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Wow, bad advice. Or maybe just bad advice for managing programmers. Interruptions suck and this advice just seems like interruption-based management. My advi

by pkaler 18y ago

Wow, bad advice. Or maybe just bad advice for managing programmers. Interruptions suck and this advice just seems like interruption-based management. My advice would be to make communication asynchronous. Use something like Yammer for status updates to make sure everyone knows what everyone else is up to. Write good commit messages for each checkin. Make sure it's understood that everyone on the team is expected to read these checkin comments. Write release notes for each feature. Stuff these notes in a wiki. The audience for these release notes are the non-technical people in your company, too. Sales, marketing, production, design, etc. Have adhoc face-to-face time. At FogCreek, the team eats lunch together. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html When I used to work at a game development company here in Vancouver, the entire team of programmers used to get up at 3PM and walk to the coffee shop together down the block to grab a coffee. This is when we would bounce ideas off of one another, talk about what we were stuck on, and let each other know what we were working on. Management tried to formalize this into 10AM Scrum-style standup meetings. That didn't work at all.

DanielBMarkham 18y ago
Have adhoc face-to-face time - key point. You're right that forced, formal scrums are a waste of time. The problem is, however, that spending time with your mates looks like a waste of time to a lot of people. You'd think it'd be an obviously good thing to do, right? By all means, take 15-30 minutes each day and grab coffee. Go for a walk as a team. Relax and chat about what work-related things are on your mind. Daily stand-ups are an attempt to get people doing this. But it's like pulling teeth. Unless you've actually been on a high-communicating team you just don't see the value. Even then for some folks it rarely occurs to them that by "wasting time" everyday they might be doubling or tripling their productivity. Then the scrums become bland and formal, nobody ever has any obstacles, the PM turns it into a status meeting, and you're truly wasting your time.
- HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago
  Excellent point. We don't do scrum/agile, but I found the daily quick meetings valuable. What worked for me as team lead was to change my parking spot so I came in through the door nearest my team (we were at opposite ends of the bldg) and I'd hold a 5-10 minute meeting before I even sat down that day. A very simple "how did things go yesterday/what do you plan to do today/are there any obstacles or questions to get you going" and we were done. Contrast this to the larger status meeting with the bigger group which normally turned into a 1 hour waste of time!
- wallflower 18y ago
  > Daily stand-ups are an attempt to get people doing this. But it's like pulling teeth. A lot of my friends' companies have drunk the corporate Kool-aid and adopted Scrum (e.g. sending project managers to Scrum Master training, forming Scrum teams out of organizational chaos). Scrum isn't that bad - it's not perfect - there are aspects I dislike. It's not as bad as teeth pulling, somewhere between gum cleaning and flossing. Daily burndown updates are always painful. It's better than nothing. But being forced to throw out a number for a task is sometimes lunacy. The whole point of Scrum in my opinion is to micro-manage programmers and hold them accountable.
  - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
    It's interesting you would see it that way -- 'cause I'm an agile coach. I train CSMs and teams when they first start using agile/scrum techniques. It's a simple thing, but people keep screwing it up. Say you have a two-week sprint. What can you do in two weeks? Make a list. Then go do that. You don't have to break your list up into dozens of tiny tasks -- that's crazy. But that's exactly what some PMs and CSMs want the teams to do. Some consultants even require that everything be broken up into tasks of less than 4 hours. If you do it that way, yes, it's micromangement hell. But the way it's supposed to work is just you describing and committing to doing some work in a certain amount of time, whether that's one huge story or a dozen little stories. I encourage people doing it the first time to break their work up into little pieces, if it helps them figure out what they need to do, but even then I actively discourage the CSM from tracking at the micro-task level. There's simply no benefit. Agile is a very simple philosophy with common sense practices. If you try hard enough, however, you can make your life miserable with it. Unfortunately, people try their hardest to remake it into some kind of micro-management, data-centric, ritual-based death grind. It's not supposed to be like that. Stand ups, like I said, can be coffee at 3 everyday with the team. Stories can be big. etc. There is the aspect of holding programmers accountable, no doubt. But there's also the aspect of giving them the freedom to break up their work and execute it in any fashion they see fit. Companies focus on the first part and then forget about the second.
    - wallflower 18y ago

by pkaler 18y ago

DanielBMarkham 18y ago

Have adhoc face-to-face time - key point. You're right that forced, formal scrums are a waste of time. The problem is, however, that spending time with your mates looks like a waste of time to a lot of people. You'd think it'd be an obviously good thing to do, right? By all means, take 15-30 minutes each day and grab coffee. Go for a walk as a team. Relax and chat about what work-related things are on your mind. Daily stand-ups are an attempt to get people doing this. But it's like pulling teeth. Unless you've actually been on a high-communicating team you just don't see the value. Even then for some folks it rarely occurs to them that by "wasting time" everyday they might be doubling or tripling their productivity. Then the scrums become bland and formal, nobody ever has any obstacles, the PM turns it into a status meeting, and you're truly wasting your time.

HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago
Excellent point. We don't do scrum/agile, but I found the daily quick meetings valuable. What worked for me as team lead was to change my parking spot so I came in through the door nearest my team (we were at opposite ends of the bldg) and I'd hold a 5-10 minute meeting before I even sat down that day. A very simple "how did things go yesterday/what do you plan to do today/are there any obstacles or questions to get you going" and we were done. Contrast this to the larger status meeting with the bigger group which normally turned into a 1 hour waste of time!
wallflower 18y ago
> Daily stand-ups are an attempt to get people doing this. But it's like pulling teeth. A lot of my friends' companies have drunk the corporate Kool-aid and adopted Scrum (e.g. sending project managers to Scrum Master training, forming Scrum teams out of organizational chaos). Scrum isn't that bad - it's not perfect - there are aspects I dislike. It's not as bad as teeth pulling, somewhere between gum cleaning and flossing. Daily burndown updates are always painful. It's better than nothing. But being forced to throw out a number for a task is sometimes lunacy. The whole point of Scrum in my opinion is to micro-manage programmers and hold them accountable.
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  It's interesting you would see it that way -- 'cause I'm an agile coach. I train CSMs and teams when they first start using agile/scrum techniques. It's a simple thing, but people keep screwing it up. Say you have a two-week sprint. What can you do in two weeks? Make a list. Then go do that. You don't have to break your list up into dozens of tiny tasks -- that's crazy. But that's exactly what some PMs and CSMs want the teams to do. Some consultants even require that everything be broken up into tasks of less than 4 hours. If you do it that way, yes, it's micromangement hell. But the way it's supposed to work is just you describing and committing to doing some work in a certain amount of time, whether that's one huge story or a dozen little stories. I encourage people doing it the first time to break their work up into little pieces, if it helps them figure out what they need to do, but even then I actively discourage the CSM from tracking at the micro-task level. There's simply no benefit. Agile is a very simple philosophy with common sense practices. If you try hard enough, however, you can make your life miserable with it. Unfortunately, people try their hardest to remake it into some kind of micro-management, data-centric, ritual-based death grind. It's not supposed to be like that. Stand ups, like I said, can be coffee at 3 everyday with the team. Stories can be big. etc. There is the aspect of holding programmers accountable, no doubt. But there's also the aspect of giving them the freedom to break up their work and execute it in any fashion they see fit. Companies focus on the first part and then forget about the second.
  - wallflower 18y ago