9 ms·
The Daily Scrum: Does It Have to Be Daily?
- shmerl 2y ago> Daily check-ins, for professionals, for adults in general, heck even for children, are micromanagement Exactly this.
- jimbob45 2y agoMy lead is busy 100% of his day. If we don't force him to purposefully have the 15 minute standup inefficiency in his day, I won't get time with him ever. I simply won't ever outrank the other people asking for him.
- shmerl 2y agoThat's the problem on the other end. But micromanaging on this end is also very annoying.
- dijit 2y agoSounds like you have an organisational issue outside of that 15 minute window. In fact, likely, its because people are forcing your lead into meetings that are largely irrelevant (because otherwise if they permit that block to open they feel that wont be able to get time with them) that causes the lack of time in the first place.
- marcosdumay 2y agoIs he busy because of your workplace's meetings culture?
- marktangotango 2y agoAt one company (think bank/financial services) I was at as a "software development supervisor" I had to run a daily standup/scrum meeting every day, for 3 years. It really became oppressive over time. That company eventually had layoffs and I left. But they were still doing the daily standup, even when there were only 3 people left.
- dijit 2y agoI find it funny that whenever theres an article lambasting capital-A Agile (which, is usually scrum), people are quick to say “you’re doing it wrong”. Its the best no true scotsman fallacy I’ve ever seen. Yet, here I am, to say we are all doing it wrong. The daily standup should have no managers at all in it, its for the team, and its for understanding blockers and progress. Another issue that pervades is that of organisation: One of the hardest parts of leadership for me has been trying to understand the distinction between team and task/project, because projects require more collaboration than single discipline teams do: but we conduct capital-A Agile across single discipline team boundaries. I’m too shy to break everyones mental model of how they should work because… It’s always this way in every company I ever worked, as it is with managers/leads in standups. I have no idea why, we prescribe scrum instead of using our brains, and we don’t listen to the core instructions given even then- of course it doesn’t work.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoOn the No True Scrummaster point, it's fair to say that this comment actually suggests a fundamentally different alternative. The No True Scrummaster arguments I see typically zoom in to specific details instead of zooming out to examine the whole process.
- bravetraveler 2y agoMust put the crabs in the bucket for the clawing to begin
- johncessna 2y agoIt's really important to know the history of agile and why it came about. I don't think it's the problem. The root problem, which is true for any other methodology is business's unwillingness to accept uncertainty and change. Standups were co-opted from a people-working-the-sprint touch point to discuss A 24 hour window and address problem, and turned into a status meeting, a jira hygiene meeting, or an number of unrelated things. The answer to management's question, 'when will you be done' is, "at the end of the sprint." Don't ask me to report a daily, or god forbid, hourly status.
- Folcon 2y ago
- itronitron 2y agoHonestly, I don't understand why it isn't hourly. That would fit in quite nicely with the pomodoro gobbledygook.
- ErikAugust 2y agoI’ve heard of status updates every 15 minutes. Huge contractor.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoNot time tracking, but updates?
- rqtwteye 2y agoI do scrums twice a week. That's more than enough and if somebody has problems in between they are required to get in touch either with me or the person who can help. I think there is not enough going on to justify required daily standups.
- allknowingfrog 2y agoIf you lack the confidence and the comfort to report "no interesting progress" once a day, I either pity your emotional state or your team dynamic. Daily standups should not be overwhelming, and abolishing them is an avoidance strategy, not a solution.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoThat works until someone a bit higher up comes in and chews you out for not saying "what you did yesterday and what you plan to do today" with clear and achievable goals for today. People can contort the stand-up quite painfully.
- allknowingfrog 2y agoSure, but that sounds like a culture problem, not a problem with the meeting schedule. If you have abusive higher-ups, avoiding them is not a solution. Honestly, the whole premise of the discussion is kind of silly at that point. If you don't have the power to improve the meeting experience, then you definitely don't have the power to abolish the meeting.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eclectic29 2y agoI mean if it doesn't fit the team's or the project's stage, don't do them daily. Simple! I just solved it for you. Not sure why we need tons of articles on scrum to state the obvious :-). Are the engineering teams so dumb that they're following scrum to the letter? Come on!
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago> Are the engineering teams so dumb that they're following scrum to the letter? No, their managers are.
- cauch 2y agoBut I thought the daily scrum is to give an opportunity to communicate and realign. I'm not a developer (I'm a scientist working in R&D that then needs to be implemented by developers), but I've participated to plenty of daily scrum. I can say that they are sometimes very useful, without them, the devs would just go into whatever useless direction or would spend days trying to solve non-problem. I never had any problem to say "nothing to report on my side, working on X like yesterday". Maybe the pressure is self-inflicted by a culture that idolized unicorns and 10x coders.
- aguaviva 2y agoWithout them, the devs would just go into whatever useless direction or would spend days trying to solve non-problem. Perhaps this is a sign you need better devs -- much better devs, in fact? And that Scrum, while it may appear to help by patching over this problem -- is actually masking it?
- cauch 2y agoI think that if a dev think that they will not do whatever without guidance, THEY need to be replaced by better devs. It's just mathematical: the possibility of interpretation of a solution is just very very big. It's not even a matter of precision of the requirements: the same way the dev cannot read the mind of the product owner, the product owner cannot read the mind of the dev and guess that when they use the term X that they always used this way, the dev will understand X' which is slightly different. Developing a solution is like some point forecasting: you forecast the next point, then use that next point as input to forecast the next point and so on. If you don't realign with observations as soon as possible, you are just deviating. It depends of the uncertainty around your points, but this uncertainty is never totally 0. Now, it's true that I'm in R&D, which may be dealing with more uncertainties. Maybe the frequency of scrum meeting should be based on that. But, pretty please, do not push to removing scrum meetings if you don't even understand that.
- kledru 2y agoone reason engineers are frustrated with daily rituals is this assumption that they are aimless creatures who need constant instructions from rational beings (product managers and such)
- choeger 2y agoDaily check-ins can be necessary under certain circumstances. (Think all-hands-on-deck quickly evolving situations with a tight deadline and several unknowns. Like a big feature launch.) Sometimes you might even need them twice a day. You cannot do it much more often, though. So the big problem with scrum is not the daily, but it's ceremonious importance. It's just fixed, it doesn't have any reason. One does it because scrum. If you look closely, you'll see more of that pattern in scrum. Sprints, for instance, are a given. Yet, why would anybody do them when there are no new features to be developed? When a product is mature and needs maintenance or simply doesn't exist at all, there's no reason to do sprints. Whenever there's no feedback from stakeholders, there's no reason to do sprints.
- cesaref 2y agoBreaking news - introverts don't want to have daily stand ups, whilst extroverts think it's fun and useful. I personally found them quite helpful to ensure I could help out team members who had got stuck. It's sometimes lonely debugging a complex system, and people can appreciate someone else to either confirm it really is what they think is going on, or maybe bounce some ideas off. It's a great way for the more experienced team members to find places where they can make a significant difference by contributing a bit of their day to helping out.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoIf your team is waiting until the next stand-up to get help to get unstuck I think that's a cultural problem, they should be reaching out at any point during the day.
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoI feel like the existence of daily standup has influenced this for my team. There's a lot of, "well I could reach out about this now, but I'll just bring it up at standup and then I'm not interrupting anyone"
- marcosdumay 2y agoYes. The existence of the meeting makes people delay solving their problems until the next one. This is not something that make teams agile.
- strict9 2y agoAn asynchronous daily check in via chat and a weekly meeting is more than enough to cover the important parts. A virtual or in-person meeting scheduled at the same time every day is mostly performance art for management and is not necessary to get everyone on the same page.
- replyifuagree 2y agoAlmost all problems with daily scrum/kanban/whatever can be traced back to inappropriate management. Most of the time the issue is the daily whatever has been turned into a demotivating status meeting where a PMO trained project manager (PMP) is drilling each person for a status roll-up. When management is inappropriate, the ignorance is so thick that no rational discussion can penetrate.
- cauch 2y agoWhile I agree, it is also very common that it's the culture inside the dev team that leads to this situation. Dev culture tends to idolize unicorns and 10x coders (more than management who has absolutely no reason to care about the status or ego of each dev individually) so they tend to, themselves, find intimidating to admit they are not one.
- replyifuagree 2y agoYep once we kick the PMP out, then we can work on safety so people will openly share where they are in the battle with the real enemy - the software. As it turns out 10x isn't enough. Once the complexity of the solution hits a certain point you really need multiple brains working together to reliably evolve it in a sustainable manner that isn't rife with operational disruption.
- vishalontheline 2y agoI've been an engineer and a PM in Scrum, Spiral, and Waterfall teams. That daily meeting can either be: - One where, participants feel as if they are reporting to some person of authority who is there to judge them, but not really help them much, if at all. - Or, one where everyone feels like the meeting is for their benefit. One person (usually a manager) that feels too senior / detached to participate will quickly turn the meeting from the latter to the former. If someone is in a daily Scrum meeting, then they must share with everyone what they did yesterday, how it's going and what they're going to that day. If they don't, then they shouldn't be in the meeting - they can get all the information they need by looking at the story board or meeting notes or reach out directly. For distributed teams there are some wonderful tools to collaboratively participate in daily meetings. These tools will speed up the whole meeting, making it even less tedious than before! Once everyone is participating, then it becomes possible to move beyond "worked on bugs" or "worked on AB-24132" to something more descriptive. Personally, I think of the daily meeting as the thread that connects the events of the previous day to the goals of today. It should feel like a story that you are living, and not some dystopian nightmare where everyday is just like the day before.
- jongjong 2y agoIt pains me to read this because the scrum meetings at my last companies were fluid enough that you could say anything. So if I worked on a problem which turned out to be more complicated than originally estimated, I would just list out all these sub-problems and so people would realize that I did a lot. The company I work for now does scrum very differently. During the scrum planning meetings, we must break down all tasks so that they are less than 8 hours. So this means that every day, you MUST be able to point to at least one completed task every day. If new complexity was uncovered (which of course is always the case due to technical bloat which occurs when developers are always pressured like this), then you need to take it upon yourself to cut all the corners necessary to get your minimum of one daily task done. That is unpleasant and unproductive. Though I guess it helps existing devs build a moat of complexity around themselves so that, over time, the work becomes predictable for you but not for others who are less familiar with existing code/constraints.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- underseacables 2y agoHow about: can we just stop scruming altogether? Please?
- jacknews 2y agoThe standup isn't to report what you did, but to raise any issues or concerns and synchronize with the rest of the team. The 'what did you do' part by default is 'work on the stories, as planned', and should probably just be left out altogether.
- apple4ever 2y agoDaily scrums or meetings are maddening. After a month I just get so stressed even thinking about it. It's such a drag on productivity.He's right, only children should be checked upon daily. Every other day isn't so bad, weekly is totally fine.