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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

by 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).
SkyPuncher 5y ago
We've settled on a similar setup as well. We want most of our meetings to be effective, but we're intentionally about that one being a bit "sloppy". It's a good time to get to know people and uncover challenges that people might not raise asynchronously otherwise.
dustymcp 5y ago
This is out setup aswell with and added friday 1 h where we show off stuff we done/found interesting its great for team building imo
brightball 5y ago
Yes, that's critical. We've used entire stand-ups to discuss how to make stand-ups more effective. Finding a way that makes it quality time for the team is ideal. The goal is for everybody to be able to work and communicate better together. My favorite version is one in which we just went through the daily Merge/Pull Requests in the system and let that be the check in. It set aside regular time for small code reviews and let everybody showcase things clearly, with room to ask people to dive in for a deeper review right then and there. IMO it was much more effective than the normal standup ritual.
- mateo411 5y ago
  That's a good idea. It's basically a group code review. Everybody can see what's getting merged in and what's going out to production.
humanlion87 5y ago
Such a great setup! I wish my team would follow something like this. Everyone seems to be in their own silo or they interact with people only for doing a specific task.
brianmcc 5y ago
Same here. It's a little bloated maybe but the balance of chit-chat vs real work seems to be one that works for us. It's productive and also good social session to start the day. Feels like it's probably been positive for people since we all went 100% remote March 2020. Good team rapport and trust etc are important factors, it's vital no one is "scared" to give honest updates.
reaperducer 5y ago
But it works great for us And that's the key: Do what works for your group. The problem is that we have middle managers and project managers and middle project managers who go to conferences and watch lectures online and hang out in social media echo chambers talking about the latest, greatest innovation in managing projects without thinking about the people or the tasks involved. Too often development teams are forced to work for the process, rather than the process working for them. I've been in places where the PM would say things like, "We'll do it this way because it's what Google does." Well, Google has seventy brazillian people, and we have six on our team. What makes PMs think that one size fits all? It doesn't. I currently have a guy who's trying to impose a project management method he learned from a video game company on us. We work in healthcare. But he refuses to deviate from what worked for the video game company, and thinks it's OK for the users to "discover" features on their own, rather than letting us spend time documenting how the system works. Again... in healthcare.
- soneca 5y ago
  > ” Google has seventy brazillian people, and we have six on our team.” I spent a good few minutes trying to understand this sentence. Mainly because I am Brazilian and was stunned how did you know that I was. Then trying to understand how the number of Brazilian people might affect standup dynamic. Then trying to understand exactly how many Brazilians there were in Google and how many of the six of your team were Brazilian. Just then I understood it was an expression for “a lot” hahaha
gwbas1c 5y ago
> we often chat about life, topics outside of work... Because your standup is primarily providing team bonding and meets other emotional needs.
karmelapple 5y ago
Great to hear we're not the only team who does this. We are fully remote, and most articles on this seem to revolve around cutting standup to 15 minutes or less. Ours still stays pretty short, and is even 15 minutes sometimes, but frequently edges out towards a half hour. Since we're fully remote, and we do standup over voice, we only see each other via video a couple times every three-week iteration. So a little chatter at the beginning of standup is a way to just check in and see how people are doing, including in their personal life. Another idea to perhaps add: we've informally agreed that the time right after standup is typically reserved for small group discussions for any subset of the team. We're fully remote (and have been for 10 years), so when standup starts, our brains have already shifted to "talking" mode (rather than planning/coding/reviewing mode), so it's easy to just keep going and help talk through any issues that would benefit from synchronous communication. Sometimes we screenshare, but frequently not - we just talk through whatever we're stuck on or could use insight from others.
- soneca 5y ago
  > ” we've informally agreed that the time right after standup is typically reserved for small group discussions for any subset of the team.” This happens with us as well. Usually for technical discussions that will take longer than 5 to 10 minutes.
the_arun 5y ago
We follow similar structure, but it is not a daily thing. We do this 3 days a week. So far useful. Besides, we extensively use Slack to notify team for any blockers.
zamadatix 5y ago
> For us developers it is the only group meeting in the day 90% of the days. That seems so fantastical to me :/. That works out to 1 day with other group meetings every 2 weeks. Glad to hear there are places like that though!
uhtred 5y ago
Are you one of the managers or PMs?
- soneca 5y ago
  No, I am one of the IC developers.
  - uhtred 5y ago
    Interesting. Thank you. I was just wondering if your viewpoint was from a non-developer perspective.
fatnoah 5y ago
> But it works great for us. We have explicitly discussed it before and that’s how we want it, at least for now. This is the real key, IMHO. As a manager, I push the team to figure out what works best for them. I've seen daily standups w/status reports, no standups where we simply message the details, and bi-weekly where we talk more about status and challenges and save "what I did" for other mediums. In all cases, it's what the team wanted and worked best for them.
RegBarclay 5y ago
Something that I've noticed as a remote employee (before and after the pandemic) is that the usual interpersonal interactions that happen organically in the office have to be done intentionally. You've decided to have some fluff in stand-ups. My team has a social meeting every week for about 30 minutes. It's not running into people in the breakroom, but it meets the need to be social.
VBprogrammer 5y ago
The worst standup I ever had were where it wasn't a standup at all. It was a role call by the managing director to check up on what you did the day before and to generally berate you for any minor transgression in his idea of what you should have been working on.
- mc32 5y ago
  I hate places that have stand ups. It mostly amounts to being in a work collective where the apparatchik gets to show you it’s still the boss of you. There are other routines that are actually helpful but don’t feel like the red guard roll call.
  - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    To me, Agile is micromanagement in disguise
    - mc32 5y ago
      Yes, for bad (poor) managers it's a tool for micromanagement. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for the manager to use this tool in order to micromanage antagonistically rather than lubricate the team.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  That would certainly suck. The worst in my experience (at least recently) are standups where the PO shows up, then proceeds to get in long-winded discussions about features and implementation, and invariably tries to guide priorities for the day. 90 minutes later... For a time I was managing a team that used this PO, and I quickly banned him outright from standups. Told him to keep his guidance granularity at the sprint level, make sure his stories were written well enough to not require constant elaboration, and otherwise leave the developers alone. He could show up for sprint review & planning. Standups were just to unblock anyone who needed it, and should only last a couple minutes.
- handrous 5y ago
  Worst ones I've ever had, the dev manager was also still doing some dev work, mostly not on the company's main product, but other crap, but was in on the stand-ups and set the tone for it being a "moan about how hard your work is, to justify why we pay you" fest, by going into way too much detail about every little difficulty he had yesterday. This on top of the fact that there were like 6-7 people on these meetings, no more than two of whom were working on the same thing, so standups weren't even theoretically a good idea to begin with. The meetings existed only for him, and he was ensuring the form they took was terrible, stressful, and took up way too much time. He also liked to take really shitty notes, then treat them like the gospel truth. I read my stand-ups from notes I'd written beforehand—never done that anywhere else, but the amount of crap one was evidently expected to talk about was large enough there, that I did, after the first week or two—so I could tell for a fact when he'd recorded something about mine that was flat-out wrong, and it was often.
JasonCannon 5y ago
Fully remote team here. We decided that the chit chat starts at 10, the standup at 10:15. That.... often doesn't happen. So our running joke is no matter what time it is getting (sometimes 10:30, sometimes 10:40) we always say "Alright guys, it's almost 10:15" to signal that we should probably get started.
kfichter 5y ago
Hah, we dedicate the first 5 minutes (used to be 7 minutes, but the company grew) of our daily standup to non-work related subjects. After which someone makes an airhorn-like noise (think "pew pew pew") to mark the beginning of "actual" standup. It started as a way to accommodate people who were running a minute or two late but it's become a ritual at this point. Rituals are nice!
- Rezwoodly 5y ago
  Sounds pretty sweet. The last "leader" I operated under used to lock us into 1.5-2 hour daily stand ups every morning and would use the time to either bitch, delegate or brag about his work. It's was a fucking nightmare.
randomdata 5y ago
> ”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today” This is what makes standups shitty. I couldn't care less to know if you are still working on something. When you are done working on it, I'll know because the tooling will let me know of the changes. There is no time where vocalizing this provides value, unless you have no tools at all, which seems pretty silly if you are not working with a team of prehistoric cavemen. If you have a fun story about what you did last night, a recap of last night's reality TV show, whatever floats your boat – that's much more valuable use of the time. I can get behind that, although don't be upset if I don't always show up.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  No tooling is as reliable and enduring as speech. And the phrase you quoted as an example takes less than 5 second to say.
  - randomdata 5y ago
    Five seconds to say and two hours of lost productivity from the context switch required to hear it[0]. And I still don't care. What am I going to do with the information? [0] https://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      What am I going to do with the information? The purpose of a functioning standup is contextualization. If you know your teammate is still working on feature X, maybe you notice that your own work is related and you can design some shared data structure that speeds up both of you. If you want to be an IC with no responsibility, that's fine, just make it clear to your team that your assigned work is all you are going to do. If you want to be more productive individually and as a team, though, the interconnectedness of the team is just as important as what any one member is working on.
      - Salgat 5y ago
irrational 5y ago
Ours used to be similar, then we were assigned a scrum master to act as a mentor (despite most of us working together for more than a decade, we are fairly new to agile). He made stand ups much more regimented. All the chit chat is completely gone. I’m now realizing that standup was the only time of the day that my coworkers and I connected about anything not strictly work related. It does feel like we have lost out on something.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  you should try virtual happy hours with the team. once every couple weeks, generally just an hour or just long enough to finish a beer. If the group is kept small it can be a pretty good team builder as long as an effort is made to include everyone in the conversation. Felt forced in the beginning but generally most teams have at least one person that can get and keep the chat going. Still keep it going now with people I used to work with even though we all went our separate ways.
- midrus 5y ago
  Yeah, scrum masters. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse.
konschubert 5y ago
We have the exact same and it's awesome. Made me feel close to people I only knew remotely.
muzzio 5y ago
I agree that especially in pandemic times this is hugely beneficial, although I'd recommend doing it in the opposite order: quick 1 minute updates followed by casual off-topic chatter for the rest of the meeting. I've found that folks are much more relaxed after giving standup updates :)
speeder 5y ago
Thing is, what you are doing is NOT a standup meeting. The reason it is called standup it was because the meeting was literally done standing, the idea was to force people to talk as quickly as possible whatever needed urgently and make them leave because they are tired of standing in one place. What you are doing is some kind of daily meeting, but not a standup in any sense.
- rhacker 5y ago
  > in any sense I think he's meeting 99% of the idea behind a scrum standup, except for standing up. So for some reason the lack of physically standing up reverts the 99% to 0%?
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  A standup meeting was also in 1 room and in person. More people work remote now, it's not 1995 anymore ( history of scrum). As most things, scrum evolved. It's a guide, not a strict protocol/law The idea is to have all the technical things in one time to eliminate interruptions later on, not to eliminate personal connections with the team. So what is a better time for the casual talk, since people don't have coffee breaks anymore? ( If everyone of the team is onboard fyi) I kinda miss in person with the entire team. I see some people seriously slacking and those are the ones not really involved with casual talk too ( coincidence? ). While many people are perfectly able to work remotely, it made the job of a eg. teamlead much harder to confront more difficult things. They can't notice the body signals anymore when a person's cam is just off ( and even then).
- Closi 5y ago
  Of course it's a standup, its a metaphor these days you don't have to literally stand (otherwise how would a remote standup work? Do you have to insist everyone gets out of their office chairs?). We used to have huddles at work, but it didn't mean that we were actually nestled closely together for warmth.
  - speeder 5y ago
    You and the guy below missed my point grossly. What made the meeting not-standup is the fact the meeting is not short. The fact people take time to talk about their daily lives, and other random stuff, means it is not a standup meeting. I mentioned the original standup meeting was standing, because the point of it was force people to want to leave the meeting.
rdruxn 5y ago
>But teams behave in an infinite combination of size, members, companies, and time Slightly off topic, but I realize this is a subject I'd be interested in reading more about. Would be interested in suggestions in the same vein as Creativity, Inc. by Edwin Catmull?
noodle 5y ago
For a remote team, you have to make space for people to get the face-to-face hallway/watercooler chat time if you want to build a solid culture. Time for people to get to know oneanother that is easy if you're co-located. Easiest place to make space for this is to have padding on your meetings. Especially standups.
swman 5y ago
We have shit standups on my team. People show up 5 minutes late to standup so we don't actually start for like 5-10 min past start time. I get it, not all are morning people. Please mute your mic, I really don't want to hear you yawn half a dozen times. It's obnoxious. If you're talking and you need to yawn, just mute for a second. I know you're still working on this ticket (what's the point of JIRA otherwise?), just tell me if you need help on it or are blocked. That's more important to the team. Standups over zoom or as a dedicated meeting are honestly a waste of time when people show up late or yawn just to go over mostly the same status every day. Just post your update in slack, let others know if you have any blockers. I'm pretty much checked out these days, so I don't really care. What should be a 5 min exercise (90% of the time) turns into 20 minutes of pain. Others enjoy it as it is though, so I don't really care. Also every other meeting is similar nowadays too, way too lax and people seem to be okay being slow/lazy.
- saltminer 5y ago
  > I get it, not all are morning people This is why I prefer standups to be right before lunch (back when you'd have lunch with your coworkers). People are awake and have a reason to not want things to drag on. Of course, when one of your coworkers is on the west coast (and the rest are on the east coast), it's not lunch time for everyone, but it still tends to go quicker than if the meeting was an hour earlier.
freeqaz 5y ago
I really can't emphasize this enough. I work with a small team (2 other devs) and our morning standup happens 3x per week. We're remote and we're building Open Source tech[0]. We do it similarly to how you describe here -- we have a short intro (5 mins) before diving into each of us presenting. Each of us presenting may take 2 mins or take 30 mins. If one of us is struggling or blocked, we use this time to collaborate + pair program/debug. Eventually, we get through everything and then go about our day. Sometimes (because I am the "lead"), I'll use the opportunity to ask questions about roadmap or other items that I need their input on. They're already distracted and not "in the zone", so chaining on the additional "meeting" works quite well. Because of this, these are our only meetings every week. We get a bit of "water cooler" chatting in, we are able to unblock each other, and we are able to have a short iteration loop for re-prioritizing our work. (New tasks can be delegated by quickly going through the backlog) The pandemic has really changed work, and I really feel like we're still iterating on what the best dynamics are for teams to be productive. Thanks for the insight into your team dynamic! 0: https://github.com/lunasec-io/lunasec https://github.com/lunasec-io/lunasec
- quambene 5y ago
  Sounds great. Which tool do you use for pair programming?
  - freeqaz 5y ago
    The built in "Code With Me" in IntelliJ is awesome. Besides that, we use Zoom for video calls. (The screen sharing quality is the best I've found)
koonsolo 5y ago
I said this before: the only thing you really need is retrospectives. When you have that, you can adapt your process to anything your team wants.
mnsc 5y ago
We had the same experience and just renamed the calendar booking from "standup" to "morning meeting" and made it 30 minutes. Great for morale and team building! Small supporting team though in a highly moving complex domain with lots of consultants coming in and out so ymmv.
jjav 5y ago
Daily status reports are really a special form of hell. There is no value in something so fine-grained except to the micromanager. It forces a daily interrupt that reduces productivity. Most painfully, it effectively prevents (heavily discourages, anyway) a deep dive into anything because you better have a snappy status report for tomorrow. No time for deep research, so all work becomes superficial. Before agile and standups were the hip thing, the norm in all places I worked was to have a weekly team status meeting. Those were great. Weekly is about the right cadence for this type of meeting. It gives you four days to deep dive into technical work without worrying about status reports all the time. With a week, you end up having something meaningful to talk about and listen from others.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
In my experience talking about life is what is missing from most anaemic standups. Forcing people to immediately talk work is harsh. Sure, some (especially managers) prefer not to waste time (or have no real life), but as a globally distributed team I feel we miss out of experiencing each others culture a lot.
seanc 5y ago
I used to run more strict 15 minute SCRUM standups, but when the pandemic hit and we all left the office I changed to this kind of standup on purpose. Those chit-chat conversations are important and since they weren't happening by accident we made it part of the structure. I also encourage people to turn their cameras on during standup, just so we see each other once a day.

by soneca 5y ago

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).

SkyPuncher 5y ago

We've settled on a similar setup as well. We want most of our meetings to be effective, but we're intentionally about that one being a bit "sloppy". It's a good time to get to know people and uncover challenges that people might not raise asynchronously otherwise.

dustymcp 5y ago

This is out setup aswell with and added friday 1 h where we show off stuff we done/found interesting its great for team building imo

brightball 5y ago

Yes, that's critical. We've used entire stand-ups to discuss how to make stand-ups more effective. Finding a way that makes it quality time for the team is ideal. The goal is for everybody to be able to work and communicate better together. My favorite version is one in which we just went through the daily Merge/Pull Requests in the system and let that be the check in. It set aside regular time for small code reviews and let everybody showcase things clearly, with room to ask people to dive in for a deeper review right then and there. IMO it was much more effective than the normal standup ritual.

mateo411 5y ago
That's a good idea. It's basically a group code review. Everybody can see what's getting merged in and what's going out to production.

humanlion87 5y ago

Such a great setup! I wish my team would follow something like this. Everyone seems to be in their own silo or they interact with people only for doing a specific task.

brianmcc 5y ago

Same here. It's a little bloated maybe but the balance of chit-chat vs real work seems to be one that works for us. It's productive and also good social session to start the day. Feels like it's probably been positive for people since we all went 100% remote March 2020. Good team rapport and trust etc are important factors, it's vital no one is "scared" to give honest updates.

reaperducer 5y ago

But it works great for us And that's the key: Do what works for your group. The problem is that we have middle managers and project managers and middle project managers who go to conferences and watch lectures online and hang out in social media echo chambers talking about the latest, greatest innovation in managing projects without thinking about the people or the tasks involved. Too often development teams are forced to work for the process, rather than the process working for them. I've been in places where the PM would say things like, "We'll do it this way because it's what Google does." Well, Google has seventy brazillian people, and we have six on our team. What makes PMs think that one size fits all? It doesn't. I currently have a guy who's trying to impose a project management method he learned from a video game company on us. We work in healthcare. But he refuses to deviate from what worked for the video game company, and thinks it's OK for the users to "discover" features on their own, rather than letting us spend time documenting how the system works. Again... in healthcare.

soneca 5y ago
> ” Google has seventy brazillian people, and we have six on our team.” I spent a good few minutes trying to understand this sentence. Mainly because I am Brazilian and was stunned how did you know that I was. Then trying to understand how the number of Brazilian people might affect standup dynamic. Then trying to understand exactly how many Brazilians there were in Google and how many of the six of your team were Brazilian. Just then I understood it was an expression for “a lot” hahaha

gwbas1c 5y ago

> we often chat about life, topics outside of work... Because your standup is primarily providing team bonding and meets other emotional needs.

karmelapple 5y ago

Great to hear we're not the only team who does this. We are fully remote, and most articles on this seem to revolve around cutting standup to 15 minutes or less. Ours still stays pretty short, and is even 15 minutes sometimes, but frequently edges out towards a half hour. Since we're fully remote, and we do standup over voice, we only see each other via video a couple times every three-week iteration. So a little chatter at the beginning of standup is a way to just check in and see how people are doing, including in their personal life. Another idea to perhaps add: we've informally agreed that the time right after standup is typically reserved for small group discussions for any subset of the team. We're fully remote (and have been for 10 years), so when standup starts, our brains have already shifted to "talking" mode (rather than planning/coding/reviewing mode), so it's easy to just keep going and help talk through any issues that would benefit from synchronous communication. Sometimes we screenshare, but frequently not - we just talk through whatever we're stuck on or could use insight from others.

soneca 5y ago
> ” we've informally agreed that the time right after standup is typically reserved for small group discussions for any subset of the team.” This happens with us as well. Usually for technical discussions that will take longer than 5 to 10 minutes.

the_arun 5y ago

We follow similar structure, but it is not a daily thing. We do this 3 days a week. So far useful. Besides, we extensively use Slack to notify team for any blockers.

zamadatix 5y ago

> For us developers it is the only group meeting in the day 90% of the days. That seems so fantastical to me :/. That works out to 1 day with other group meetings every 2 weeks. Glad to hear there are places like that though!

uhtred 5y ago

Are you one of the managers or PMs?

soneca 5y ago
No, I am one of the IC developers.
- uhtred 5y ago
  Interesting. Thank you. I was just wondering if your viewpoint was from a non-developer perspective.

fatnoah 5y ago

> But it works great for us. We have explicitly discussed it before and that’s how we want it, at least for now. This is the real key, IMHO. As a manager, I push the team to figure out what works best for them. I've seen daily standups w/status reports, no standups where we simply message the details, and bi-weekly where we talk more about status and challenges and save "what I did" for other mediums. In all cases, it's what the team wanted and worked best for them.

RegBarclay 5y ago

Something that I've noticed as a remote employee (before and after the pandemic) is that the usual interpersonal interactions that happen organically in the office have to be done intentionally. You've decided to have some fluff in stand-ups. My team has a social meeting every week for about 30 minutes. It's not running into people in the breakroom, but it meets the need to be social.

VBprogrammer 5y ago

The worst standup I ever had were where it wasn't a standup at all. It was a role call by the managing director to check up on what you did the day before and to generally berate you for any minor transgression in his idea of what you should have been working on.

mc32 5y ago
I hate places that have stand ups. It mostly amounts to being in a work collective where the apparatchik gets to show you it’s still the boss of you. There are other routines that are actually helpful but don’t feel like the red guard roll call.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  To me, Agile is micromanagement in disguise
  - mc32 5y ago
    Yes, for bad (poor) managers it's a tool for micromanagement. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for the manager to use this tool in order to micromanage antagonistically rather than lubricate the team.
rootusrootus 5y ago
That would certainly suck. The worst in my experience (at least recently) are standups where the PO shows up, then proceeds to get in long-winded discussions about features and implementation, and invariably tries to guide priorities for the day. 90 minutes later... For a time I was managing a team that used this PO, and I quickly banned him outright from standups. Told him to keep his guidance granularity at the sprint level, make sure his stories were written well enough to not require constant elaboration, and otherwise leave the developers alone. He could show up for sprint review & planning. Standups were just to unblock anyone who needed it, and should only last a couple minutes.
handrous 5y ago
Worst ones I've ever had, the dev manager was also still doing some dev work, mostly not on the company's main product, but other crap, but was in on the stand-ups and set the tone for it being a "moan about how hard your work is, to justify why we pay you" fest, by going into way too much detail about every little difficulty he had yesterday. This on top of the fact that there were like 6-7 people on these meetings, no more than two of whom were working on the same thing, so standups weren't even theoretically a good idea to begin with. The meetings existed only for him, and he was ensuring the form they took was terrible, stressful, and took up way too much time. He also liked to take really shitty notes, then treat them like the gospel truth. I read my stand-ups from notes I'd written beforehand—never done that anywhere else, but the amount of crap one was evidently expected to talk about was large enough there, that I did, after the first week or two—so I could tell for a fact when he'd recorded something about mine that was flat-out wrong, and it was often.

JasonCannon 5y ago

Fully remote team here. We decided that the chit chat starts at 10, the standup at 10:15. That.... often doesn't happen. So our running joke is no matter what time it is getting (sometimes 10:30, sometimes 10:40) we always say "Alright guys, it's almost 10:15" to signal that we should probably get started.

kfichter 5y ago

Hah, we dedicate the first 5 minutes (used to be 7 minutes, but the company grew) of our daily standup to non-work related subjects. After which someone makes an airhorn-like noise (think "pew pew pew") to mark the beginning of "actual" standup. It started as a way to accommodate people who were running a minute or two late but it's become a ritual at this point. Rituals are nice!

Rezwoodly 5y ago
Sounds pretty sweet. The last "leader" I operated under used to lock us into 1.5-2 hour daily stand ups every morning and would use the time to either bitch, delegate or brag about his work. It's was a fucking nightmare.

randomdata 5y ago

> ”worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today” This is what makes standups shitty. I couldn't care less to know if you are still working on something. When you are done working on it, I'll know because the tooling will let me know of the changes. There is no time where vocalizing this provides value, unless you have no tools at all, which seems pretty silly if you are not working with a team of prehistoric cavemen. If you have a fun story about what you did last night, a recap of last night's reality TV show, whatever floats your boat – that's much more valuable use of the time. I can get behind that, although don't be upset if I don't always show up.

Buttons840 5y ago
No tooling is as reliable and enduring as speech. And the phrase you quoted as an example takes less than 5 second to say.
- randomdata 5y ago
  Five seconds to say and two hours of lost productivity from the context switch required to hear it[0]. And I still don't care. What am I going to do with the information? [0] https://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    What am I going to do with the information? The purpose of a functioning standup is contextualization. If you know your teammate is still working on feature X, maybe you notice that your own work is related and you can design some shared data structure that speeds up both of you. If you want to be an IC with no responsibility, that's fine, just make it clear to your team that your assigned work is all you are going to do. If you want to be more productive individually and as a team, though, the interconnectedness of the team is just as important as what any one member is working on.
    - Salgat 5y ago

irrational 5y ago

Ours used to be similar, then we were assigned a scrum master to act as a mentor (despite most of us working together for more than a decade, we are fairly new to agile). He made stand ups much more regimented. All the chit chat is completely gone. I’m now realizing that standup was the only time of the day that my coworkers and I connected about anything not strictly work related. It does feel like we have lost out on something.

wonderwonder 5y ago
you should try virtual happy hours with the team. once every couple weeks, generally just an hour or just long enough to finish a beer. If the group is kept small it can be a pretty good team builder as long as an effort is made to include everyone in the conversation. Felt forced in the beginning but generally most teams have at least one person that can get and keep the chat going. Still keep it going now with people I used to work with even though we all went our separate ways.
midrus 5y ago
Yeah, scrum masters. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse.

konschubert 5y ago

We have the exact same and it's awesome. Made me feel close to people I only knew remotely.

muzzio 5y ago

I agree that especially in pandemic times this is hugely beneficial, although I'd recommend doing it in the opposite order: quick 1 minute updates followed by casual off-topic chatter for the rest of the meeting. I've found that folks are much more relaxed after giving standup updates :)

speeder 5y ago

Thing is, what you are doing is NOT a standup meeting. The reason it is called standup it was because the meeting was literally done standing, the idea was to force people to talk as quickly as possible whatever needed urgently and make them leave because they are tired of standing in one place. What you are doing is some kind of daily meeting, but not a standup in any sense.

rhacker 5y ago
> in any sense I think he's meeting 99% of the idea behind a scrum standup, except for standing up. So for some reason the lack of physically standing up reverts the 99% to 0%?
NicoJuicy 5y ago
A standup meeting was also in 1 room and in person. More people work remote now, it's not 1995 anymore ( history of scrum). As most things, scrum evolved. It's a guide, not a strict protocol/law The idea is to have all the technical things in one time to eliminate interruptions later on, not to eliminate personal connections with the team. So what is a better time for the casual talk, since people don't have coffee breaks anymore? ( If everyone of the team is onboard fyi) I kinda miss in person with the entire team. I see some people seriously slacking and those are the ones not really involved with casual talk too ( coincidence? ). While many people are perfectly able to work remotely, it made the job of a eg. teamlead much harder to confront more difficult things. They can't notice the body signals anymore when a person's cam is just off ( and even then).
Closi 5y ago
Of course it's a standup, its a metaphor these days you don't have to literally stand (otherwise how would a remote standup work? Do you have to insist everyone gets out of their office chairs?). We used to have huddles at work, but it didn't mean that we were actually nestled closely together for warmth.
- speeder 5y ago
  You and the guy below missed my point grossly. What made the meeting not-standup is the fact the meeting is not short. The fact people take time to talk about their daily lives, and other random stuff, means it is not a standup meeting. I mentioned the original standup meeting was standing, because the point of it was force people to want to leave the meeting.

rdruxn 5y ago

>But teams behave in an infinite combination of size, members, companies, and time Slightly off topic, but I realize this is a subject I'd be interested in reading more about. Would be interested in suggestions in the same vein as Creativity, Inc. by Edwin Catmull?

noodle 5y ago

For a remote team, you have to make space for people to get the face-to-face hallway/watercooler chat time if you want to build a solid culture. Time for people to get to know oneanother that is easy if you're co-located. Easiest place to make space for this is to have padding on your meetings. Especially standups.

swman 5y ago

We have shit standups on my team. People show up 5 minutes late to standup so we don't actually start for like 5-10 min past start time. I get it, not all are morning people. Please mute your mic, I really don't want to hear you yawn half a dozen times. It's obnoxious. If you're talking and you need to yawn, just mute for a second. I know you're still working on this ticket (what's the point of JIRA otherwise?), just tell me if you need help on it or are blocked. That's more important to the team. Standups over zoom or as a dedicated meeting are honestly a waste of time when people show up late or yawn just to go over mostly the same status every day. Just post your update in slack, let others know if you have any blockers. I'm pretty much checked out these days, so I don't really care. What should be a 5 min exercise (90% of the time) turns into 20 minutes of pain. Others enjoy it as it is though, so I don't really care. Also every other meeting is similar nowadays too, way too lax and people seem to be okay being slow/lazy.

saltminer 5y ago
> I get it, not all are morning people This is why I prefer standups to be right before lunch (back when you'd have lunch with your coworkers). People are awake and have a reason to not want things to drag on. Of course, when one of your coworkers is on the west coast (and the rest are on the east coast), it's not lunch time for everyone, but it still tends to go quicker than if the meeting was an hour earlier.

freeqaz 5y ago

I really can't emphasize this enough. I work with a small team (2 other devs) and our morning standup happens 3x per week. We're remote and we're building Open Source tech[0]. We do it similarly to how you describe here -- we have a short intro (5 mins) before diving into each of us presenting. Each of us presenting may take 2 mins or take 30 mins. If one of us is struggling or blocked, we use this time to collaborate + pair program/debug. Eventually, we get through everything and then go about our day. Sometimes (because I am the "lead"), I'll use the opportunity to ask questions about roadmap or other items that I need their input on. They're already distracted and not "in the zone", so chaining on the additional "meeting" works quite well. Because of this, these are our only meetings every week. We get a bit of "water cooler" chatting in, we are able to unblock each other, and we are able to have a short iteration loop for re-prioritizing our work. (New tasks can be delegated by quickly going through the backlog) The pandemic has really changed work, and I really feel like we're still iterating on what the best dynamics are for teams to be productive. Thanks for the insight into your team dynamic! 0: https://github.com/lunasec-io/lunasec https://github.com/lunasec-io/lunasec

quambene 5y ago
Sounds great. Which tool do you use for pair programming?
- freeqaz 5y ago
  The built in "Code With Me" in IntelliJ is awesome. Besides that, we use Zoom for video calls. (The screen sharing quality is the best I've found)

koonsolo 5y ago

I said this before: the only thing you really need is retrospectives. When you have that, you can adapt your process to anything your team wants.

mnsc 5y ago

We had the same experience and just renamed the calendar booking from "standup" to "morning meeting" and made it 30 minutes. Great for morale and team building! Small supporting team though in a highly moving complex domain with lots of consultants coming in and out so ymmv.

jjav 5y ago

Daily status reports are really a special form of hell. There is no value in something so fine-grained except to the micromanager. It forces a daily interrupt that reduces productivity. Most painfully, it effectively prevents (heavily discourages, anyway) a deep dive into anything because you better have a snappy status report for tomorrow. No time for deep research, so all work becomes superficial. Before agile and standups were the hip thing, the norm in all places I worked was to have a weekly team status meeting. Those were great. Weekly is about the right cadence for this type of meeting. It gives you four days to deep dive into technical work without worrying about status reports all the time. With a week, you end up having something meaningful to talk about and listen from others.

dzhiurgis 5y ago

In my experience talking about life is what is missing from most anaemic standups. Forcing people to immediately talk work is harsh. Sure, some (especially managers) prefer not to waste time (or have no real life), but as a globally distributed team I feel we miss out of experiencing each others culture a lot.

seanc 5y ago

I used to run more strict 15 minute SCRUM standups, but when the pandemic hit and we all left the office I changed to this kind of standup on purpose. Those chit-chat conversations are important and since they weren't happening by accident we made it part of the structure. I also encourage people to turn their cameras on during standup, just so we see each other once a day.