects/project-managers/the-meeting-scheduler/ https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-proj...
pyrophane 6y ago
I have never really loved standups and have tried to tinker with them, but I've not found much that works any better, tbh. I've just sort of accepted the standup as an imperfect meeting that is probably still worth having. It does sort of keep everyone up to speed with what is going on, and it can surface blockers that might have lingered otherwise. Plus, without it, engineers, especially remote ones, might not really see or communicate with their team that much during the week if they are are otherwise head down. The other nice thing about standups is that they are short! I'm more okay with the shortcomings of standups because they don't take up much time at all.
AzzieElbab 6y ago
Is 15 minutes a day really too much to ask for?
- ectospheno 6y ago
  You mean 65 hours per year? Or over one man year when looked at over your entire career? Yes.
- jhayward 6y ago
  Is it really 15 minutes? What about all the time lost from flow/focus, the hour before the meeting where you are unable to start new work, the hour after where you have to scramble to communicate/fix erroneous update info, etc. What if the scheduled time is right in the middle of your best focus time of the day? You've lost most of your day. every day.
  - AzzieElbab 6y ago
    Not for me. And I go from client to client every few months. I did see horrible 1hr+ stand ups in the past, but I don’t think the author was exposed to that kind of horror
msla 6y ago
The least boring standups I've ever had were IT department "ticket roundups" where, once a week, we went through and bitched about the tickets in the IT Jira and what was keeping us from closing them and whatever else was work-related. This was all pre-COVID, so we found a disused conference room in a disused section of the building and made sure the door was closed.
llaolleh 6y ago
Daily standup experience correlates with competence of the scrum master. If they can keep it under 5 minutes, call people out for rambling, prevent engineers from going down a rabbit hole,and do complexity and time management well, people wouldn't hate it as much. It has to be a tight ship. If I ran my standup, I would say - standup lasts 5 minutes. The timer starts now and it exactly lasts 5 minutes. Everyone goes through once ASAP. Afterwards you can break out into your discussions, whatever. But don't waste everyone else's time.
sabujp 6y ago
after wfh we moved to a weekly standup
jraph 6y ago
I discovered stand ups two weeks before the first lockdown and found it stressful and inefficient. I needed to interrupt any task I was doing (I'm usually early, and the standup often happens at a time my focus is best), or rush to arrive on time if I was ever late, listen to people in a state not necessarily fit for listening correctly, at a speed that is sometimes too high, sometimes too low, not always concerned by everything every people did or do. No note so I was stressed about remembering each thing that might be relevant to me. During the lock-down, we started doing it using video calls. We had to wait for everybody to come, including those who where fighting the technology, the sound wasn't always great, the flatmate was still sleeping so it was not ideal for him too. And then, we switched to text in a dedicated channel in our chat. The result? - I can write it whenever I want before 10 am, without needing to interrupt in the middle of something. I could even write it the evening before if I wanted. - everybody is efficient in their writing: the standup is actually short and to the point without needing a good moderator! - I can take my time to formulate, to forget nothing (I don't need to prepare in advance neither) - I can take my time to read, and to react to other people when relevant, and organize without stress. - all the relevant info is here - sometime someone forgets something and responds to there own answer to let people know, and this is good. - we are supposed to add an "eye" emoji to each standup message so we tell people we read their stuff. Seeing people's faces is great but the standup was an awful occasion for that. But what we did during the first lockdown was following the standup by a "coffee break" to which people were advised to go, and then we got to see people and keep building relationship by speaking about anything, often unrelated to work. I recommend trying this. I don't see a point for the daily synchronous stand up now that I lived standup in text format. If you need to build relationship, do breaks in which people get to speak about something else than work… or about work at times! But without rush and without lengthy unwanted digressions.
xondono 6y ago
In my current team we’re exactly on the opposite situation. Daily standup is the only agile-like meeting that works for us. The rest of meetings have converged into a weird thing were everyone is interrogated about the tasks needed until the release, and everyone has learned quickly that the trick is listing your tasks in excruciating detail, because they will be valued at least 1 point, and you can inflate your way up into doing little while looking very busy. Then we collectively assign point estimates, which is a nuisance because everyone is making the estimates in hours and then trying to convert to points with a very impractical 5/8 ratio, and also completely pointless because our team is so diverse and specialized, that no one really understands their tasks except themselves. In the whole, I’ve estimated to be losing about 2 full days every 10 working days into this madness, while no clarity is gained. We (still) discover our blockers on our daily meetings and have enough backlog that blockers just imply reshuffling the work around.
jpswade 6y ago
Walk the board is always better because it focuses the mind on what’s important.
nerbert 6y ago
ITT a lot of can't do mentality... "Daily standup are useless because one email would be enough" If email were then required: "emails are useless because nobody reads them, jira is enough" "Jira is shit" If emails are then not required: everyone works by themselves without communicating and symptoms of that, frictions start happening "Our project is poorly managed." People just don't seem to understand that yeah, ideally everyone would just do their work, and those pieces would perfectly fit into the project. Unfortunately, that's not how reality works.
brhsagain 6y ago
The worst and most common argument I’ve heard for the daily standup is that it somehow facilitates team bonding and and passive, “osmosis-like” transfer of knowledge. Like... why would you ever do x with the vague intention of getting y as a side benefit? Why don’t you just do y directly? I frankly don’t care what my teammates are up to. I don’t care what the team is up to. It’s not my job to care. It’s my job to send commits and get paid. If I need to collaborate with a teammate why wouldn’t I just reach out directly? If I need “context” about something, whether it’s company goals or how some piece in the code works, why don’t I just have a meeting specifically about that? If we want team bonding why don’t we have the team bond over actually working together in real ways? I hate this culture of by default having all these regular meetings for no explicit reason.
- PicassoCTs 6y ago
  Rituals have the nice effect of distributing the felt guilt for failure and distributing the pressure of decisions. Thus, there will always be a priest, there will always be a king, there will always be a congregation viewing the absolution of the ruler.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  The same argument is used for open floor plans and Slack.
piklsss 6y ago
I've seen now this article too many times, lol. Already mentioned to the author that the points are great, I would only add that slack standup bot, like this one https://standupbuddy.app/ https://standupbuddy.app/ in 2021 might be a good alternative to those standups since it keeps you organized and you can move together towards the sprint goal. The one I mentioned is just simple, but has many alternatives to choose from on the market.
mempko 6y ago
If you want to understand what a standup is and how to do a good one you need to read the original paper that documented the daily standup Borland Software Craftsmanship: A New Look at Process, Quality and Productivity (https://1pn8a8ult4o2bls5f2jxuel1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/borland-process.pdf https://1pn8a8ult4o2bls5f2jxuel1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...). The standup is a planning meeting, not a status meeting. If you feel your standup meeting is a status meeting, you are doing it wrong. The reason the standup became popular was because the Borland Quatro Pro team was EXTREMELY productive and it seemed standup helped the team be productive. Here is the relavant quote. The core architecture team met daily to hammer out C++ class interfaces, to discuss overall algorithms and approaches, and to develop the basic underlying mechanisms on which the system would be built. These daily meetings were several hours in duration; from what I heard,the project was made more of meetings than anything else. That's right, they had a 'standup' that could last hours. Yet they were extremely productive. I hope this sheds some light on what the daily standup should really be. Maybe people should sit down.

102 points by strife25 6y ago

> The problems with the traditional daily standup is a lack of focus and off-topic discussions. This is not a problem with daily standups. This is a general problem with all meetings and discussions that are not ruthlessly kept on-topic and to the point by someone of authority who should be ready to interrupt as soon as the discussion goes off-track.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> It goes awry when the team gets larger than seven or so people. Everything does. Teams don’t scale, its not a special feature of daily standups. Beyond that, you need teams of teams. But, sure, the standup format is a waate, because the filler is stuff that should be evident from a status board, and the meat—impediments—should be addressed as they emerge, not delated for a daily meeting. > Now, you may be thinking that this format takes a lot of time. It doesn’t! I think that it just means that the dominant personalities that have touched any given ticket will be the only ones who talk, which is part of my the reason the classic format is organized by people, not tickets. It also has the same redundancy issues as the classic format, and while it may have a linear improvement in time over the classic format, when both formats are followed equally well, the scaling is exactly the same as classic. So, the problem it seems to solve is “standups aren’t adequately venues for social dominance displays”, not “standups don’t scale”.

beaconstudios 6y ago

Any process is worthless if it doesn't exist to solve a problem, doesn't solve the problem, or targets an imaginary problem. It could be better if it solves the problem inoptimally. What problem does the standup solve? in my experience it solves the manager's desire to know what each team member is doing every day, ie its a trendy rename of the status report meeting. It is an inefficient solution because you are setting up a parallel resource consumption (everybody's time) and then using those resources in serial (one person speaks at a time). Either the format should change to a parallel one (everybody emails a report to the manager) or its supposed to be solving a different problem (you'd have to ask the organiser what the intent of the meeting is).

ratsbane 6y ago
It also can solve the problem of helping team members know what each other are doing. If standup were only what this essay describes, it would be a waste of time, but it's a lot more than that. It's also a chance for team members to describe problems they're having and benefit from the collective experience. I'm a big fan of morning standup, but I suppose there are good standups and bad standups.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  I'm not sure why that would have to be a process though. When I worked in a bigger team, if anyone needed help they'd just ask a deskmate if they didn't look too deep in flow, or drop a message in slack.
- danjac 6y ago
  You can use Slack. If you have a problem, raise it in the relevant channel or reach out to the relevant expert. There's no reason to make that something that has to be done once a day. If you want to know who is working on what, again there are tools for that (Trello, Jira, whatever). If you need to reach out to a manager/team lead to escalate an issue, then reach out to the manager. Morning standups quickly devolve into "I'll say what I'm up to while everyone else checks their email". I fail to see what problem they solve, really.
  - redisman 6y ago
    We have a standup channel and its very easy to track and timezone insensitive. "Here's what I did, this didn't get done, blocked on this, planning to tackle Y next". We still do just kind of general 1h meetings couple of times a week because it's just easy to dive into a few tricky problems we have that week with the stakeholders and all devs present. These could probably be removed if someone did messaging between the devs and stakeholders as a full time job.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  In my experience, there’s rarely a reason why an entire team needs to know what everyone is doing. Tasks are decomposed. You may need an update from a single person, but you never need an update from eight people. Encourage people to communicate directly. Share noteworthy progress and problems in the weekly meeting. Just make sure the meeting doesn’t devolve into a dramatic reading of the status reports.

thrower123 6y ago

If you do the standup the way it's supposed to be done, it'd be quicker and easier to just send an email. Assuming you've got people who can read and write intelligibly, which is a big if. The biggest thing that I hate about standups is that it ends up being the de facto start of the work day. If you're supposed to start work at 9am, you can't do the standup at 9AM, because a third of the people who are supposed to be there will be running late any given day. So you do it at 9:30, or 10:00, or, god help you, at 10:30. And then it just works out that you can't actually do any real work in the morning with that hanging over you, so you diddle around doing email, or everybody just starts planning on getting to the office five minutes before the standup is scheduled to start. And then it's just a big waste of time because nobody has read their email or thought about what they are supposed to be discussing, and you start getting pressure behind your eyes and the irrepressible urge to scream.

shalmanese 6y ago
> The biggest thing that I hate about standups is that it ends up being the de facto start of the work day. If you're supposed to start work at 9am, you can't do the standup at 9AM, because a third of the people who are supposed to be there will be running late any given day. So you do it at 9:30, or 10:00, or, god help you, at 10:30. And then it just works out that you can't actually do any real work in the morning I've been a deep proponent that standups should be done at lunchtime. Every place I've worked, I've tried to set the expectation that meetings are to be discouraged in the morning. Leave the morning aside for a chunk of deep work, use the standup to communicate where you're blocked and then segue directly into afternoon time where people can co-ordinate to unblock.

srswtf123 6y ago

IME, daily standups exist primarily for management to take attendance. This is usually framed as "removing any immediate blockers to keep employees productive".

TuringNYC 6y ago
I've seen worse actually. I had a customer that had 7:15am daily scrum standups, it was a way to force employees to come in early. This was a hospital, so granted, there was a culture of coming in early. Except IT doesn't get paid doctor salaries, neither do they have the growth of residents/fellows, so why should they come in early? Quite obviously the problem was not with scrum nor with agile nor with stand-ups. Rather, agile weaponized into an enforcement mechanism. Whips do not work in the long term. The most productive teams, in my experience, are ones where either: 1. The work/team/problem is interesting enough that people want to come to work OR 2. The pay is high enough such that people want to come to work, perform well, and earn that paycheck OR 3. The mission is important enough that people want to come to work to fulfill the mission

jonathankoren 6y ago

I’ve been looked at as a madman or a heretic for calling daily stand ups a waste of time for years. I’d include this person’s “walk the board” idea as also a waste of time. There’s only one situation where a daily stand up makes sense, and that’s when you have a small group on a very tight deadline, ie an emergency situation. A daily standup is a many to one communication meeting. The implementing engineers are telling a project manager how much progress they made. Engineer to engineer communication is rarely meaningful. So many daily stand ups I’ve attended I either had no need to know what anyone else was working on, or I wanted an update from exactly one person at the meeting, yet I had to stand around and wait for for a bunch of irrelevant updates. What works better? Let the engineers self organize their communication. As long as everyone knows who is doing what, then they know who to ask. Have each engineer write an update a team doc at the end of the week saying how much was done, then update the tickets. Quickly review the doc at your team meeting, and move on.

eloff 6y ago

I'm fully aware that the standup could be done on slack or email with similar effectiveness most of the time. However, I still think it's worth it in remote teams. The daily standup is that morning coffee pot discussion with my teammates, before we get on to what we're working on. We make smalltalk and banter a bit. There aren't as many chances to do that in a remote setting, I think it's worth it for that alone. However, often times I'm having a problem that my teammates give valuable ideas or feedback about and visa versa. Or we discuss some hairy edge case and come to a decision about what the behavior should be. So some percent of standups are really valuable.

closeparen 6y ago
One person has a barking dog, the next a screaming child, the next a jackhammer. Several people have no headphones, so there’s brutal echo cancellation. Someone else is on Bluetooth, so there’s half a second latency. At least three are connected by potato. Each word exchanged with a remote team is excruciating. I cannot imagine smalltalk or banter ever being a reasonable thing to do on Zoom.
- cameldrv 6y ago
  If a year into this thing, you can’t manage to get headphones for the whole team, I have no idea how you manage to release software.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    It’s not really in the company’s DNA to be so paternalistic as “you must use wired headphones when connecting to a company Zoom meeting” although perhaps it would help. I’m sure everyone has headphones, but a lot of people choose not to use them or choose to use Bluetooth headphones that are great for music but wreck conversation. Only a few audio nerds have an inkling that this matters, let alone the boldness and clout to change others’ behavior.
    - nilkn 6y ago

duxup 6y ago

>It goes awry when the team gets larger than seven or so people. Agreed generally. With my current employer we do it every day. 5 people, just a few / maybe one minute each... maybe a tangent here or there to discuss something that came up as a group that would benefit from more than one person on the team's input, etc.

wideareanetwork 6y ago

Daily stand ups seem a waste of time to me. Maybe once a week or perhaps Monday and Friday. Still, I’m being paid for what I see as a waste of time so that’s the upside..... and it’s the boss who values it, so if they want to pay me well whatever I guess.

spacemanmatt 6y ago

My team of 3 finds it very useful.

avelis 6y ago

Title was a little clickbaity but the solution and conclusions are how I have run standups and I can't see any other way than forms of walking the board, unblocking, & working to solutions in real time. We also have come up with a form of this called Library Time where we stay on one feature as a team for 2 hours. No outside interruptions. We hone in on architecture or bug bashing and solve it together as a team distributed.

rm_-rf_slash 6y ago

I like to type my standup update into Teams and read from it when I’m on the mic. I tried to get the rest of my team to try that so we could skip the meeting itself but it didn’t stick.

borvo 6y ago

His "walk the board" section is what modern standups are supposed to do. https://agileforall.com/7-tips-for-a-more-effective-daily-scrum/ https://agileforall.com/7-tips-for-a-more-effective-daily-sc...

jiveturkey 6y ago

Author doesn't understand the unstated point of standups, even though he does allude to it when describing his thought process. > I start thinking about my update to prove I should keep my job In non-contract-work development, the entirety of Agile is micro or maybe "mini" management so that less performant people are managed into average performance. (The downside is that high performance people are dragged down to average. This is acceptable because it's infinitely easier to hire average and below average people who don't live and breathe the product.) The standup specifically puts very public, social pressure, on people who would otherwise be happy to be the slack that others have to constantly take up. As such, it serves a critical function and is not a waste of time at all. The author just isn't seeing the forest for the trees.

pseudalopex 6y ago
Or maybe it isn't necessary or sufficient in the author's experience.
- thendrill 6y ago
  Well yeh but the author is wrong. Most children think that school isnt necessary. But from a social stand point, we don't need some ace students. We just need all students to be good enough to finish certain simple tasks. So yeh, agile and standups are necessary social constructs, like taxes and insurance.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    Your analogy is insulting, patronizing, and inapplicable. Unmotivated workers have existed forever. No methodology is a panacea.

thendrill 6y ago

It is not a waste of time if you are getting payed for that time.

erik_seaberg 6y ago
I expect to build valuable skills at work. If they waste a lot of my time I may have to reconsider.

vletal 6y ago

After reading the negative comments I feel like a misfit. We have two standups a day and it has been great so far. After a year into this social appocalipse I am just happy to see faces. We do not have any issues with severe noise or hardware though. For the usual noise, like keyboard, Krisp [1] has been a pleasure to use (beware, shameless referal link plug)! [1] https://ref.krisp.ai/u/u2fa290c46 https://ref.krisp.ai/u/u2fa290c46

flr03 6y ago

I like my daily stand ups. To be honest, I need it to get my day started, and I also care about what my teammates are up to. Team of 7 we usually get this done around 15/20mins. In the office we used to grab a coffee after. We can't do that these days, but still nice to see each other face and hear each other voice (we all have the camera on).

surfsvammel 6y ago

The pandemic has made the morning stand ups valuable again! Before the pandemic my mornings felt pretty useless. First a face-to-face standup and then an online stand-up with another team. An hour in total. Since the pandemic started that hour has proven more valuable than ever. I do these meetings on my phone now, while taking a brisk walk in the forrest. The morning check-in meetings now feel more valuable than ever, as a means to socialise.

ineptech 6y ago

It seems like the title of this essay should be "My Daily Standup is a Waste of Time." To which the obvious answer is: ok, so change it. That (in my humble opinion) is the basic core feature of agile, that teams own their own processes. So, if your standup is too long/short/etc, bring it up at retro, propose a fix, try that for a while, and iterate until it's working well. And if you're not empowered to change your process, well, change the title of your essay to, "Agile-in-name-only is a waste of time."

alisonkisk 6y ago
If the agile solution to the standup is to remove the stand-up, and this solution is repeated across many times, then the standup is a waste of time. No need to feel that "agile" is threatened.
heymijo 6y ago
The author circles back on himself though and notes that even though the 15 minute stand up itself is "a waste of time" the conversation it catalyzes amongst employees afterwards is of value.
- edoceo 6y ago
  The ceremony to cast the magic spell is a waste of time. But without the ceremony the spell won't work. The ceremony is part of the spell.
SkyPuncher 6y ago
My team runs a daily stand and it's the highlight of our day. * It cuts about a bunch of other noise and meetings because we hash a lot out during daily stand. * It a fun watecooler some days. * We have engineering, product management, and design in stand up. Great opportunity to understand and build empathy for other specialities.
pseudalopex 6y ago
Strange criticism. They suggest changes!

throwaway823882 6y ago

Honestly, as both a regular engineer and a team lead, I now understand the point of stand-ups. They are a blunt tool to micro-manage work. And I love it. In daily stand-ups, I go over all our current in-progress & blocked issues in Kanban. I ask about every task someone is working on or is blocked. Besides helping people unblock work, I also ask questions about in-progress work when something seems unusual. I can often either identify duplicate work, give someone information they would have spent time trying to find, or ask someone to rework something if a given solution looks like it will be a dead end. There is no more efficient way for me to do all of those things in one place. Using this method, I can constantly help prune work in progress in one short spurt of time. It benefits junior engineers who are still learning how to juggle tasks. And it helps the team in general, as a lead is making sure there are tickets on the board and pushing when no progress is being made. As long as someone is actually doing something at the stand-up, it is definitely useful. If you do it poorly, it's going to suck. I've been part of a lot of sucky, pointless stand-ups. I now make a point to ask more questions in those stand-ups if I think the lead/scrum master/etc isn't probing enough. It often starts a brief discussion that leads to meaningful work.

flyingchipmann 6y ago

Daily Standup is wrong if you are doing it wrongly. It shouldn't take more that few minutes for each person to do a briefing. Any other meetings with substantial scope are scheduled with later time. It's like shell scripting of the meeting, use it when you need to. You don't use bash as your primary language

ethbr0 6y ago
The problem with this, and why there's such a wide variety of opinions, is that this is an individual skill. Either you're good at keeping yourself to a short summary, or you're not. If you're not, most teams lack the social bludgeon / care to push back on you, to the degree that should happen. Consequently, one person who sucks at summarizing ruins standup for everyone. And whether or not 1+ of those people are on your team is a dice roll.
- closeparen 6y ago
  Standup is a wedge into the calendars of people with impossible calendars. If there is something to discuss with them the options are talk about it in standup, wait for the next weekly sync on the topic, or try to play calendar tetris to get an ad hoc meeting in the next couple of weeks. Talking about it in standup clearly wins here. So standups get long.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    To OP's point, 9/10 times that happens... everyone in standup doesn't need to be in that conversation. E.g. https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-projects/project-managers/the-meeting-scheduler/ https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-proj...

pyrophane 6y ago

I have never really loved standups and have tried to tinker with them, but I've not found much that works any better, tbh. I've just sort of accepted the standup as an imperfect meeting that is probably still worth having. It does sort of keep everyone up to speed with what is going on, and it can surface blockers that might have lingered otherwise. Plus, without it, engineers, especially remote ones, might not really see or communicate with their team that much during the week if they are are otherwise head down. The other nice thing about standups is that they are short! I'm more okay with the shortcomings of standups because they don't take up much time at all.

AzzieElbab 6y ago

Is 15 minutes a day really too much to ask for?

ectospheno 6y ago
You mean 65 hours per year? Or over one man year when looked at over your entire career? Yes.
jhayward 6y ago
Is it really 15 minutes? What about all the time lost from flow/focus, the hour before the meeting where you are unable to start new work, the hour after where you have to scramble to communicate/fix erroneous update info, etc. What if the scheduled time is right in the middle of your best focus time of the day? You've lost most of your day. every day.
- AzzieElbab 6y ago
  Not for me. And I go from client to client every few months. I did see horrible 1hr+ stand ups in the past, but I don’t think the author was exposed to that kind of horror

msla 6y ago

The least boring standups I've ever had were IT department "ticket roundups" where, once a week, we went through and bitched about the tickets in the IT Jira and what was keeping us from closing them and whatever else was work-related. This was all pre-COVID, so we found a disused conference room in a disused section of the building and made sure the door was closed.

llaolleh 6y ago

Daily standup experience correlates with competence of the scrum master. If they can keep it under 5 minutes, call people out for rambling, prevent engineers from going down a rabbit hole,and do complexity and time management well, people wouldn't hate it as much. It has to be a tight ship. If I ran my standup, I would say - standup lasts 5 minutes. The timer starts now and it exactly lasts 5 minutes. Everyone goes through once ASAP. Afterwards you can break out into your discussions, whatever. But don't waste everyone else's time.

sabujp 6y ago

after wfh we moved to a weekly standup

jraph 6y ago

I discovered stand ups two weeks before the first lockdown and found it stressful and inefficient. I needed to interrupt any task I was doing (I'm usually early, and the standup often happens at a time my focus is best), or rush to arrive on time if I was ever late, listen to people in a state not necessarily fit for listening correctly, at a speed that is sometimes too high, sometimes too low, not always concerned by everything every people did or do. No note so I was stressed about remembering each thing that might be relevant to me. During the lock-down, we started doing it using video calls. We had to wait for everybody to come, including those who where fighting the technology, the sound wasn't always great, the flatmate was still sleeping so it was not ideal for him too. And then, we switched to text in a dedicated channel in our chat. The result? - I can write it whenever I want before 10 am, without needing to interrupt in the middle of something. I could even write it the evening before if I wanted. - everybody is efficient in their writing: the standup is actually short and to the point without needing a good moderator! - I can take my time to formulate, to forget nothing (I don't need to prepare in advance neither) - I can take my time to read, and to react to other people when relevant, and organize without stress. - all the relevant info is here - sometime someone forgets something and responds to there own answer to let people know, and this is good. - we are supposed to add an "eye" emoji to each standup message so we tell people we read their stuff. Seeing people's faces is great but the standup was an awful occasion for that. But what we did during the first lockdown was following the standup by a "coffee break" to which people were advised to go, and then we got to see people and keep building relationship by speaking about anything, often unrelated to work. I recommend trying this. I don't see a point for the daily synchronous stand up now that I lived standup in text format. If you need to build relationship, do breaks in which people get to speak about something else than work… or about work at times! But without rush and without lengthy unwanted digressions.

xondono 6y ago

In my current team we’re exactly on the opposite situation. Daily standup is the only agile-like meeting that works for us. The rest of meetings have converged into a weird thing were everyone is interrogated about the tasks needed until the release, and everyone has learned quickly that the trick is listing your tasks in excruciating detail, because they will be valued at least 1 point, and you can inflate your way up into doing little while looking very busy. Then we collectively assign point estimates, which is a nuisance because everyone is making the estimates in hours and then trying to convert to points with a very impractical 5/8 ratio, and also completely pointless because our team is so diverse and specialized, that no one really understands their tasks except themselves. In the whole, I’ve estimated to be losing about 2 full days every 10 working days into this madness, while no clarity is gained. We (still) discover our blockers on our daily meetings and have enough backlog that blockers just imply reshuffling the work around.

jpswade 6y ago

Walk the board is always better because it focuses the mind on what’s important.

nerbert 6y ago

ITT a lot of can't do mentality... "Daily standup are useless because one email would be enough" If email were then required: "emails are useless because nobody reads them, jira is enough" "Jira is shit" If emails are then not required: everyone works by themselves without communicating and symptoms of that, frictions start happening "Our project is poorly managed." People just don't seem to understand that yeah, ideally everyone would just do their work, and those pieces would perfectly fit into the project. Unfortunately, that's not how reality works.

brhsagain 6y ago

The worst and most common argument I’ve heard for the daily standup is that it somehow facilitates team bonding and and passive, “osmosis-like” transfer of knowledge. Like... why would you ever do x with the vague intention of getting y as a side benefit? Why don’t you just do y directly? I frankly don’t care what my teammates are up to. I don’t care what the team is up to. It’s not my job to care. It’s my job to send commits and get paid. If I need to collaborate with a teammate why wouldn’t I just reach out directly? If I need “context” about something, whether it’s company goals or how some piece in the code works, why don’t I just have a meeting specifically about that? If we want team bonding why don’t we have the team bond over actually working together in real ways? I hate this culture of by default having all these regular meetings for no explicit reason.

PicassoCTs 6y ago
Rituals have the nice effect of distributing the felt guilt for failure and distributing the pressure of decisions. Thus, there will always be a priest, there will always be a king, there will always be a congregation viewing the absolution of the ruler.
pseudalopex 6y ago
The same argument is used for open floor plans and Slack.

piklsss 6y ago

I've seen now this article too many times, lol. Already mentioned to the author that the points are great, I would only add that slack standup bot, like this one https://standupbuddy.app/ https://standupbuddy.app/ in 2021 might be a good alternative to those standups since it keeps you organized and you can move together towards the sprint goal. The one I mentioned is just simple, but has many alternatives to choose from on the market.

mempko 6y ago

If you want to understand what a standup is and how to do a good one you need to read the original paper that documented the daily standup Borland Software Craftsmanship: A New Look at Process, Quality and Productivity (https://1pn8a8ult4o2bls5f2jxuel1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/borland-process.pdf https://1pn8a8ult4o2bls5f2jxuel1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...). The standup is a planning meeting, not a status meeting. If you feel your standup meeting is a status meeting, you are doing it wrong. The reason the standup became popular was because the Borland Quatro Pro team was EXTREMELY productive and it seemed standup helped the team be productive. Here is the relavant quote. The core architecture team met daily to hammer out C++ class interfaces, to discuss overall algorithms and approaches, and to develop the basic underlying mechanisms on which the system would be built. These daily meetings were several hours in duration; from what I heard,the project was made more of meetings than anything else. That's right, they had a 'standup' that could last hours. Yet they were extremely productive. I hope this sheds some light on what the daily standup should really be. Maybe people should sit down.