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Are daily standups hurting your team?

• Communitivity 5y ago
  I have been on teams where a daily standup was no issue, ones where we needed to go to a weekly standup, and ones where getting everyone to attend the standup was problematic. Each team is different. Use what the team finds beneficial, modify or chuck what they do not. My personal experience is that on a team of mostly senior engineers a daily standup is a good thing.
• purpleidea 5y ago
  Daily standups is a form of evil micromanagement for competent devs and a bad substitute for good mentorship that junior devs need. Ban this horrible practice and start trusting your employees more.
  • TheJoYo 5y ago
    What does good daily mentorship look like? I ask because I tried to set up daily checkins with my junior dev if only to make myself available to them. What do I do when they just go radio silent for a week?
• dummyqwertyu 5y ago
  Don't know about the rest of the team, but for me the daily "meaningless micromanagement meetings" provided the last drop of stress and burnout, leading to a depression. Quit my job just before Covid, and have not been able to return to work since that. (posted from a throw-away account)
  • nine_zeros 5y ago
    This. More people should call standup what it really is - micromanagement.
    • cube00 5y ago
      Justify the last eight hours we paid you for code monkey.
    • taf21 5y ago
      Had a job where that's exactly what happened- the manager took 30-40 min and went through the board, stopping at each devs name and their task. "How is this task going" Putting devs on the spot and demanding updates like you'd expect from a child doing their homework or completing their chores doesn't feel like team building...it feels like babysitting.
• moon_other 5y ago
  Yes, they do. A few developers have taken advantage of the stand-ups to avoid updating tickets with information as it comes up and just wait until the stand-up.
  • randomdata 5y ago
    When I was on a team that caught the agile flu and wanted to experience the standup fever, it soon became very confusing to the team to know when communication should occur. What was naturally communicated throughout the day became bottled up for standup. "Taken advantage" suggests nefarious intent, but I expect in a lot of cases it was simply because people have no idea what purpose standups serve if they otherwise communicate normally. And since standup advocates suggest that people should be called upon to say their piece, there is even more incentive to save up something in order to have something to say. "I'm afraid I have no new information to share" every day gets old very quickly. I know first hand, because that's exactly what we were left with when we tried to also communicate outside of standups.
    • moon_other 5y ago
      I did mean the nefarious intent. We currently have a problem with outdated information in tickets. Keeping such tickets up to date requires a bit of discipline that involves adding in information as soon as it becomes available. These updates are almost always provided during the stand-up; when not provided, they're forgotten.
• nkotov 5y ago
  We stopped doing daily standups completely. It just felt like a waste of time. If we had to bring them back, I'd use something like Standuply on Slack to do it asynchronously.
• the_jeremy 5y ago
  Once we finally got buy-in from management, we switched our (3/week) standup from "justify why we pay you and mention everything you did" to "only mention blockers or items you think the rest of the team needs to know". Standups went from 45 minutes (!!) to <15, and the things we mention are actually relevant to at least a couple people.
• ubermonkey 5y ago
  No. Shitty MANAGEMENT might be, but a true standup / checkin that follows actual agile/scrum methodology is FINE. Key here is that it's SHORT. What are you working on, what's next, are you blocked, do you need help from a team member? Ok, next. Remember it's called STANDUP because the whole thing should be short enough that nobody needs to sit down.
• randomdata 5y ago
  Unquestionably. Just yesterday I was asked a quick question about something we are working on. I made the mistake of saying that it could be a problem, but I would have to confirm since I did not have the needed information in my head at the time. Once I was able confirm, there was no problem, but that lead to wasting an hour later in the day to explain why it might have been a problem and why it isn't actually a problem. In asynchronous mode, I would have taken the five minutes before replying to perform that confirmation step and all would have been right with the world. I would have been far more happy that my time wasn't wasted and far more productive in the end. Not to mention that there would be written record of the answer, which is always useful later when the same question arises. So much valuable information is lost in the traditional standup. It is heartbreaking. I know, it is ultimately my failing that I don't have the full knowledge of the universe stored in memory at all times and often say the wrong things when put on the spot, but then again, a well structured team is designed around the failings of people rather than trying to shoehorn failing people into a fixed structure.
• 0des 5y ago
  Shitty standups are first the fault of the leader, and second the participants. If everyone limps into the meeting and 'phones it in' by repeating common responses "uhh, work orders, reviewing PR's", then of course you'll get a weak result. Addressing standups as the sole issue completely ignores the holistic factors that influence the outcome. If a team is bored, undercompensated, overworked, undersupervised, then they're going to deliver shitty standups, and those standups will be a waste of time. When the participants are eager to provide a handoff of knowledge and prompt eachother for interchange, then you get the good standups that leave people racing back to their desks to build off of that synergy.
  • rightbyte 5y ago
    > "uhh, work orders, reviewing PR's", then of course you'll get a weak result. What are you supposed to say then? Daily is way too ofent to have anything interesting to say. It is a low effort way for the manager to keep track on things and make people feel stupid for not doing progress in the maner the agile scoreboard dictates.
    • 0des 5y ago
      Head's up - You might be one of the people detracting from your team's standup.
      • JKCalhoun 5y ago
        If the team in general benefits from the daily stand-ups then you may be correct. Instead I see someone who questions the utility of this particular daily ritual. If others on the team feel the same way then it's more like they're calling the emperor naked.
      • BlargMcLarg 5y ago
        This doesn't address the issue of some participants perceiving the frequency of standups outpacing the amount of information worth sharing. Which is one of the largest recurring criticisms of standups.
• roland35 5y ago
  I think it depends a lot on the what stage of the project we are in. In the beginning designing phase daily standups might be useful but once the work is well defined a more asynchronous communication style works better. I agree with the author that often the standup is the "ceiling" of communication in a group, and oftentimes most of the information presented isn't super valuable to anyone besides a project manager.
• lumost 5y ago
  Stand-ups tend to devolve into either show boating or phone it in updates. The former saps productivity and the latter saps morale. Best approach I've seen is an asynchronous yesterday/today standup via slack. If you keep it in a separate room there is also no obligation to make the update at a specific point in time. With asynchronous updates you can carefully examine if someone is stuck and has made the same updates N days in a row, or if someone is making rapid progress.
  • randomdata 5y ago
    > Best approach I've seen is an asynchronous yesterday/today standup via slack. Did you have luck not falling into the "Yesterday I worked on X, today I will also work on X" trap in desperate attempt to find something to write? Synchronous standups regularly suffer the same problem, in fairness. Best approach I have seen is to simply not have meetings until there is something worth meeting over. They can actually productive when they have intent behind them, not because the calendar said it is time for one.
    • saithir 5y ago
      Not the above poster, but I also do and like the yesterday/today slack standups (with a proper zoom meeting once every two weeks to review/strategize/etc). Usually the "yesterday I worked on X, today I will also work on X" for me are a sign that I need to grab a second team member to get a second set of eyes on something. That is if X is specific enough, of course - but if working on something larger, I think it should always be if the standup message is to have any usefulness at all. So I'll try to always write something more in way of "Yesterday I was working on X, so I made X_1 and started on X_2, but had problems so I've skipped over to X_3. Today I'll be continuing working on X_2", with the numbered ones being subtasks or subsets of X. I'd probably do the same on actual spoken standups, but this is a kind of a meeting that could easily be a slack message, so I prefer slack :)
      • randomdata 5y ago
        > Usually the "yesterday I worked on X, today I will also work on X" for me are a sign that I need to grab a second team member to get a second set of eyes on something. While I admittedly do not entirely understand why it requires writing that down to come to the realization that you need help, if that is what works for you, more power to you. But is external communication necessary? Writing that down in notepad.exe seems like it would trigger the same in you? Why bother your team with noise? Once you have realized, letting the problem be known to your team makes sense, sure, but that does not seem like something that happens on any kind of regular schedule. Pre-scheduling your chance to let your team know that you have a problem seems unnecessary at best. I've certainly never met a teammate who is unwilling to help with a problem without being given advanced scheduled notice, and I'm not sure a person with that kind of attitude should be on the team in the first place.
• brixon 5y ago
  "Show up for 15 minutes, and then it’s safe to hide for the rest of the day." Lack of stand ups makes it safe to hide for multiple days. Short of reading the Shape Up book (which I will probably do), the article is weak in action and reason.
  • paulcnichols 5y ago
    Haha, I totally agree.
• nanis 5y ago
  Shitty standups happen because 1) team members do not believe in their core that their work is valued; 2) in such an environment, meaningless, destructive competition on dimensions other than the teams ability to deliver and maintain code that does the stuff the business wants takes hold; 3) in such an environment, team members become hesitant to actually share that they are blocked by something (in case that counts as point against them come promotion/comp time) etc In that environment, the individually rational strategy is not to reveal much, look busy, don't stick out much etc. So, people end up listening to the newly minted scrum "master" pontificate on value or the grooming habits of their pet. In a healthy environment, standups are developer-to-developer conversations. Dev A says "I am having a problem solving X" or Dev B says "I found out that 3rd party service API we are relying on was suddenly phased out, we need to rethink the entire approach", and people can figure out a quick response. Sometimes the solution is pairing, sometimes it's a change in other plans. Public information (who is working on which ticket, which PRs are open etc) do not need to be repeated. Standup is not a place to list accomplishments: Of course, if a particularly thorny problem has been solved, that calls for celebration, but 30 seconds is more than enough if nothing unexpected happened since the last time. I do prefer in person synchronous standups so that an impromptu discussion of how to handle anything unexpected can happen with everyone's input.
  • g051051 5y ago
    "Shitty standups" happen because in anything like a healthy team, they're a complete waste of time. Things like "I am having a problem solving X" should not be deferred until the next standup, they should be communicated in real time, at the very least to the team lead.
    • alexashka 5y ago
      This. I'd extend this to the very existence of rigid roles such as 'project manager', 'qa', etc. We've traded the existence of healthy teams and healthy individuals in exchange for predictable insert/delete commands of any team member by the management caste. That this destroys morale and human's natural desire to connect and form lasting bonds doesn't seem to bother the management caste. I guess why would it, it's modelled after master/slave or aristocrat/pleb relationship of the past.
• brightball 5y ago
  It depends on the team. 99% of the time stand ups are there to help your manager/scrum master/team lead get a read on whether there is a problem that somebody on the team is trying to avoid mentioning. One of the biggest reasons to time-cap it is that overall...it really isn't a good use of time. On the other hand people are far too over the top acting as if it's the most awful thing they've ever had to deal with (it's 15 minutes and in most cases the only meeting you're going to have that day). People who can't tolerate a 15 minute chat with their team tend to have a lot of issue working well with others in my experience. The "I can't spare 15 minutes" mindset tends to live with people firmly in the "all about me" world. It can be hard to get out of the bubble of the work that you are doing. EDIT: I totally get bad scheduling that interrupts flow time. IMO either beginning of the day, end of the day or just before lunch is the ideal time to do it for that reason. Time zones also complicate it. People need to emphasize that the problem is the bad scheduling of the time slot rather than the 15 minutes itself. Also, it's a good idea to make skipping it periodically totally acceptable.
  • nine_zeros 5y ago
    > It depends on the team. 99% of the time stand ups are there to help your manager get a read on whether there is a problem that somebody on the team is trying to avoid mentioning. In other words - micromanagement.
    • brixon 5y ago
      Well, the manager is not supposed to be there. A scrum master is supposed to keep it organized and time boxed, but the team is supposed to self police/organize themselves. It's supposed to be like a restaurant where all the waiters share tips. It is in everyone's interest that one, all customers are being served well and two, that all waiters are pulling their weight.
      • jseban 5y ago
        Yeah which never happens in reality, as it's completely incompatible with a normal (risk averse) corporate environment. And the main premise is that there's recurring daily obstacles that the scrum master somehow can resolve, which never ever happens in reality. The daily is just an idea that never work out that way in reality.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > To be clear, I am encouraging more communication, not less communication. For internally aligned teams, you get more, and better, communication through a system that replaces daily standups with asynchronous collaboration. Coming from a perspective of managing distributed teams: Asynchronous communication is a decent way to replace synchronous standups if (and only if) everyone involved can respond in a timely manner and is willing to schedule a synchronous discussion when necessary. The pitfall of asynchronous communication is when team members start trying to force everything to be asynchronous. In many cases, getting on a call with someone or even just taking 10-20 minutes to have a synchronous chat is all it takes, but the team needs to be willing and ready to go synchronous when necessary. Purely asynchronous environments sound great when you just want to go heads-down and work on something, but the downsides become obvious when people start getting blocked on responses from other people for sometimes days at a time while async emails ping-pong back and forth instead of a 10 minute conversation that could clear everything up. Of course, the other extreme is also bad: If everything is forced into synchronous conversations over chat or calls then you’ve given license to the team for everyone to disrupt each other all day. There needs to be some guidance about what’s appropriate for communications and interruptions as well as some authority for individuals to push back and delay meetings that interfere too much with their work.
  • randomdata 5y ago
    > In many cases, getting on a call with someone or even just taking 10-20 minutes to have a synchronous chat is all it takes I have only found that to be beneficial if you work with horrible communicators who struggle to get their thoughts out without repeating themselves in a multitude of ways. In the age of testing candidates to death, ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater if they cannot calculate how many golf balls fit on a bus in O(n) time using a reversed linked list, why are you hiring horrible communicators in the first place? Having had the luxury of once working with a team of effective communicators, the idea of needing a 10-20 minute call would have been laughable.
    • marcosdumay 5y ago
      > I have only found that to be beneficial if you work with horrible communicators who struggle to get their thoughts out without repeating themselves in a multitude of ways. That's true, that's just around 99% of the people, while it's useless for the 1% that can't communicate even with synchronous audiovisual aid.
• timvdalen 5y ago
  Thanks for reminding me I never received my 5 pack of Shape Up! I should get on that...
• gumby 5y ago
  This is the blog equivalent of a business book: long text to pad out a simple insight. Isn’t everyone using something like a slack standup bot? We get the advantage of the daily “did this, will do that, no blockers” in a highly distributed team.
• FpUser 5y ago
  I think each team should work the way they feel comfortable and avoid those "unified ceremonies". If someone needs an input they can ask for it when needed. Or organize a meeting if it really required. Otherwise just let workers work and do not waste their time with useless talk. Leader can always monitor overall progress.
  • randomdata 5y ago
    > Leader can always monitor overall progress. If you have a leader. Standups were popularized alongside Agile, which is a framework for having all members of the team take on an equal leadership role. The idea of having standups under Agile was to provide a point for the "leaders" to coordinate themselves. If you have a designated leader, they are indeed dubious (and may also be dubious under Agile, but you cannot lean on a leader in that case, at least).
    • FpUser 5y ago
      Dubious leader is not the leader. And having a team without a leader is not very good idea. If team is 2 people and both are equally qualify let them sort it between themselves.
      • randomdata 5y ago
        > And having a team without a leader is not very good idea. I mean, I'm not sure anyone seriously claims that Agile is actually a good idea. It may look like a nice idea on paper, not having a leader to get in the way of the people who know what they are doing, but not even the Agile Manifesto signatories were able to make it work in the real world when they worked together.
  • rimliu 5y ago
    I liked the idea (I think it was from Semler's book, but may also be from 37signals), that meetings are always optional. If you have organised a meeting and nobody came, it just means that no one saw any value in it.
• warriormonk5 5y ago
  I've always thought that stand-ups are a lazy form of management
  • brixon 5y ago
    Stand ups are not for top down management or managers. Daily Scrum Meeting aims to support the self-organization of the Scrum Team and identify impediments systematically.
    • nzmsv 5y ago
      It aims. And misses.
      • rimliu 5y ago
        I am not even sure it aims. It aims to make the team look "professional" or something. Given that at most organisations the biggest problem always turns out to be communication, stand-ups are probably thought to be a remedy, but in reality they are more of a symptom than a cure. Where communication works, there is no need to waste anybody's time with stand-ups. Where it does not work, stand-ups fix nothing. Just another cargo-cult practice.
• cletus 5y ago
  I've always hated standups. Very rarely do they provide value for the ICs (IMHO) and that should be the key measure. The biggest problem is that managers can easily fall into a trap where they have everyone in the same place so they can ask individuals questions that only really matter to them. Beyond about 8 people (and maybe as low as 5) this means a bunch of people are standing around while other people give updates on things they don't really care about. I've seen standups with 20 people that last 45 minutes as the manager goes around the room, basically. That's not a standup. It's even worse if PMs and other non-eng are there. Just, stop. This brings me to my second point: size. Standups need to be small. No more than 4-5 people ideally. In an office environment these people should be in a pod of 4 desks (possibly minus the EM and/or TL who might have broader responsibilities) and they should be able to turn around and talk to each other, at which point you don't really need a standup anyway. But I can't tell you how many times some EM has triggered crisis mode due to impending deadlines and we end up spending an hour a day with 20 people in a "standup" until the situation improves.
  • ck425 5y ago
    I disagree that the key measure should be value for ICs, or atleast engineering ICs. There are a lot of management and non-engineering IC issues that can be sorted by a quick chat. The alternative to a quick chat at standup tends to be constant Slack/Teams messages and lots of 30min meetings. ICs might not get much direct value from a daily standup but we get a lot of indirect value from moving a big chunk of those interruptions to a set time each day. This can be badly managed, as is the case in your examples. You're right that there shouldn't be more than 8 people and it definitely shouldn't take 45 min. 15 min max and if there's more to quickly discuss the people involved should stop and continue after the meeting. The situation you're talking about with crisis mode sounds like planning rather than standup and if you're Engineering Manager is declaring crisis mode and hijacking standup each day to spend an hour planning then you've got major cultural/organisation problems. In that case standups are just a symptom not the root cause. There's also the social aspect, which other comments have mentioned. I've always found that underrated, though I was recently reading about how some national cultures rate it a lot more than others. For me as a Brit I always feel far more comfortable communicating my colleagues when we get on socially and we understand each others sense of humor and communication styles. Taking that time to banter for a few min each morning is massively important for improving team communication. And during lockdown and WFH it's been even more essential.
• g051051 5y ago
  > The daily standup may have done more than any other ritual to improve developer productivity. In what universe did this happen? Certainly not ours.
• Bluecobra 5y ago
  We have to post our daily standup into a Slack channel, so it’s just a matter of posting my (planned) task list for the day. There’s no discussion, just something my manager reviews. I don’t really see the point but I play along anyways.
  • skeeter2020 5y ago
    This seems like way more micromanagement than a daily, sync stand-up
• tester34 5y ago
  I struggle to understand why people hate daily this hard What so bad about having to tell what you've been doing yesterday? one up to few sentences per person, 10-15min max?
  • Clubber 5y ago
    Do you have 15 minutes to talk about your vehicle's extended warranty? It's kinda like that except every day, and you can't hang up.
  • cube00 5y ago
    It's bad when your management are considered part of your team and they challenge every sentence of your update: "can we expect that done by stand up tomorrow?" "will that be a problem?" "let's have a quick meeting to discuss in 45 minutes"
  • JKCalhoun 5y ago
    For me it's just another straw on this camel's back: process that detracts from my productivity.
  • Dudeman112 5y ago
    Programmers tend to be introverted and have some serious ego issues. Therefore any mandatory social interaction will be met with resistance, even if it's useful for knowledge sharing or for letting your boss know how things are progressing or if they have to change resource allocation. We can afford 5-10 minutes to chat. Most of us spend an order of magnitude more time dicking around per day (as we should, for it's intellectual work)
  • rimliu 5y ago
    I hate doing stuff that I see no point in. Especially if it wastes time.
  • closeparen 5y ago
    * Having something on your calendar that pulls you out of what you’re doing * In order to mostly stand there and listen to irrelevant or redundant information * So that when it’s your turn you can say something that the listeners don’t care about, that could have been a Slack message The first point can be slightly mitigated by placing the standup directly before or after lunch or another meeting, or at the beginning of the workday, so at least you were already going to have to put down your task.
• byteface 5y ago
  I find it's the opposite. Are Cheap hires, 10x devs that think the rules don't appply, bad managers, the work shy etc hurting your stand-ups?
  • rimliu 5y ago
    This comes so close to "does your actual work hurt your stand-ups"?
• shane_b 5y ago
  I feel we need a middle ground between standup and pair programming. Standups aren’t enough to meaningfully contribute but pair programming is frequently wasteful and dominated by one person. I have been thinking about a daily meeting of 5-8 people with a rotation for the presenter to give a tour through their code. I would keep it 15-30 mins. Then other devs can catch any glaring issues without getting caught in the details.
• pram 5y ago
  My main problem with standups is people really like to turn them into soapboxes. They're supposed to be short but if it's scheduled for 30 minutes, people WILL make sure it lasts exactly 30 minutes. Even if theres awkward silence at some point, they'll come up with something to bitch about. I think this is to show they're "engaged" or something. IDK. Doesn't really hurt the team overall I guess, just an unpleasant interruption to my nap time.
• soneca 5y ago
  Where I work we have something that other software developers might consider ”shitty standups” or a waste of time. We show up one or two minutes late, we often chat about life, topics outside of work for anything between 2 and 15 minutes. Only then we actually start the standup routine. Each person chooses if they want to just say ”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today” or to share a complex coding problem or business doubt they want help with. Then it is over and a bit more chatting until someone decides to leave. But it works great for us. We have explicitly discussed it before and that’s how we want it, at least for now. The thing is, it’s a completely remote team of 9 people (two PMs, two engineering managers that code, 5 developers). 5 of us never met in real life and the rest were remote even before the pandemic. For us developers it is the only group meeting in the day 90% of the days. The PMs and Managers have lots of meetings, so they are often the ones leaving the standup early, and that’s ok. We want that meeting to be loose, to allow for non-work conversations, to be flexible in what and how each person share their status. It works great for this team, of this size, with these people. That’s the thing with advice like the OP. You have to make assumptions about how teams behave. But teams behave in an infinite combination of size, members, companies, and time (we might decide a year from now that we want to run standups differently).
  • jidiculous 5y ago
    It's good that your team is empowered to tailor its rituals to its needs. It seems that a lot of people forget that the Agile manifesto[1] is loose enough to allow for team-specific customization: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". 1: https://agilemanifesto.org https://agilemanifesto.org
    • AtNightWeCode 5y ago
      True, but not at all in line with how Scrum was sold back in the days. I even believe there was a rule saying if you do not follow all the rules of Scrum it is not Scrum.
    • sodapopcan 5y ago
      Companies should not dictate a team's process. If they do, you should leave (if you can) or change it (if you can). Process should always be owned by the team as a whole. It should also be ever improving (even if this means complete change) and, almost more importantly, you should have as little of it as possible (it shouldn't get in the way).
• cube00 5y ago
  The project manager interpreted what they thought a stand up was and enforce we follow a template, they see themselves as part of the "scrum team" so they also attend these meetings. You have to open with "Today I commit to..." and then the following day you had to start with "Yesterday I committed to ... and I achieved or did not achieve my commitment because ...". This was followed up with a new commitment for the following day which was again followed up the next day, five days a week. It's horrible. I hope one day I can be part of the kind of agile which hasn't been weaponized against developers.
  • viburnum 5y ago
    That sounds insane. In my experience agile works when it’s led by developers and not management.
    • wgj 5y ago
      That's rare. The majority of agile/scrum/standup is led by some kind or another of project manager. Specific titles vary.
    • jseban 5y ago
      In what company are management not leading
• viburnum 5y ago
  Maybe I’ve led a charmed life but I’ve never seen any problems with stand ups. It’s just a few minutes of “I’m working on this today” and “okay we’ll pair on that after lunch.” But I guess people can mess up anything.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  It's potentially quite expensive. Say someone costs the company $800 a day, all in (taxes etc), ie their salary is under 800x250 = $200k/year. Dragging them into a meeting for an hour (8 hour day) is thus $100. 10 people perhaps, that's a grand a day you're spending on meetings. How much of that hour does each participant actually need to be there? YMMV of course. You can't have no meetings at all, but declining returns to scale will hit you on both time and people-count axes. I recall working for a firm with tens of thousands of staff that would do a global all-hands each quarter. Costs a bomb. Just keep is small and quick, preferable async so that the least productive times are used.
• baconforce 5y ago
  The question should be "does my standup provide enough value to the participants to be worth the time? Why or why not? Are there other ways in which we can provide this value?". There is no 1 size fits all solution. Some teams may not find any value in standups, so they should be removed. Some teams find it a valuable time to sync up as a team so they should be kept. Some teams adapt standups to add value in ways that were not originally intended. All I see here are arguments around a one size fits all solutions. Be fluid. Observe, listen to your team, and adapt.
• notjustanymike 5y ago
  We transitioned to Slack standups a few years ago and never looked back. I put together a daily standup channel with a custom form containing two questions: What are you working on today? What are your blockers? Any conversation which needs to happen is managed in threads. It's a win for everyone: No more mid-day interruptions, a good well-documented log of work, and the timing is flexible (submit by 12pm EST).
• flanbiscuit 5y ago
  While everyone else here discusses the daily standup, I was curious if anyone, outside of Basecamp, has tried this "Shape Up" process thing. The 6-week cycle sounds interesting to me. Sometimes I fel like the typical 2-week cycle is enough and sometimes it's too short so this longer one intrigues me. https://basecamp.com/shapeup/webbook https://basecamp.com/shapeup/webbook
• bww 5y ago
  There seems to be a surprising amount of antipathy towards standups in this thread. Reasonable people may disagree about how useful they are, sure, but the suggestion that 15 minutes of daily coordination is somehow a foundational problem in modern software engineering strikes me as pretty unrealistic. I would suggest that if you truly believe standups are some deeply destructive tool of mismanagement you probably have much bigger problems with your company or role that you're projecting on to this rather innocuous meeting.
  • Jensson 5y ago
    > There seems to be a surprising amount of antipathy towards standups in this thread What is surprising about a bunch of introverted people not wanting to be forced to stand up and loudly declare what their day was like to the entire team every day?
• dahart 5y ago
  I totally understand it, but I’m still a bit surprised by the sheer amount of dislike for standups here. I used to be there myself but changed my mind after years of seeing programmers who complained about having to do too-frequent status updates go off into the bushes and take their code off the rails for weeks at a time to build the wrong thing. While standups are indeed a context switch and feel like they sap productivity, there’s nothing less productive than people who run off quietly and build something you dont need or want, or people who over-engineer things because they’re worried about requirements they don’t have, or sometimes just to flex. The scale of productivity loss that I’ve personally witnessed of programmers not talking things out properly is so much larger than the 30 minutes it takes to sit through standup, they’re just incomparable. Standup doesn’t automatically fix this issue, but it seems to have helped, from what I’ve seen.
  • malermeister 5y ago
    We spend so much time interviewing people, we should be filtering those folks out before they even join the company.
    • dahart 5y ago
      There’s a real danger that if we filtered out everyone who doesn’t see the value in meetings, we’d have nobody left to write any code. ;) I suspect all programmers are prone to this in varying degrees, and in decades of experience in companies of many sizes I’ve never seen a counter-example. I have absolutely wrestled with preferring less talking and more coding and felt at many times like I was wasting time in meetings, even though my mindset has shifted over time to see the value in communication that brings team alignment even if it uses up some of my time and attention. In my first job in CG films, there were 1-hour dailies twice a day that I was expected to show partial progress. And it might take 30 minutes to render & prepare for it every time too. It could use up half my day sometimes, and I fought with the producer about it. I was writing code to control crowds that wouldn’t be ready for weeks, so what was the point of showing every day, or of being present only to watch other people’s updates? There’s a balance for sure, but years later I feel like I was in the wrong, and I see the value in showing partial work often. It’s because people often don’t agree even when they say they do, language is way too ambiguous. So a planning meeting once is never finished, you have to keep agreeing on the goals over and over with tangible results until it’s finished before you actually know if everyone’s in sync.
• AtNightWeCode 5y ago
  The thing I like about agile development is that you constantly evaluate your process and change it to the better. In most teams I worked with we reduced the dailys to occur two or three times a week. Also trying to keep them to only be a short status update for the team. Who is working on what and if there are any news or issues everybody should know about. And you can always use a safe word like SUMO. What is really hurting a team are the renegades. People who think they are so great that they can bypass any process or agreement. People that are always talking and never listens. People with own agendas. People never showing up when key decisions are about to be made. People that take huge risks for no good reason. People that always try to solve problems themself and then blame others when they fail or have to much work. People that do not care about adding business value. People always making vague comments implying incompetence among others in the team by using basic mastering techniques. People that never works on anything that is in the backlog.
• jackconsidine 5y ago
  I didn't find this article compelling. The analogy between the "phases of automobile development" and standup wasn't tight. The only reasons given for ditching standup were "decentralization" and "ShapeUp"– which isn't necessarily at odds with standup– and the author didn't develop these. In my experience, my business went from no standup to standup and it was a huge boon. "Decentralization" for us was a euphemism for disorganization and chaos. Obviously you can do standup way wrong, but that's a matter of fixing it not ditching it.
• flipflip 5y ago
  I don't mind them, but I would like if people keep it short. I work on feature X, I have this problem, I need help. Or I work on feature X, I don't need help. It always devolves into whole blog posts. Also when you are in a small team and communication is fast and efficient, they are superfluous. Team members already can ask for help and you know what everybody is doing.
  • b3lvedere 5y ago
    Exactly. Around here we have daily standup via Teams even when we are all in the office. Sometimes it seems more an excersise on 'look at all the tools we got to our disposal!' than a functional communication. Plus the fact nobody has time/the mood/the mindset/the care to help with complex problems. You touched it, you're the owner, the solver and the guru for eternity for this particular thing. Oh well. It gives me plenty of time to drink coffee.
• bastardoperator 5y ago
  The stand up ritual is a complete and utter waste of time/resource for everyone involved. It can be replaced entirely with an async chat bot if anyone is actually interested.
• kemiller2002 5y ago
  Our standups are great for us but not for the reasons it should be. My team keeps itself up to date with constant communication. Not bothersome communication, people "go dark" when they need to, but we make sure to communicate. We use the standup to make sure the other teams/management takes us seriously. We use it to set the tone. No one is late to our meetings. We don't wait, and we don't recap what a visitor missed by being tardy. We set a clear expectation that we're busy, and we don't waste time. We also use it call out problems where other teams are involved. Our standup last about 4 minutes, and then we disperse. Admittedly, sometimes we stay around, or we join another channel and b.s., but mainly it's quickly meet and go.
• ravenstine 5y ago
  The only value I've ever gotten out of standups is just being able to quickly hang out with coworkers I like. If the standups are online then they're pretty much worthless. If I were to lead a team and help develop the processes and methodologies we were going to use, I'd still have a form of standup but it wouldn't be the kind of standup typical to SCUM methodology or anything like that. My idea of a valuable standup would be for the team to get together for a short while in the morning to shoot the shit for 10 minutes at most. Nobody has to talk about their work, although it would be a good time for team leads to introduce intel about new or changing priorities. If team members want to talk about their work or challenges they are facing, then all the better. There would be no pressure to attend them all the time, or to be there on time. If people aren't showing up to them enough then that's a sign that they aren't valuable in the first place. Why treat standups like something out of public school? It just ends up turning standups into an exercise where students are coerced to attend even if no value is being provided. Such standups quickly turn into status updates and an exercise in subordination for many of the team members.
• davidw 5y ago
  Let's circle back and bring that up as an action item for the next team retrospective.
• Waterluvian 5y ago
  I've had a lot of various stand-up formats. Most are junk. Many are mainly for the PMs and managers at the cost of everyone else. But my current format for over a year is: - One day a week about 20 of us get on Zoom, the 6 "group leads" give 1-2 minutes of updates. The director gives big picture updates, chases down any critical issues. Anyone has a chance to raise anything. About 45 minutes long. - Every day, a "stand-up" channel in Slack, everyone adds 1-4 bullet points of what they're up to, things they're fighting with, etc. Takes about 30 seconds to write, another 30 seconds to skim. About once a week I see an item I need to be more aware of and I follow-up on it directly. It's... fine? I wouldn't call it great, or "the solution to stand-ups" but for once I'm actually feeling an appropriate balance between spending time and getting value.
• thrower123 5y ago
  The biggest problem with standups is that they inevitably balloon into all-encompassing, dragging status meetings where 95% of the stuff discussed is not relevant to more than one or two people present. The other problem with standup meetings, although this is more of an issue back in the before-times when we actually went to the office, is that they turn into a de facto clock-in time. If the standup is at 10 AM, then over time, nobody bothers showing up until 9:55, because there's not sufficient time to do anything worth doing before being interrupted the standup, and if you had plans for the day, they'll get tipped ass-over-beanbox by some new urgent request from somewhere at the standup. I'm deeply envious of those fabled software developers of the past, before the Agile Manifesto, who were allowed to go work by themselves in a room for a whole day at a time, sometimes even two or three days. What luxury! Just imagine what you could do without people poking you with a stick every hour or so?
  • malermeister 5y ago
    The waterfall bogeyman agile types conjure up honestly sounds like such a nice way to work. You get requirements that don't change and you get time to implement them without bullshit status meetings interrupting? When did we decide that was a bad thing? And how did we get brainwashed into thinking agile was better for ICs?
    • ajaynomics 5y ago
      time for "agile waterfall?" ;)
      • thrower123 5y ago
        Is this the one where we have all the Agile gymnastics, but we're still locked into a featureset and a timeframe by management, or the one where we do 2-week waterfalls and call them sprints? To be honest, I'm usually in a purely reactive mode most of the time. Planning what work I'm going to even do tomorrow is not really possible, until I see what crap has been landed on my calendar overnight...
• vlunkr 5y ago
  Are they sometimes useless? sure. Are they hurting anything? no. As long as you keep them brief, as intended, they are a good way to quickly spread lots of info. And you have to live with the fact that they mostly aren't for the developers.
• ahurmazda 5y ago
  What worked for our team: 1. strictly time-boxed (1 min per person) 2. we stick to stating 3 things and then move on: - I accomplished X yesterday - I am working on Y today - I am blocking Z or blocked by Z (edit: I suck at editing markdown on HN)
  • sanitycheck 5y ago
    Funnily enough, you were able to express that perfectly in text. I don't think this information which needs to shared in person, simultaneously, at a set time every day, while standing up.
    • ahurmazda 5y ago
      We do stand ups but nobody is standing :-) We are all remote. This is the only time we see each other in a group. We tried doing it slack-only but ppl liked getting to see each others face once a day. Finally, if something comes up, its as easy as saying "lets do :standup-emoji over slack". No questions asked
• sodapopcan 5y ago
  Standup for me is about a daily ritual—to show each other you respect each other well enough to show up and honour your working agreements. I believe that so long as you are intentional about it, you can do standup however you want. But I'll reiterate that it's really important to be intentional about it, and that's exact what you seem to be doing, so that's great! We've stripped out standup completely bare. We're fully remote and use JamBoard. There's no going taking turns to give long-winded updates that causes people to tune-out. If you have an update, you must put it on a sticky, otherwise there's no need to talk. At the end of standup, the devs will discuss what we're going to work on for the day. We only talk about what we're working on with the full team if things aren't on track and we need help from product or design.
  • sillysaurusx 5y ago
    > Standup for me is about a daily ritual—to show each other you respect each other well enough to show up and honour your working agreements. As someone with narcolepsy, your daily ritual is everything that makes my life horrible. I got lucky not to be a part of companies with this mindset now. Every other company was like this, and it was truly a miserable thing. I remember the secretary at my first job calling me every day whenever I was running slightly late, and one of my coworkers joked that someday he'd sabotage that phone. The whole idea of it being "respect" is just bogus. My inability to put my ass in a chair at 9am every day has nothing to do with how much I respect you, the team, or the company. People are just different, and work in different ways.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • madarcho 5y ago
      And in my team, we would have taken this into account. And that starts with a conversation (like the thread OP implied in their answer). Hopefully the conversation would then avoid any pressure on you in saying that the meeting doesn't work for you.
      • 5y ago
• inoffensivename 5y ago
  > If you’re weary of a future without standups, you need to Shape Up People need to know the difference between "weary" and "wary". * weary: tired * wary: watchful, cautious
  • throwaway889900 5y ago
    I think we're all weary of the future.
  • ajaynomics 5y ago
    many thanks -- correcting!
• paulcnichols 5y ago
  Ah yes, the mythical high ownership, high autonomy engineer that just magically does what you need and also wants to work for you and your company. Sure, no stand ups required then. Or how about the mythical perfectly written ticket with zero ambiguity about anything. Yep. Total autonomy. The rub is everything about building software is imperfect. The only place perfection exists is in the mind of “senior” engineers gazing lovingly at their own code.
• RegW 5y ago
  In some places standups work, in others they don't, and it can change overtime as people move in and out of the team. Standups don't work when the team isn't getting anything out of them. Perhaps we all know what's going on because its a small team and we all talk to each other. Perhaps. its because we don't talk to each other in or outside the standup. Reeling off a load of ticket numbers without challenge is not communicating. From the article: standups aim to: "seek out and destroy misalignment". How can we do that without putting the mis-aligned on the spot and making them uncomfortable? I think standups start to fail when we're all being too nice and don't ask the awkward question. After a while we just stop listening.
• sushsjsuauahab 5y ago
  Standup is how they check you aren't working for two companies (or more) at once
• deleted 5y ago
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• vbtemp 5y ago
  Agile, "SCRUM", and daily "stand ups" are the worst thing to have happened to me during my career. In the mid 2010s they started to become a serious thing, and my career/work satisfaction really steadily declined. Now, I only work in teams and projects that are pointedly non-Agile, non-SCRUM, without anyone holding a title of "SCRUM Master". My love of software development is coming back, and it really feels great. Every time I interview for a job, the only time I permit myself one foul-language word, is when I make the point that "I'm not going to work in an Agile team, I'm too old for that shit". When what follows is an awkward, silent few moments, I know it isn't going to work out. When what follows is enthusiasm and agreement (happening more and more these days) I know we're on the right track to do great work together.
  • LimaBearz 5y ago
    I've also hated that trend. Ill preface this with the caveat that I'm extremely biased against PMs. What we've seen is the birth of a new profession, "Project Manager" (Agile/Scrum); and its filled by a ton of people who read a travel brochure size sheet of paper detailing how to be one and that's how they all operate, all while demanding outsized pay for the "skill" (really if they were paid minimum wage that's still too much) They take zero consideration for team structure, working dynamic, the business that the org is operating in and tries to shove every uniquely shaped team into a square peg. What's more annoying is that I've seen some hardcore PM run shop promoting project managers into people managers, often overseeing highly technical teams while they themselves not being technical which leads to all sort of pain and cost to the the ICs they oversee. Agile has managed to 'codify' middle management, very poorly.
    • vbtemp 5y ago
      Agile is exactly the corporate management hellscape that, circa 2000, the Agile Manifesto authors explicitly sought to subvert. Things from Office Space (1999) have come exactly full circle.
    • hemloc_io 5y ago
      I agree w/ you broadly but I want to add a counterpoint that a great PM/TPM is worth their weight in gold. We lost one on our team and immediately we were worse off. Having someone who can unblock engineers by making and updating trackers, knowing who to talk to to get projects unblocked, and having a larger view of things sped us up so much. (Which I'm sure is why he got ferreted away to a very important project for the company ;)
• WaitWaitWha 5y ago
  No, if the individual tasks are fraction of a day to complete, and multiple tasks can be completed in a day, and synchronization of status is necessary, and stand-up do not last longer than a few minutes, and stand-up have actionable/impacting outcome. Yes, if they are more than a day long. Wasting time, and fragmenting work flow. (edit: added extra caveats to no)
• ok123456 5y ago
  It's ablest to make standups required. What about programmers who are deaf or mute who would otherwise would have no impediment to working on a team.
• miah_ 5y ago
  Daily stand ups are _hell_ because they always end up taking ~1 hour for 3 people. If you say more than what you're doing, what you've done, and whether you're blocked or not you're saying too much during your standup. It shouldn't take you more than 3 minutes to give your status. The entire stand-up shouldn't take more than ~10 minutes. Remember, you're supposed to stand up to make it kinda uncomfortable and informal. Everybody video-chatting their standup has made it too easy to be relaxed and waste time.
  • BeetleB 5y ago
    > Daily stand ups are _hell_ because they always end up taking ~1 hour for 3 people. In the one team I was in that had standups, most of the developers would definitely leave after 15 minutes whether someone was talking or not. This put pressure on the others to keep it short.
  • spicybright 5y ago
    I'm sorry for your pain, a 1 hour stand up isn't a stand up at all. My company has a hard 15 min limit for ~8 engineers. It's a good opportunity for people to speak up if they can help, and give a simple "let's talk after about this". Tech details get shut down by the PM after a minute or two unless it's actually useful to most of the people there. It's very rare we go over the 15 min mark. That said, I still have some long and pointless meetings, but I'm thankful I can throw them to a third monitor and keep working in the background. Doing a boring meeting in person would be hell without that ability imo!
  • icoder 5y ago
    An hour sound terrible, given it is daily. That's a serious part of your workday (week, year)! Where I work it's 10-15 minutes for 10-15 people. We're with a bunch of disciplines (hardware, embedded, mobile and cloud) so it gives me a birds eye view of the bigger picture and some insights into where my activities will touch others, and where I can help or provide ideas. In addition, especially now we're remote, it's a way to sync up the devs time-wise. Some days a small ad-hoc group (2-4) will stay in the meeting to discuss an issue at hand. Plus often bilaterals are planned 'after the standup', since we're all in, and in meeting mode at that point anyway.
• annoyingnoob 5y ago
  I think daily standups are fine as long as soapboxing and ranting is kept off the table. Daily nagging is not helpful. But daily interactions are helpful.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• m0zg 5y ago
  In the world where Slack exists, standups are simply an idiotic cargo cult and a waste of time. Just post your goddamn status on a Slack channel at a predetermined time and read other people's status if you feel you need to know that neither you nor other people haven't accomplished much in a day. 3 minutes, async, done. And for communication use VC or Huddle _without_ waiting for a standup, or ping your peers on Slack too. Or better yet, just treat your people like adults, give them sizable chunks of work, and give them a bonus if they do it with high quality and quickly, which is otherwise known as "management". That's how Google worked back in the day, and it works fine, as long as you hire well, and pay well.
• mr_tristan 5y ago
  I've now successfully gotten two teams to put statuses in a daily Slack thread, so other managers can keep up on the progress of different work. One place basically used that thread to go around the room and basically announce questions or discussion topics. The other just completely eschewed status reporting in group, and just uses a separate doc to launch into complex discussion topics. And our "standup" is now a parking lot that's basically "sync up on complex topics". Once you start speeding past the "what did you do yesterday" topic, you realize how poorly organized communication is on serious topics. A lot of places spin up Google docs or the like to basically make agendas and take meeting notes. So now, unless you have the magic link handy you have no idea where it is. And 9/10 times it turns into a giant mind map of fragmented sentences. What I'm basically seeing, is that agile, and scrum, grew up in a world of synchronous meetings. To really embrace asynchronous communication needs new ways of organization. And there just aren't strong patterns for this yet.
• Shaddox 5y ago
  This article's conclusion isn't wrong but the premise is. Standups are NOT for developers, they're for business types to tighten grip over a project, to make sure everyone is there at a certain hour, reporting to clients, etc. We have two daily standups, one in the morning and one in the evening, each about 30 minutes or more. Moving from a company with no standups to one that treasures meetings so much has been a killer on my soul...
• higeorge13 5y ago
  I get the standup hate, but i have also been to a company with no standups and no 1-1s policy and it was a massive chaos. People doing whatever they wanted, overengineering, working on features overlapping with others’ work, creating silos, no actual organization and hierarchy which resulted in severe micro management by the PMs asking new features on a daily basis, people getting fired without ever receiving any feedback and other fun and toxic situations. In the end i would take a boring 15 min daily catchup anytime compared to that.
• mise_en_place 5y ago
  > Standups are intended to set a 'floor' for communication, but they often set a 'ceiling' instead. In my experience, the ‘daily’ standup becomes a benchmark for minimum acceptable communication. Show up for 15 minutes, and then it’s safe to hide for the rest of the day. This may or may not be a problem given the economics of the business in which a software team operates. I'm actually OK with this, and this is how my team operates. We treat each other as adults, instead of witch hunting who did the least amount of work yesterday. Works fine for the team, things get done, minimal toil, zero churn.
• theknocker 5y ago
  I basically stopped working in software because of managers thinking their processes (i.e. their nagging) are more important than code. Most of the benefits we supposedly get out of agile could be accomplished by a non-dumbass technical lead looking at git histories for 10 minutes a day. I suspect this is how real world software teams get things done behind their so called managers' backs.
• escot 5y ago
  Standups feel good because the uniform process gives a sense of control. But software requires constant decision making based on the specific problem of the moment, and you can't globally define a process that works across all these problems.
• lmilcin 5y ago
  The problem is simple. Whatever you do, don't blindly implement something just because it is written in a book or an article. Agile is about focusing on constantly improving processes. Ask yourself, "Are the standups paying for themselves? Are they improving my process? If they are not, can I do something to fix them? Is there something else I can do that would be less disruptive and more worthwhile?" If there is no benefit, continuing to run inefficient process is anti-agile and, frankly, stupid. Over the years I have participated in a lot of standups that are basically progress reports to the manager. Those teams usually already had a Jira, so this was just a stupid waste of time for something that did not provide any value. The value of standups is in interactions between team members that would not normally happen without them. Like finding out somebody has a problem that I know an answer to. Or figuring out your task is no longer needed because of somebody else is doing something that makes it obsolete. Or noticing somebody is overworked and that I can spare some time to help them so that the team collectively delivers more on its promise. I have learned that low trust between team members precludes exchange of useful information on a standup and basically negates any value you could get from it. When people treat standup as progress report to the manager and have low trust towards their manager and peers, they tend to guard any information to not pass anything that could by accident backfire on them. Another reason I have seen standups be a waste of time is when people don't really work as a team but rather as a collection of single person projects. When other people work on things that are completely unrelated to what I am doing and in fact understanding requires knowledge that I don't have, there is very little value coming from telling the progress of what I am working on.
• lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  "Why not switch to this new process, that, oh, gee, happens to be built around this software product that I sell."
  • ajaynomics 5y ago
    I have no affiliation or interest whatsoever with my recommendations.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  I absolutely hated standups until I found myself in a team where everyone's very siloed. Nobody knows what anyone else is doing in detail and expertise isn't shared. I may as well be moving from solo project to solo project. Now I kinda miss standups.
• rconti 5y ago
  Oooh, we're in the Third Wave of software development! Will it be like Third Wave of coffee? [1] I can't wait to have artisanal software. Thankfully, this BlogPost has concluded that, not only is three the correct number of waves (and yes, the number of waves shall be three), but it has also backed up this conclusion with strong evidence from the paragons of innovation and efficiency, Ford and GM. One cannot disagree with how great market segmentation works for GM, selling the same truck under both Chevrolet and GMC nameplates, or the same SUV as a Chevrolet, and a Buick, and a GMC. This cannot be wasteful or driven by internal fiefdoms. Because, look at Ford, they sell Ford trucks under both the names Ford and... well, uh, okay, that's it. It's indisputable that Ford building the Explorer in the 90s, and then begrudgingly allowing Mazda to sell the same SUV under the Mazda name as the Navajo, but only with 2 doors, is a killer innovation in market segmentation leading to larger overall sales, rather than a I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine agreement that gave Mazda a way to quickly get popular SUVs in the showroom in order to drive foot traffic and (hopefully) sales. But seriously, I get that cars are segmented by lifestyle these days, and the "same car under different badges" was just a crappy example. But why does everything have to be a groundbreaking innovation, and allocated to a wave? Why not just say "there used to be only a couple of different cars because they were expensive and hardly anyone bought cars, and variety was an obvious and inherent outgrowth from increasing sales volume and customer demand"? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_wave_of_coffee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_wave_of_coffee
• syngrog66 5y ago
  they dont scale. across people or time. in person, and actual standing (which one boss insisted on) are the worst. phone conf a little better but still bad. wastes so much time. even the textual status versions can be annoying and put pressure on you to "game" it to not look bad. if someone is working on essentially one thing only and that lasts over many days or weeks it becomes a maddening grind to have to say the same exact thing everyday. and it can make you feel bad as a "slacker" if you dont have as much exciting stuff to report new each day. in short it becomes yet enough tool for coworkers to abuse in the name of politics and getting ahead that said... I like the potential of them. and I think it might be possible to do them right. but theyre certainly optimized to be best for the manager, maybe a net win for him, and a net lose for each of his reports. caveat: I might have experienced them "done wrong" more than done right. so will keep an open mind that the latter is possible
• danielovichdk 5y ago
  Not sure what the author is pushing here. But any process can be derailed without putting discipline into it. He talks about daily stand up being a communication pattern that is broken because it enforces people to be transparent and it forces, if applied correctly, that people can't hide. Agile is about delivering value to the business. That means that the team has to come together (as a team does) and deliver upon request. I see teams all the times where the process is detailed. Mostly it's because of weak scrummasters and/POs. And I have learned during my +20 years and 20 some teams that if someone tries to tell you something is better without objective proof they usually want to sell you something. Good luck
• spaetzleesser 5y ago
  Since I have become scrum master I have reduced the number of standups to twice a week and my main question is "Is anything holding you up and what can we do to resolve this?". I then follow up with the right people and make sure this really gets resolved. Daily standups are way too much. There is not enough happening to warrant daily reporting to the whole team. If people don't show I assume they are doing fine. But if they complain about a blocking issue weeks later I make it very clear that they had an obligation to bring this up earlier. After the standup often a group will stay on and discuss what's going on in more detail. Some people are interested and some aren't interested so they don't have to join. Works reasonably well for me.
• seanhunter 5y ago
  For all meetings, I think it helps to evaluate on an ongoing basis: 1)what the meeting is for (ie the goal of the meeting) 2)whether a meeting is actually the best way to achieve that goal and if so, who actually needs to be there to achieve that goal 3)whether the meeting on an ongoing basis is achieving the goal and if not, why not In my experience a lot of daily standups degenerate into being a very inefficient "serial hub-and-spoke" information-sharing where one dominant boss person asks each person in turn a series of questions and everyone else shuts off their brain until it's their turn. It's a tremendous waste of everyone's time and just there to stoke the overinflated ego of the person running the meeting.
• registeredcorn 5y ago
  For my own environment, I find standups themselves to be worthless, but not pointless. The worth, what we get out of them, is very very little. "Oh hey, people are working on different, unrelated things. Alright. Bye." The point, the purpose of having the standup, is at least theoretically valuable. It gives us all a reason to reflect what we've been doing, and what still needs to be done. It also gives us the opportunity to ask "What's next?", although this is rarely needed, as upcoming events are usually conveyed effectively through email or larger meetings once every few months. Do I want more meetings? Absolutely not! I hate talking to people about work. I just want to do the work and not blather on about it. Do I want less meetings? Absolutely! I hate talking to people in a way that makes me feel like I'm somehow justifying my job. I justify my job by the work that I do, not by telling someone about the work that I do. Do I think we should actually have less meetings? Absolutely not! They have a point. There is a purpose to them. There is a need. If everything were strictly through email, everyone would ignore everyone else entirely. There is a purpose to have meetings, even if it has very little value.
• jcpst 5y ago
  We cut out standup a few sprints ago. We replaced it with an automated post on our team’s channel, and we leave a comment in the thread with statements for “yesterday” “today” and “blockers”. Everyone on the team loves it. To compensate for some of the social aspects, we now do a 30m “coffee chat” Monday morning, and a “engineering roundtable” on Fridays, which is a time to sync up around coding conventions and practices we would like to adopt or get rid of.
• sime2009 5y ago
  Man oh man, so many people here doing the worse version of standups, the status update meeting. I understand the bile in these threads. It is a shit format. Stop doing it. Instead try this: Standups are time for a team to plan their day and coordinate on how they will tackle the issues on the board. So, go from right to left on the board and discuss each issue and what needs to be done to finish it. Maybe some people can team up today. Maybe someone else has expertise regarding some problem. Maybe the team decides to drop an issue and give prio to another. etc etc. That's all. None of this "what I did yesterday, what I'm doing today" bullshit. No one cares. Stop it. Also, you don't need any managers to be present. The standup is for the benefit of the team. No managers need to be involved. Try it. It is much much better.
• robertlagrant 5y ago
  > Empower decentralized decision making. Back it up with centralized control. This has nothing to do with standups. Decisions aren't even particularly made in standups, other than "how do we solve today's problems". I keep reading apparently revolutionary next gen agile articles that are full of non sequiturs such as this.
• dcabrejas 5y ago
  I disagree with this article. It is extremely rare to have s time of people who are senior enough to own their work to a point that they don't need stand ups. And even then, miscomunication will inevitably happen. In my experience, stand ups are the only reliable way to find out about blockers/issues before it is too late. At least from more Junior members of the team.
• cabalamat 5y ago
  > Really, doesn’t the idea of gathering a team for a status meeting feel quaint in an era of ubiquitous instant messaging? No! Talking to people face to face is infinitely better than using shitty messaging apps like Slack.
• crabl 5y ago
  It's interesting: we've been running our own take on the Shape Up model for a bit, and when we started out, we did not run a daily standup. After a few weeks, however, we decided to bring the group together every day: it gets lonely when working remotely, and having a daily ritual to center ourselves around is actually quite nice.
• hcrean 5y ago
  I'm a DevOps engineer embedded in a Development team, (something about Spotify models being popular). Stand-Ups are a complete and utter waste of time and a lovely way to break flow in the middle of the morning. No one knows what anyone else is doing, 99% of the time no one cares, Moreover people are all dealing with context switch and ineffective at relating how their thing might have a knock-on effect for others. Sure makes team leaders feel like they are in the loop and valuable to an organisation though, especially ones that don't know how to ask effectively.
• cwkoss 5y ago
  We do standup on slack, which I like quite a bit. I'm a PM now, so it's very valuable to be able to quickly figure out what someone has been working on for the past few days, but it's async and minimally disruptive. Threaded conversations can happen when someone has a question. Easy to scan for the info you need and team doesn't have to post at a particular time of day or spend much time on it.
• croutonwagon 5y ago
  My team doesn’t really do stand ups. But we do spend a lot of time in a daily meeting on Teams. Often there’s lots of dead air. Free to come and go. If you are in a zone, don’t be there in that meeting. But also free to bring up questions, including work related or not. I started them years ago as one of my admins has been remote for 6+ years. When I started he griped he felt distant and out of touch to what was going on. I don’t think he feels that now. And now that we are often remote or roaming. We stayed pretty well In sync. Definitely not for everyone or every team, including some I’ve worked on. But it works for us.
• roguas 5y ago
  Daily standups should be performed in text on some dedicated channel. This allows me: to see your problem in more detail(or just skim), click a link to your PR and have a look at it, get interested and help us find best solution. During audio standup, I just wait for my name. Tell some stuff preferably as short as possible, as everybody has to listen and is likely as bored as I am. While reading standup update in text during morning coffee allows me to peek on the internet (maybe i will google using better terms etc.) spend a little bit more time on it. All while drinking coffee and doing regular internet scrolling - so pretty low effort.