7 ms·

Standups are Not Poisonous

153 points by dshimy 14y ago

phamilton 14y ago
"Remember, they are not status meetings." Additionally, I think it is important to remember that standup is not a "justify my existence on the team" meeting. Having nothing to report is fine.
- Morendil 14y ago
  This, a million times. (Which is how many I feel like I've said it so far.) Conversely, this particular dysfunction of standups is a useful index of how much the corporate culture leads people to feel like they must justify their existence.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  I agree, but i notice that i find it difficult to act on it, and many with me. Any tips for how to get the "look, i did work" urge out of the way?
  - suppressingfire 14y ago
    If I haven't made any progress since the last day, I just talk about what I plan to do for the upcoming day. I also might say "I'm still working on (the thing I was working on yesterday)". With a well functioning, trusting team that should be a perfectly reasonable thing to say every so often.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    To me, that's a sign of low collaboration and low trust. If your team does regular retrospectives, I'd just say, "Look, I feel like in stand-ups, I keep having to justify my existence. Do other people feel that? What can we change to make that better?" Off the top of my head, I'd look at the size of the unit of work and the length of the release cycle. I think Agile processes work best when the work is broken down into lots of small deliverables that meet the INVEST criteria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INVEST_%28mnemonic%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INVEST_%28mnemonic%29 If the team is jointly completing a few shippable things a day, then everybody should have a pretty good idea that everybody else is working. Doubly so if those are actually getting released daily.
- YokoZar 14y ago
  How do I communicate this when I'm in such a team and daily meetings are regularly going 30 minutes?
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Email this thread to your team, if you are too shy to say "let's take that conversation offline" whenever someone drifts off topic.
    - YokoZar 14y ago
      What if we have a product manager who's asking for a status report on every single open bug every meeting?
- dmoney 14y ago
  > Having nothing to report is fine. In a meeting where you're supposed to say what you've been working on, at a job where you're paid to be working on it, in what way is it fine to have nothing to report?
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    You were blocked by some externality. If all you have to report is "I'm still waiting for Larry in XYZ group to send over the new protocol specs", then that's all you can really say. Vis-a-vis the daily scrum/standup, that's all you have to say. Issues like "what else could you be doing with your time, what are we paying you to do" blah, are a topic for a different audience and a different time. That said, in a quality team staffed with quality people, you don't worry about people goofing off during the time they're blocked... you assume they are doing some kind of self-development, or tweaking some small detail somewhere, etc. It's when somebody is blocked for long enough that it puts their tasks in jeopardy that the scrummaster needs to start escalating things and working to get the roadblocks removed, and/or manage expectations vis-a-vis the tasks for the iteration.
moron4hire 14y ago
I have tried to get this point across at every place I have worked. Management covets micromanagement, so stands turn into status meetings.
- kamkazemoose 14y ago
  My team just went through more agile training, and one piece of advice I found interesting was to consider keeping the managers out of the standup if it's not working. The meeting is to help others on the team, so that's the only people who need to be there.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    Absolutely! And once things are running well enough that you can let the managers back in, it's still reasonable to forbid them to talk. Unless they are on the hook for deliverables, then they are at best there to observe.
projectileboy 14y ago
Honestly, I can't understand all of the vitriol around "agile" methods that arises here occasionally. If you're doing something that works for your team, do it, if it doesn't work, do something else. Isn't that the whole idea behind "agile" stuff? Do people get stuck in situations where they have to do X because "we're doing agile, and agile says we must do X"? If so, can't the offenders be gently pointed to http://agilemanifesto.org http://agilemanifesto.org ?
- brazzy 14y ago
  I believe ist's a combination of never having experienced the monstrosities agile was invented to replace, having experienced agile done wrong, and natural cowboy coder hybris.
  - paulrademacher 14y ago
    In my experience, the "cowboy coder" is sometimes indeed disruptive (large unannounced refactors, e.g.), but almost always they are the most productive people on the team, the ones who contribute the best and most code.
    - Morcane 14y ago
      well, in my experience, cowboy coders fuck up, leave and have others fix the mess they left.
- wpietri 14y ago
  Oh, the vitriol is entirely earned. I learned one of the Agile methods before the term Agile was even invented. Adopting it made a giant difference in the quality and sanity of my work. But so many people today have have pseudo-Agile methods inflicted on them in large corporate contexts. There, the point isn't to make things saner and more effective. It's to please some executive who has a bee in their bonnet. And often, they only adopt some labels and some rituals. It's all pain, no gain. I wrote about how this happened here: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/ http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how... But it's at the point where I avoid using the term "Agile". Or any other buzzword. I look at the circumstances, and say, "Hey, you guys feel pain X. Can we try change Y and see if that helps?" Often, the tool is one from the Agile or Lean toolbox. But I won't talk about the particular process I'm borrowing from because a) most people don't care, and b) a lot of people have been burned with faux-Agile adoptions.
onemorepassword 14y ago
Standups can however very easily become very uncomfortable in a dysfunctional environment. (As the original article unwittingly demonstrated.) Consider the standup to be the canary in the coalmine. Most of the time people can ignore the dysfunction, work around it and pretend it isn't happening by just getting on with the job as much as possible. But the standup will then become increasingly uncomfortable. Every single day. In a healthy organisation, you can have perfectly pleasant standups, even without Scrum or Agile. I mean, what does a healthy team have to fear from standing around for a few minutes bringing each other up to speed? It's a process that is very close to what often happens quite naturally around the time everyone on the team has arrived at the office (or online). A standup can only become poisonous if the poison is injected from elsewhere. In Gareth's case abusing it for management status reports. In other cases it might be tension between team members, not having a clear goal, whatever. The point is, you cannot have pleasant standup if there is that kind of stuff going on. Which is all the more reason to have a standup, unless it's your policy to ignore problems rather than dealing with them. Standups aren't just not poisonous either: they are a very good poison detector.
- hobs 14y ago
  It's a process that is very close to what often happens quite naturally around the time everyone on the team has arrived at the office (or online). This is exactly the behavior I have seen of well functioning teams. Usually there is a period when the person comes in, maybe after coming up to speed on their email where they get informed and up to speed on what is happening with everyone, if anyone needs anything, what people are working on, and then get to work! Standups are just a formalized approach to what can be a drawn out process for an individual, and in some cases may not be "normal" for your standard introvert dev types who sit at a computer all day and perceive meetings as multi-hour long chores that are inflicted on their participants instead of quick high quality bursts of information distributed in an efficient fashion (face to face).
- Evbn 14y ago
  Thank you. Most of "agile" "process" serves one purpose: to shine light on every aspect of your team's functioning. What you do with what you see is up to you.
je42 14y ago
I am wondering where you guys draw the line between a standup and a status reporting meeting ?
johnrob 14y ago
Standups would make more sense if the team did not communicate during the day. The reason I think they are pointless is that when a blocking issue arises, you drop what you're doing and walk straight over to the person who can help you. I've never seen or heard of someone waiting until the following day's standup to bring up the issue (which is supposedly what the standup is for, right?).
- ratherbefuddled 14y ago
  Standups primarily are for making sure everyone knows what's going on. If you're doing Scrum, the only issues you should really be bringing to standups are those you can't solve within the team that you need the Scrum Master to sort out. Anything the team can fix for itself isn't blocking, it's business as usual.
- knighthacker 14y ago
  I should have read your comment before I posted mine, but I agree 100%
- gdulli 14y ago
  This is why I don't allow them on my teams. You have a block or issue and you're going to passively wait until the next morning or whenever the next meeting is? No. Deal with it when it comes up, don't lose half a day.
sareon 14y ago
What's a standup? I didn't see it defined in either post.
- elliottcarlson 14y ago
  A standup is generally what it sounds like - the entire team stands up together and quickly/briefly cover what they have worked on in the last 24 hours. This can be as simple as "still working on x", or "i need x from y to continue". Some places don't manage standups well at all, and that is one of the big problems with standups in general - they become status meetings and take too long. When done right, they are very useful as you quickly know what everyone is working on and if someone might need your insights on something (which should then be a separate meeting and not covered in the standup).
- potatolicious 14y ago
  To expand on elliotcarlson's post: There are a few main features of standups that, if abused or ignored, can lead to awfulness. - They're supposed to be short, very short. A few minutes at the most. They do not work for large teams (20 people giving a status update is a lot), and if you find yourself having 20-person standups it's time to think about if you should be breaking them into multiple independent standups. - Managers aren't present, or aren't allowed to speak. This is an opportunity to ask questions, ask for help, describe what you're working on, to other members of your team, not to justify what you were up to yesterday to your boss. It's sharing, not reporting. This part is key. - You don't troubleshoot in a standup. If you say "I can't figure out why I can't Foo module Baz", there shouldn't be a discussion about it, but someone else might go "I've worked with Baz a lot, let's take a look together after standup.", or later in the day someone might go "Oh hey, that problem you were having with Baz? I think I know what's happening." - this is the ideal intent of standups. Very quick snippets that highlight certain things in everyone's minds. - It doesn't need to be documented. It's not a meeting, you don't need to take down minutes. Actual tracking of work done occurs separately (your scrum master should be doing this).
- djhworld 14y ago
  You stand in a circle and listen to people update management on what they are doing
guiomie 14y ago
"Gareth Rees’ article titled, Standups are Poinonous hit HN" ... I stopped there.
- Gigablah 14y ago
  "Stopping at the First Sentence Considered Harmful"
notjustanymike 14y ago
Holy crap, he has 3 hours standups? They're called "STAND UPS" because you stand while giving them so that you're motivated to be quick! I actually try and follow the one-breath rule for what have I done, what am I doing, what are my blockers.
- Bootvis 14y ago
  No, he is saying that a 6 person, 30 minute stand up takes 3 hours.
  - dasil003 14y ago
    I read that but it sailed right over my head until your comment because that is an utterly banal observation. Yeah, Microsoft spends 12 man months on bathroom breaks every single day too; I guess that's why they are going down the shitter.
    - Bootvis 14y ago
      I agree that it is not a very deep point but I think the point is a different one from the point your analogy make. People go to toilets, slack off and do all kinds of things during work that are not actually work. Those things are unavoidable. However, meetings that take too long are avoidable, have a low value by definition and thus require management action.
dos1 14y ago
I'm genuinely curious, how are standups not status meetings? From the article: - Make sure everyone is working on the right thing - Help out other team members by taking work off their plate or helping them by sharing domain-specific knowledge - Keeping everyone informed How is that different from a status meeting? I've heard "standups are not status meetings" over and over from the agile community, but I don't get it. They sure seem to be quick status meetings that allow everyone to get a handle on the current status of the iteration?
- babarock 14y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm not an "agile guru". I've worked for years in an old-school corporate environment and just recently switched job and joined a small agile team. My views on agile don't come from reading or theory, they come from my one month experience so far. The only difference between standups and status meeting is that you're not there to fill a report card. You're not there to show your manager you did something. You're just there because it's the only 10 minutes in the whole day where the whole team comes together to discuss. It's (at least in my place of work) highly informal, very chilled and very genuine. What we do is say what we're working on and ask for help and/or ideas. We have a private IRC channel for this, but the fact that we meet face to face for 10 mins a day really does bring up interesting fast conversations. The whole point of standups is not to take notes, not to keep track and just have a quick break to talk (not type) about work.
- ratherbefuddled 14y ago
  Standups are useful to the team. They are for making sure everybody knows what's being done and impediments that can't be fixed inside the team get kicked to someone who can focus on them. Anything in a standup that isn't useful to the whole team should fall by the wayside. They are standups to encourage them to be short. Status meetings are for the benefit of a manager. They allow everybody to report to the manager so the manager can feel comfortably informed. These are typically useless to everybody else because they drag on for far longer and nobody pays attention whilst each individual briefs that manager. These sorts of meetings are detrimental to getting a team to self organise.
- suppressingfire 14y ago
corresation 14y ago
Aside from standups becoming status meetings (which it a mechanism of superficial management used by terrible managers), one of my gripes with them is that they're often redundant -- everyone should know what everyone else is working on, and what everyone else finished, and any blocking issues, via your agile tool (e.g. Rally). Redundancy in information is a terrible, terrible thing, and it leads to a situation where neither becomes canonical because that other thing.
- TheSilentMan 14y ago
  To me, it seems like a waste of time to have everybody constantly monitoring the status of every card being worked on when you can just have everybody stand in one place for 10 or 15 minutes, then maybe another 15 minutes of subgroups talking about potential solutions to issues that were brought up. On top of that if you really want the tool to show everything everyone is blocked on at any time, you wind up spending a lot more time than strictly necessary just typing status updates. In my team's standups, people frequently wind up shifting plans to cover issues that are brought up or offering work arounds to mitigate blocking issues and kick them down the road a bit to give the scrum master(who is also our VP) time to clear them. We also wind up frequently offering to pair with different people based on what they're working on(i.e. one dev is working on something that touches part of our system that's particularly fragile, another dev more familiar with that area will offer to pair for the morning). Since we started doing morning standups I've seen our team get more productive.
  - absconditus 14y ago
    You are advocating a meeting once per day. Why not spend 2 minutes at that time to look over the agile board in the tool instead? I look at my team's board several times per day, as well as check-ins, and I spend very little time doing it. I am also aware of status throughout the day instead of once during the meeting.
- wpietri 14y ago
  In which case, I'd say stop putting information in the tool. We ran my last company on index cards. You can see a picture here: https://www.quora.com/Startups/Which-is-the-best-To-Do-List-Task-Management-application-Any-do-WunderList-Orchestra-Cheddar-Jugggla-Gmail-Tasks-or-other-Which-also-has-Project-Management-features-tasks-as-part-of-a-project/answer/William-Pietri?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Startups/Which-is-the-best-To-Do-List-... The average card had maybe 4 words on it. We knew about issues because we talked about them. I love the written word, but it is so much slower and less efficient than face-to-face communication in so many circumstances. The highest-bandwidth, lowest-latency human communication system is conversation.
mratzloff 14y ago
Every daily standup I have been a part of or organized has turned into a status meeting. The biggest "tell" of a status meeting masquerading as a standup? When people address the boss, not each other.
- firepoet 14y ago
  What would it be like if the boss wasn't there? I've had good Scrum Masters hide under their desks if people kept reporting status out at them. The point: people in authority need to continually work to fight the urge to be "in charge" during self-organizational meetings. Also: training/coaching wouldn't hurt..
greghinch 14y ago
I'm on my fourth team now since 2005 where I have helped successfully employ scrum, and stand ups are a great part of it. A couple of the biggest mistakes I see being made are: 1) not correctly identifying "chickens" and "pigs"[1]. Pigs get to talk in a standup, chickens do not. In fact any interaction with the pigs and chickens should go entirely through the scrum master (and not during the standup). If chickens want to come to the standup it is to observe only. 2) conversations. The standup is not the time for conversation. The best method I've employed is to have each person specifically answer three questions: what did you do since the last standup? What are you going to do between now and the next one? Are you impeded in any way? The last one is where conversations often start. Scrum master needs to stop those, identify the people who need to talk after the stand up, and move things along. When you follow those as hard fast rules, standups shouldn't take more than N*3 minutes where N is the number of pigs. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig
jlarocco 14y ago
IMO the usefulness of standup meetings depends entirely on the project and the team. It's impossible to categorically say they're good or bad. For a while I worked on a team with a small codebase, which we all knew pretty well, and it was very likely that if somebody made a change today, I'd be working in the same area of code in the next day or two. In that situation I thought standups were really helpful. My current team/project is a bit larger and it's maintenance on a much, much larger code base. The project is large enough that nobody really knows the whole thing very well, and everybody works on a different section and there's not much overlap. If I were to switch places with somebody I'd have a lot more to learn than just what they've worked on recently. On this project we're still required to do standups, but they're useless. The information wouldn't be very useful to me even if people kept to one or two sentences of what they were doing. Of course, few people do that, and they usually go into obscure details that maybe two people in the whole group really understand. And that's when I tune out...
kposehn 14y ago
I'm inclined to agree that Standups can be quite good. Every morning we have our meeting which maxes out at 15 minutes. The designated note-taker rotates daily and takes the list of current action items to be added to RedMine. The biggest difficulty was fairly simple actually - removing digression from the mix and also removing things we've completed from the meeting. There are no side conversations while stuff is being covered, and every day we sum up what we did in a company-wide email. Other subjects happen offline between relevant parties. This has been remarkably effective for us :)
jt2190 14y ago
Both articles lack context, which we're all just filling in with our personal experiences with standup meetings, hence the pointless "debate" in the comments here. I've noticed that developers can be divided into two groups based on whether they prefer to work with others or by themselves. Those that prefer to work by themselves take chunks of work that can be done without input (formal or informal) from their fellow developers, (who they may refer to as "teammates" despite the fact that they don't work as a team in any real sense.) For this group, having a daily standup is a waste of time, because there is no work to coordinate. Those that prefer to work with others take chunks of work that can't be considered complete until their fellow developers have also completed their portions. They seek continual input from their teammates in order to keep everyone on the same page. For this group the daily standup is just a more formal version of what they already do informally.
manojlds 14y ago
Offtopic - Hate these "github.com" posts that are actually from some blog hosted by some random dude on Github. Makes the domain bit meaningless. Wasn't there some fix for this to show more of the domain in certain cases?
- jaredsohn 14y ago
  Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/show-full-domain-on-hn/hdjpfdgkdgogkebgfogedfhhpiibclpe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/show-full-domain-o... Bookmarklet: https://github.com/johngibb/Hacker-News--Show-Subdomains https://github.com/johngibb/Hacker-News--Show-Subdomains Edit: Haven't tried them myself; just did an hnsearch. It would be great if Hacker News would always show the subdomain if not www.
  - grimgrin 14y ago
    For the record, tried the Chrome extension and it is only marginally better, showing you "dshimy.github.com", but not the domain added via CNAME.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
grevutsky 14y ago
When I first started doing standups, mine were longer than necessary. But as I got more comfortable and the team's workflow jelled, I've gotten better at being concise.
tosh 14y ago
Regarding the usefulness of standup-meetings I've written a blog post on how we do them at Blossom: https://www.blossom.io/blog/2012/09/17/3-tips-for-quick-effective-stand-up-meetings.html https://www.blossom.io/blog/2012/09/17/3-tips-for-quick-effe... If done well they can be a great facilitator. Just make sure it fits your culture.
stevenp 14y ago
At my current job at turntable.fm, we only have standups twice a week (Tuesday and Thursday), and I honestly was surprised at how effective that is. I've always operated under the assumption that a standup needs to happen daily to be valuable, but trying them 2x weekly has changed my mind. I think the real problem is when a standup is the only way that a team actually communicates status. At turntable we rely heavily on chat, which also contains messages indicating when new things are being pushed, and we also make it a point to have a lot of face-to-face communication. Our twice-weekly standups are a good way to fill in the gaps, if there are any, but they are by no means the only way that people find out what's going on.
- vpeters25 14y ago
  And this is a very good example on what Agile is about. The daily stand ups are part of the basic "framework" but not mandatory if something else works better for a team. The key is to constantly inspect how the process is working and be open, as a team, to make adjustments.
sardonicbryan 14y ago
Standups work really well when there are dependencies between different functional groups. Consider a team working on a live browser/Facebook-based free to play game (social game as a service). There are many releases a week. - Engineering typically requires art assets to begin/complete work. Ie. building models, unit models, 2D unit images, item images, etc. - Releases don't end when they are pushed up to prod -- most releases have some kind of "go to market" plan that must be executed. For example, if a new Dragon Armor is released, we need to message all players to inform them of the new functionality and educate them on how it works, there would typically be a simultaneous tournament or contest that awards the new Armor as a prize, and possibly some other sale or promotion on a related item. - It's a time for product to provide updates on where different specs are and on key game metrics. - Customer Support/Community Management also provide updates on any emerging issues in the game, which improves everyone's situational awareness.
OldSchool 14y ago
IMO Standups are very useful for a team that works remotely. Placing them in the middle of the day ensures that nobody's going to have to bend his or her schedule unreasonably. Would you rather get at least one extra IM or phone call(?) from each member of the team randomly throughout the day as you're quietly and productively working in your own zone? I'm all for anything that tends to eliminate mental context switching during the day. Needless to say, not a fan of any office environment for coders.
orangethirty 14y ago
One on Monday before I start and one on Friday before I leave. That is how I do it and it works.
djhworld 14y ago
I'm a developer and not really a fan of standups, I find them monotonous and dull and often "zone out" after I've said my bit, but I can see how they are useful to management. The problem with standups at the company I work for is our team work on multiple projects so standups end up being just "I'm working on project X and it's going well, no blockers, cheers!" updates from everyone in the circle. Standups are probably better for teams working on a single product as everyone has a stake in what's going on
drewmclellan 14y ago
I used to hate standups when I was at Yahoo. Maybe it's more a sign of how broken Yahoo is than how broken standups are, but the daily process was roughly: 0. 9am, catch up on email, then coast for a while knowing you'll have to stop work at 10am. 1. Find out which meeting room the 10am standup is in 2. Figure out where in the building that room is 3. Travel to the rough part of the building, hunt around for the room. 4. Wait for everyone else to do the same. It's now 10.20am 5. Stand (OMG the standing!) around for 30 minutes listening to a boring load of status updates from 20 people that have absolutely nothing to do with you. 6. Give your status update (Yesterday I did some work. Today I'll do some more work. What's blocking me is this f'king meeting.) It's now 10.50am 7. Travel back to the part of the building your desk is in today (if you can find it) and grab a coffee on the way. That's an hour gone, and it's only another hour to lunch, so no point getting into anything too major. Knock off some smaller to-do items. Lunchtime! An alien race observing us would conclude that teams were a device used to prevent work getting done.
- wpietri 14y ago
  Wow, that's like a zoo of process pathologies. In order, the things I see: I like doing the stand-up as early as possible, so that there's minimal slack time before hand. And I prefer to work in ways that are less dependent on the state in one's head, including test-driven development and pair programming. The standup is always in the team room. Everybody on the same team works in the same room. Generally, you do it in front of the kanban that shows the state of the project. Because it's right where everybody works, it's pretty easy to be on time. Regardless, it starts on time. No waiting for stragglers; it just encourages them. You stand for 10 minutes or so. The team is some reasonable size; I think of 12 as a maximum. If the people turning up have nothing to do with you, then it's not actually a team. Teams are groups of people that win or lose together. Team members help one another out to achieve shared goals. If what people say is boring, you should be able to tell them so. They are there to talk to the team; there's no point in them saying things that aren't useful to the team. Coffee should be in or near the team room. Ditto water, snacks, and other things necessary for humans to do work. The stand-up should be run in such a way that people leave ready to jump on things. If I had to guess from your description, I'd say that Yahoo took a top-down culture, pasted on some Agile rituals, and kept right doing the same old bullshit. Which, honestly, is a giant waste of time. If you're going to do waterfall in a command-and-control context, just do that. No sense putting agile lipstick on your waterfall pig.
knighthacker 14y ago
I appreciate the author taking the time to write the article, but my opinion is that the whole purpose of a daily standup is to open a line of communication between team members. Well, if you have this line of communication open 24 hours, emails, chat (xmpp, irc ..etc), phone, and so forth, why do I need to wait till tomorrow afternoon for the scheduled daily standup to talk about a blocker in my code?
- wpietri 14y ago
  There's nothing wrong with talking more often. It's just to make sure that a team syncs up on a shared understanding of the state of things at least that often.
Zigurd 14y ago
If your standups are bad, there are things other than the standup that are going wrong: If it lasts too long, the person running it has lost control If it ends up berating a coder twice a day, every day, regarding a multi-day implementation task, the person running the standup is an incompetent project manager If, as others have given examples of, people zone out, or become unconfortable, the project has become toxic and the standups can't fix that If standups adhere to dogma more than they solve problems, the person running them lacks critical thinking skills and knowledge of project management techniques
asynchronous13 14y ago
I think the summary of this could be, "Ineffective meetings are ineffective." Meetings are one tool among many for team communication, it's just that very few people are able to run a meeting effectively. I used to believe that all meetings, in any form, were a waste of time. Right up until I worked for someone who actually knew how to run a meeting. It was amazing - in a 12-15 person meeting, everyone person contributed, tangents were quickly cut-off, and they rarely lasted more than 30mins. Sadly, she was promoted (i mean, good for her, bad for my group at the time) and without her guidance our group meetings quickly reverted back to a multi-hour mostly useless waste of time. The lesson I learned is not to dismiss meetings outright. Spend some effort learning how to run them effectively, and it's still a useful communication tool.
hermannj314 14y ago
A few times a day, I say to my colleagues "Want to grab some coffee?" and then we go to the coffee machine and get coffee. It is inevitable while doing that we talk about what we are doing, roadblocks, etc. and sometimes we have nothing to say and we talk about something else. That works for our team of 4-5, but I understand that it can't scale. Of course, if management started calling it a stand-up meeting and took away the coffee, I'm fairly certain we'd get less out of it. tl-dr; why is a stand-up meeting better than just grabbing a coffee with your colleagues?
datalus 14y ago
We run stanups at my place. Everyone keeps their time to talk brief as possible and we have a rotating leader to keep people out of the weeds. It works out quite well, so I agree strongly with the article that stand ups are not a waste.
dreamdu5t 14y ago
At my company, we have a HipChat room for "Daily Updates" and an automatic reminder that notifies everyone to post what they did yesterday and what they plan on doing today. That's it. Most people post by noon, and the manager has a written log. It's been working well so far.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Do you read what people post after you do? That is important too.
philwelch 14y ago
Standups, when well done on a healthy team, aren't poisonous. But I've found that they're rather pointless as well. If you have enough unforced communication in your team, you don't need the standup.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Standups are like communism, great in theory, often horrible in practice. Of all the standups I've participated in going back 5 years I'd say only one was any good. It was every other day, it was forcibly limited to 15 minutes or less, it was always on time, it was never allowed to go off on a tangent, it only had about 3 or 4 people in it, and it was actively pushed away from being a status meeting. This contrasts with every other standup I've been a part of which almost always cut into productivity, and worse. For a while there was a daily standup with 12+ members that often went for 45 minutes and sometimes went for an hour and a half. The problem with a formalized methodology like standups (or agile in general) is that if you don't have very well defined and explicit reasons and goals and you don't make that a part of the system then people will just drift into doing what seems to make sense to them, which is status reports and aimless meetings.
- bmm6o 14y ago
  A 45-90 minute meeting with 12 people doesn't even sound good in theory. I know defenses of agile can run into "no true scotsman" territory, but that is pretty objectively not agile. Your last paragraph explains why you have to be committed to doing it right. It's easy to do it wrong, and it becomes worse than doing nothing. But if your complaint is that doing it right is hard or that you need management buy-in, that's different than it doesn't work in practice.
  - bmm6o 14y ago
    I should probably say "scrum" where I say "agile" above. I would edit but I'm on my phone.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    That was just the worst example. Most of the other examples ranged from more or less useless to actively harmful. As I said, the problem is that the reasoning and goals become too easily separated from the activity. And then before you know it you've got cargo cult behavior on your hand. Wouldn't you know it, the instances where standups were used effectively was when the team had a lot of experienced people who knew how to work well. A methodology that is only effective for people who already know how to work well is not a good methodology in my book.
static_typed 14y ago
Standups are a symptom of a failing software engineering disease called 'Agile', which is the real toxin to the system of all healthy developers.
ender7 14y ago
This just seems to boil down to well-run meetings vs. poorly-run meetings. Standups are meant to be light-weight meetings where everyone gets back on the same page. If that's not happening, then someone isn't running the meeting correctly.
kabdib 14y ago
My old group started "doing agile." We had daily scrums. They quickly turned into status meetings for the PMs to bubble up micro-progress reports. This, on a team with four engineers and three QA types. We sat next to each other. We didn't need standups, we needed to be left alone to do work. Finally, on one project the PM (who had appointed himself scrumlord) finally let us meet only twice a week, and had the common decency to call the meetings "status". Call things what they are.
ardit33 14y ago
I personally hate standups. They are the 21st century version of Chinese Communist style Daily Morning Exercises. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_2C3bvh6ms http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_2C3bvh6ms Usually they either are void of real information (as they are supposed to be quick) and nothing is discussed in depth, or if things do end up discussed they end up taking too long. Unfortunately they have propagated in most work places/engineering cultures. Information should flow naturally between engineers. If you have a jelling team, people should communicate with each other naturally, without having to be forced to stand up and listen to status reports (that's exactly what standups are). I prefer once or twice a week engineering 30mins sync ups. Short meeting, that get to the point on whats going on, and you have some time to discuss things in depth if needed. For any small things, the expectations would be that engineers should communicate with each other directly. Instead of having 5 interruptions a week, you have one or two (slightly larger ones). At the end of the day accountability should be on the delivery of projects (end results), and not efforts (which standups are more about showing efforts, rather than results). From personal experience, experienced engineers tend to highly dislike them, and the over-reliance on standups is an indication of a weak engineering culture.
sultezdukes 14y ago
Who's doing standups with a 6 member team for 30 minutes? That's nuts. We're a 6 member team and our standups are typically 5 minutes or less. We stopped that "what you did yesterday, what you're going to accomplish today, do you have any roadblocks" rigor nonsense. We just turnaround to see what's going on. In the beginning, I was pretty turned off by the rules we were using for standup, but once we stopped all that, they're pretty helpful, just so we know where we all stand. My first job out of school, we had a developer that claimed that he couldn't get any work done around the office because he was constantly being interruped. Well, his boss let him work from home on this very important project with a hard deadline. Well, he wasn't checking in and he was being vague about where he stood. Lo-and-behold, 3 months later he has nothing to show for, and he's history. As a previous poster put it, standup can be a canary in the coalmine.
garagemc2 14y ago
We don't do standups. Trello does all the communicating. 1) It tells me whats done and what is not, through the checkboxes 2) On larger projects, the guys leave updates in the activity section every couple of hours or when they hit a milestone or a are stuck with a problem or are unsure of something. Think of these as like facebook style updates but for large projects. These updates are delivered to me in real time. We can then discuss any problems etc at a suitable time at their convenience or I can pre-emptively direct them to someone who can help. Unless the problem is urgent in which case we discuss it then and there. This way I know what's what and the guys have an open channel to me.
parnas 14y ago
For my show and tell, sniff sniff, I ...

153 points by dshimy 14y ago

"Remember, they are not status meetings." Additionally, I think it is important to remember that standup is not a "justify my existence on the team" meeting. Having nothing to report is fine.

Morendil 14y ago
This, a million times. (Which is how many I feel like I've said it so far.) Conversely, this particular dysfunction of standups is a useful index of how much the corporate culture leads people to feel like they must justify their existence.
skrebbel 14y ago
I agree, but i notice that i find it difficult to act on it, and many with me. Any tips for how to get the "look, i did work" urge out of the way?
- suppressingfire 14y ago
  If I haven't made any progress since the last day, I just talk about what I plan to do for the upcoming day. I also might say "I'm still working on (the thing I was working on yesterday)". With a well functioning, trusting team that should be a perfectly reasonable thing to say every so often.
- wpietri 14y ago
  To me, that's a sign of low collaboration and low trust. If your team does regular retrospectives, I'd just say, "Look, I feel like in stand-ups, I keep having to justify my existence. Do other people feel that? What can we change to make that better?" Off the top of my head, I'd look at the size of the unit of work and the length of the release cycle. I think Agile processes work best when the work is broken down into lots of small deliverables that meet the INVEST criteria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INVEST_%28mnemonic%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INVEST_%28mnemonic%29 If the team is jointly completing a few shippable things a day, then everybody should have a pretty good idea that everybody else is working. Doubly so if those are actually getting released daily.
YokoZar 14y ago
How do I communicate this when I'm in such a team and daily meetings are regularly going 30 minutes?
- Evbn 14y ago
  Email this thread to your team, if you are too shy to say "let's take that conversation offline" whenever someone drifts off topic.
  - YokoZar 14y ago
    What if we have a product manager who's asking for a status report on every single open bug every meeting?
dmoney 14y ago
> Having nothing to report is fine. In a meeting where you're supposed to say what you've been working on, at a job where you're paid to be working on it, in what way is it fine to have nothing to report?
- mindcrime 14y ago
  You were blocked by some externality. If all you have to report is "I'm still waiting for Larry in XYZ group to send over the new protocol specs", then that's all you can really say. Vis-a-vis the daily scrum/standup, that's all you have to say. Issues like "what else could you be doing with your time, what are we paying you to do" blah, are a topic for a different audience and a different time. That said, in a quality team staffed with quality people, you don't worry about people goofing off during the time they're blocked... you assume they are doing some kind of self-development, or tweaking some small detail somewhere, etc. It's when somebody is blocked for long enough that it puts their tasks in jeopardy that the scrummaster needs to start escalating things and working to get the roadblocks removed, and/or manage expectations vis-a-vis the tasks for the iteration.

moron4hire 14y ago

I have tried to get this point across at every place I have worked. Management covets micromanagement, so stands turn into status meetings.

kamkazemoose 14y ago
My team just went through more agile training, and one piece of advice I found interesting was to consider keeping the managers out of the standup if it's not working. The meeting is to help others on the team, so that's the only people who need to be there.
- wpietri 14y ago
  Absolutely! And once things are running well enough that you can let the managers back in, it's still reasonable to forbid them to talk. Unless they are on the hook for deliverables, then they are at best there to observe.

projectileboy 14y ago

Honestly, I can't understand all of the vitriol around "agile" methods that arises here occasionally. If you're doing something that works for your team, do it, if it doesn't work, do something else. Isn't that the whole idea behind "agile" stuff? Do people get stuck in situations where they have to do X because "we're doing agile, and agile says we must do X"? If so, can't the offenders be gently pointed to http://agilemanifesto.org http://agilemanifesto.org ?

brazzy 14y ago
I believe ist's a combination of never having experienced the monstrosities agile was invented to replace, having experienced agile done wrong, and natural cowboy coder hybris.
- paulrademacher 14y ago
  In my experience, the "cowboy coder" is sometimes indeed disruptive (large unannounced refactors, e.g.), but almost always they are the most productive people on the team, the ones who contribute the best and most code.
  - Morcane 14y ago
    well, in my experience, cowboy coders fuck up, leave and have others fix the mess they left.
wpietri 14y ago
Oh, the vitriol is entirely earned. I learned one of the Agile methods before the term Agile was even invented. Adopting it made a giant difference in the quality and sanity of my work. But so many people today have have pseudo-Agile methods inflicted on them in large corporate contexts. There, the point isn't to make things saner and more effective. It's to please some executive who has a bee in their bonnet. And often, they only adopt some labels and some rituals. It's all pain, no gain. I wrote about how this happened here: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/ http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how... But it's at the point where I avoid using the term "Agile". Or any other buzzword. I look at the circumstances, and say, "Hey, you guys feel pain X. Can we try change Y and see if that helps?" Often, the tool is one from the Agile or Lean toolbox. But I won't talk about the particular process I'm borrowing from because a) most people don't care, and b) a lot of people have been burned with faux-Agile adoptions.

onemorepassword 14y ago

Standups can however very easily become very uncomfortable in a dysfunctional environment. (As the original article unwittingly demonstrated.) Consider the standup to be the canary in the coalmine. Most of the time people can ignore the dysfunction, work around it and pretend it isn't happening by just getting on with the job as much as possible. But the standup will then become increasingly uncomfortable. Every single day. In a healthy organisation, you can have perfectly pleasant standups, even without Scrum or Agile. I mean, what does a healthy team have to fear from standing around for a few minutes bringing each other up to speed? It's a process that is very close to what often happens quite naturally around the time everyone on the team has arrived at the office (or online). A standup can only become poisonous if the poison is injected from elsewhere. In Gareth's case abusing it for management status reports. In other cases it might be tension between team members, not having a clear goal, whatever. The point is, you cannot have pleasant standup if there is that kind of stuff going on. Which is all the more reason to have a standup, unless it's your policy to ignore problems rather than dealing with them. Standups aren't just not poisonous either: they are a very good poison detector.

hobs 14y ago
It's a process that is very close to what often happens quite naturally around the time everyone on the team has arrived at the office (or online). This is exactly the behavior I have seen of well functioning teams. Usually there is a period when the person comes in, maybe after coming up to speed on their email where they get informed and up to speed on what is happening with everyone, if anyone needs anything, what people are working on, and then get to work! Standups are just a formalized approach to what can be a drawn out process for an individual, and in some cases may not be "normal" for your standard introvert dev types who sit at a computer all day and perceive meetings as multi-hour long chores that are inflicted on their participants instead of quick high quality bursts of information distributed in an efficient fashion (face to face).
Evbn 14y ago
Thank you. Most of "agile" "process" serves one purpose: to shine light on every aspect of your team's functioning. What you do with what you see is up to you.

je42 14y ago

I am wondering where you guys draw the line between a standup and a status reporting meeting ?

johnrob 14y ago

Standups would make more sense if the team did not communicate during the day. The reason I think they are pointless is that when a blocking issue arises, you drop what you're doing and walk straight over to the person who can help you. I've never seen or heard of someone waiting until the following day's standup to bring up the issue (which is supposedly what the standup is for, right?).

ratherbefuddled 14y ago
Standups primarily are for making sure everyone knows what's going on. If you're doing Scrum, the only issues you should really be bringing to standups are those you can't solve within the team that you need the Scrum Master to sort out. Anything the team can fix for itself isn't blocking, it's business as usual.
knighthacker 14y ago
I should have read your comment before I posted mine, but I agree 100%
gdulli 14y ago
This is why I don't allow them on my teams. You have a block or issue and you're going to passively wait until the next morning or whenever the next meeting is? No. Deal with it when it comes up, don't lose half a day.

sareon 14y ago

What's a standup? I didn't see it defined in either post.

elliottcarlson 14y ago
A standup is generally what it sounds like - the entire team stands up together and quickly/briefly cover what they have worked on in the last 24 hours. This can be as simple as "still working on x", or "i need x from y to continue". Some places don't manage standups well at all, and that is one of the big problems with standups in general - they become status meetings and take too long. When done right, they are very useful as you quickly know what everyone is working on and if someone might need your insights on something (which should then be a separate meeting and not covered in the standup).
potatolicious 14y ago
To expand on elliotcarlson's post: There are a few main features of standups that, if abused or ignored, can lead to awfulness. - They're supposed to be short, very short. A few minutes at the most. They do not work for large teams (20 people giving a status update is a lot), and if you find yourself having 20-person standups it's time to think about if you should be breaking them into multiple independent standups. - Managers aren't present, or aren't allowed to speak. This is an opportunity to ask questions, ask for help, describe what you're working on, to other members of your team, not to justify what you were up to yesterday to your boss. It's sharing, not reporting. This part is key. - You don't troubleshoot in a standup. If you say "I can't figure out why I can't Foo module Baz", there shouldn't be a discussion about it, but someone else might go "I've worked with Baz a lot, let's take a look together after standup.", or later in the day someone might go "Oh hey, that problem you were having with Baz? I think I know what's happening." - this is the ideal intent of standups. Very quick snippets that highlight certain things in everyone's minds. - It doesn't need to be documented. It's not a meeting, you don't need to take down minutes. Actual tracking of work done occurs separately (your scrum master should be doing this).
djhworld 14y ago
You stand in a circle and listen to people update management on what they are doing

guiomie 14y ago

"Gareth Rees’ article titled, Standups are Poinonous hit HN" ... I stopped there.

Gigablah 14y ago
"Stopping at the First Sentence Considered Harmful"

notjustanymike 14y ago

Holy crap, he has 3 hours standups? They're called "STAND UPS" because you stand while giving them so that you're motivated to be quick! I actually try and follow the one-breath rule for what have I done, what am I doing, what are my blockers.

Bootvis 14y ago
No, he is saying that a 6 person, 30 minute stand up takes 3 hours.
- dasil003 14y ago
  I read that but it sailed right over my head until your comment because that is an utterly banal observation. Yeah, Microsoft spends 12 man months on bathroom breaks every single day too; I guess that's why they are going down the shitter.
  - Bootvis 14y ago
    I agree that it is not a very deep point but I think the point is a different one from the point your analogy make. People go to toilets, slack off and do all kinds of things during work that are not actually work. Those things are unavoidable. However, meetings that take too long are avoidable, have a low value by definition and thus require management action.

dos1 14y ago

I'm genuinely curious, how are standups not status meetings? From the article: - Make sure everyone is working on the right thing - Help out other team members by taking work off their plate or helping them by sharing domain-specific knowledge - Keeping everyone informed How is that different from a status meeting? I've heard "standups are not status meetings" over and over from the agile community, but I don't get it. They sure seem to be quick status meetings that allow everyone to get a handle on the current status of the iteration?

babarock 14y ago
Disclaimer: I'm not an "agile guru". I've worked for years in an old-school corporate environment and just recently switched job and joined a small agile team. My views on agile don't come from reading or theory, they come from my one month experience so far. The only difference between standups and status meeting is that you're not there to fill a report card. You're not there to show your manager you did something. You're just there because it's the only 10 minutes in the whole day where the whole team comes together to discuss. It's (at least in my place of work) highly informal, very chilled and very genuine. What we do is say what we're working on and ask for help and/or ideas. We have a private IRC channel for this, but the fact that we meet face to face for 10 mins a day really does bring up interesting fast conversations. The whole point of standups is not to take notes, not to keep track and just have a quick break to talk (not type) about work.
ratherbefuddled 14y ago
Standups are useful to the team. They are for making sure everybody knows what's being done and impediments that can't be fixed inside the team get kicked to someone who can focus on them. Anything in a standup that isn't useful to the whole team should fall by the wayside. They are standups to encourage them to be short. Status meetings are for the benefit of a manager. They allow everybody to report to the manager so the manager can feel comfortably informed. These are typically useless to everybody else because they drag on for far longer and nobody pays attention whilst each individual briefs that manager. These sorts of meetings are detrimental to getting a team to self organise.
suppressingfire 14y ago

corresation 14y ago

Aside from standups becoming status meetings (which it a mechanism of superficial management used by terrible managers), one of my gripes with them is that they're often redundant -- everyone should know what everyone else is working on, and what everyone else finished, and any blocking issues, via your agile tool (e.g. Rally). Redundancy in information is a terrible, terrible thing, and it leads to a situation where neither becomes canonical because that other thing.

TheSilentMan 14y ago
To me, it seems like a waste of time to have everybody constantly monitoring the status of every card being worked on when you can just have everybody stand in one place for 10 or 15 minutes, then maybe another 15 minutes of subgroups talking about potential solutions to issues that were brought up. On top of that if you really want the tool to show everything everyone is blocked on at any time, you wind up spending a lot more time than strictly necessary just typing status updates. In my team's standups, people frequently wind up shifting plans to cover issues that are brought up or offering work arounds to mitigate blocking issues and kick them down the road a bit to give the scrum master(who is also our VP) time to clear them. We also wind up frequently offering to pair with different people based on what they're working on(i.e. one dev is working on something that touches part of our system that's particularly fragile, another dev more familiar with that area will offer to pair for the morning). Since we started doing morning standups I've seen our team get more productive.
- absconditus 14y ago
  You are advocating a meeting once per day. Why not spend 2 minutes at that time to look over the agile board in the tool instead? I look at my team's board several times per day, as well as check-ins, and I spend very little time doing it. I am also aware of status throughout the day instead of once during the meeting.
wpietri 14y ago
In which case, I'd say stop putting information in the tool. We ran my last company on index cards. You can see a picture here: https://www.quora.com/Startups/Which-is-the-best-To-Do-List-Task-Management-application-Any-do-WunderList-Orchestra-Cheddar-Jugggla-Gmail-Tasks-or-other-Which-also-has-Project-Management-features-tasks-as-part-of-a-project/answer/William-Pietri?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Startups/Which-is-the-best-To-Do-List-... The average card had maybe 4 words on it. We knew about issues because we talked about them. I love the written word, but it is so much slower and less efficient than face-to-face communication in so many circumstances. The highest-bandwidth, lowest-latency human communication system is conversation.

mratzloff 14y ago

Every daily standup I have been a part of or organized has turned into a status meeting. The biggest "tell" of a status meeting masquerading as a standup? When people address the boss, not each other.

firepoet 14y ago
What would it be like if the boss wasn't there? I've had good Scrum Masters hide under their desks if people kept reporting status out at them. The point: people in authority need to continually work to fight the urge to be "in charge" during self-organizational meetings. Also: training/coaching wouldn't hurt..

greghinch 14y ago

I'm on my fourth team now since 2005 where I have helped successfully employ scrum, and stand ups are a great part of it. A couple of the biggest mistakes I see being made are: 1) not correctly identifying "chickens" and "pigs"[1]. Pigs get to talk in a standup, chickens do not. In fact any interaction with the pigs and chickens should go entirely through the scrum master (and not during the standup). If chickens want to come to the standup it is to observe only. 2) conversations. The standup is not the time for conversation. The best method I've employed is to have each person specifically answer three questions: what did you do since the last standup? What are you going to do between now and the next one? Are you impeded in any way? The last one is where conversations often start. Scrum master needs to stop those, identify the people who need to talk after the stand up, and move things along. When you follow those as hard fast rules, standups shouldn't take more than N*3 minutes where N is the number of pigs. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig

jlarocco 14y ago

IMO the usefulness of standup meetings depends entirely on the project and the team. It's impossible to categorically say they're good or bad. For a while I worked on a team with a small codebase, which we all knew pretty well, and it was very likely that if somebody made a change today, I'd be working in the same area of code in the next day or two. In that situation I thought standups were really helpful. My current team/project is a bit larger and it's maintenance on a much, much larger code base. The project is large enough that nobody really knows the whole thing very well, and everybody works on a different section and there's not much overlap. If I were to switch places with somebody I'd have a lot more to learn than just what they've worked on recently. On this project we're still required to do standups, but they're useless. The information wouldn't be very useful to me even if people kept to one or two sentences of what they were doing. Of course, few people do that, and they usually go into obscure details that maybe two people in the whole group really understand. And that's when I tune out...

kposehn 14y ago

I'm inclined to agree that Standups can be quite good. Every morning we have our meeting which maxes out at 15 minutes. The designated note-taker rotates daily and takes the list of current action items to be added to RedMine. The biggest difficulty was fairly simple actually - removing digression from the mix and also removing things we've completed from the meeting. There are no side conversations while stuff is being covered, and every day we sum up what we did in a company-wide email. Other subjects happen offline between relevant parties. This has been remarkably effective for us :)

jt2190 14y ago

Both articles lack context, which we're all just filling in with our personal experiences with standup meetings, hence the pointless "debate" in the comments here. I've noticed that developers can be divided into two groups based on whether they prefer to work with others or by themselves. Those that prefer to work by themselves take chunks of work that can be done without input (formal or informal) from their fellow developers, (who they may refer to as "teammates" despite the fact that they don't work as a team in any real sense.) For this group, having a daily standup is a waste of time, because there is no work to coordinate. Those that prefer to work with others take chunks of work that can't be considered complete until their fellow developers have also completed their portions. They seek continual input from their teammates in order to keep everyone on the same page. For this group the daily standup is just a more formal version of what they already do informally.

manojlds 14y ago

Offtopic - Hate these "github.com" posts that are actually from some blog hosted by some random dude on Github. Makes the domain bit meaningless. Wasn't there some fix for this to show more of the domain in certain cases?

jaredsohn 14y ago
Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/show-full-domain-on-hn/hdjpfdgkdgogkebgfogedfhhpiibclpe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/show-full-domain-o... Bookmarklet: https://github.com/johngibb/Hacker-News--Show-Subdomains https://github.com/johngibb/Hacker-News--Show-Subdomains Edit: Haven't tried them myself; just did an hnsearch. It would be great if Hacker News would always show the subdomain if not www.
- grimgrin 14y ago
  For the record, tried the Chrome extension and it is only marginally better, showing you "dshimy.github.com", but not the domain added via CNAME.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

grevutsky 14y ago

When I first started doing standups, mine were longer than necessary. But as I got more comfortable and the team's workflow jelled, I've gotten better at being concise.

tosh 14y ago

Regarding the usefulness of standup-meetings I've written a blog post on how we do them at Blossom: https://www.blossom.io/blog/2012/09/17/3-tips-for-quick-effective-stand-up-meetings.html https://www.blossom.io/blog/2012/09/17/3-tips-for-quick-effe... If done well they can be a great facilitator. Just make sure it fits your culture.

stevenp 14y ago

At my current job at turntable.fm, we only have standups twice a week (Tuesday and Thursday), and I honestly was surprised at how effective that is. I've always operated under the assumption that a standup needs to happen daily to be valuable, but trying them 2x weekly has changed my mind. I think the real problem is when a standup is the only way that a team actually communicates status. At turntable we rely heavily on chat, which also contains messages indicating when new things are being pushed, and we also make it a point to have a lot of face-to-face communication. Our twice-weekly standups are a good way to fill in the gaps, if there are any, but they are by no means the only way that people find out what's going on.

vpeters25 14y ago
And this is a very good example on what Agile is about. The daily stand ups are part of the basic "framework" but not mandatory if something else works better for a team. The key is to constantly inspect how the process is working and be open, as a team, to make adjustments.

sardonicbryan 14y ago

Standups work really well when there are dependencies between different functional groups. Consider a team working on a live browser/Facebook-based free to play game (social game as a service). There are many releases a week. - Engineering typically requires art assets to begin/complete work. Ie. building models, unit models, 2D unit images, item images, etc. - Releases don't end when they are pushed up to prod -- most releases have some kind of "go to market" plan that must be executed. For example, if a new Dragon Armor is released, we need to message all players to inform them of the new functionality and educate them on how it works, there would typically be a simultaneous tournament or contest that awards the new Armor as a prize, and possibly some other sale or promotion on a related item. - It's a time for product to provide updates on where different specs are and on key game metrics. - Customer Support/Community Management also provide updates on any emerging issues in the game, which improves everyone's situational awareness.

OldSchool 14y ago

IMO Standups are very useful for a team that works remotely. Placing them in the middle of the day ensures that nobody's going to have to bend his or her schedule unreasonably. Would you rather get at least one extra IM or phone call(?) from each member of the team randomly throughout the day as you're quietly and productively working in your own zone? I'm all for anything that tends to eliminate mental context switching during the day. Needless to say, not a fan of any office environment for coders.

orangethirty 14y ago

One on Monday before I start and one on Friday before I leave. That is how I do it and it works.

djhworld 14y ago

I'm a developer and not really a fan of standups, I find them monotonous and dull and often "zone out" after I've said my bit, but I can see how they are useful to management. The problem with standups at the company I work for is our team work on multiple projects so standups end up being just "I'm working on project X and it's going well, no blockers, cheers!" updates from everyone in the circle. Standups are probably better for teams working on a single product as everyone has a stake in what's going on

drewmclellan 14y ago

I used to hate standups when I was at Yahoo. Maybe it's more a sign of how broken Yahoo is than how broken standups are, but the daily process was roughly: 0. 9am, catch up on email, then coast for a while knowing you'll have to stop work at 10am. 1. Find out which meeting room the 10am standup is in 2. Figure out where in the building that room is 3. Travel to the rough part of the building, hunt around for the room. 4. Wait for everyone else to do the same. It's now 10.20am 5. Stand (OMG the standing!) around for 30 minutes listening to a boring load of status updates from 20 people that have absolutely nothing to do with you. 6. Give your status update (Yesterday I did some work. Today I'll do some more work. What's blocking me is this f'king meeting.) It's now 10.50am 7. Travel back to the part of the building your desk is in today (if you can find it) and grab a coffee on the way. That's an hour gone, and it's only another hour to lunch, so no point getting into anything too major. Knock off some smaller to-do items. Lunchtime! An alien race observing us would conclude that teams were a device used to prevent work getting done.

wpietri 14y ago
Wow, that's like a zoo of process pathologies. In order, the things I see: I like doing the stand-up as early as possible, so that there's minimal slack time before hand. And I prefer to work in ways that are less dependent on the state in one's head, including test-driven development and pair programming. The standup is always in the team room. Everybody on the same team works in the same room. Generally, you do it in front of the kanban that shows the state of the project. Because it's right where everybody works, it's pretty easy to be on time. Regardless, it starts on time. No waiting for stragglers; it just encourages them. You stand for 10 minutes or so. The team is some reasonable size; I think of 12 as a maximum. If the people turning up have nothing to do with you, then it's not actually a team. Teams are groups of people that win or lose together. Team members help one another out to achieve shared goals. If what people say is boring, you should be able to tell them so. They are there to talk to the team; there's no point in them saying things that aren't useful to the team. Coffee should be in or near the team room. Ditto water, snacks, and other things necessary for humans to do work. The stand-up should be run in such a way that people leave ready to jump on things. If I had to guess from your description, I'd say that Yahoo took a top-down culture, pasted on some Agile rituals, and kept right doing the same old bullshit. Which, honestly, is a giant waste of time. If you're going to do waterfall in a command-and-control context, just do that. No sense putting agile lipstick on your waterfall pig.

knighthacker 14y ago

I appreciate the author taking the time to write the article, but my opinion is that the whole purpose of a daily standup is to open a line of communication between team members. Well, if you have this line of communication open 24 hours, emails, chat (xmpp, irc ..etc), phone, and so forth, why do I need to wait till tomorrow afternoon for the scheduled daily standup to talk about a blocker in my code?

wpietri 14y ago
There's nothing wrong with talking more often. It's just to make sure that a team syncs up on a shared understanding of the state of things at least that often.

Zigurd 14y ago

If your standups are bad, there are things other than the standup that are going wrong: If it lasts too long, the person running it has lost control If it ends up berating a coder twice a day, every day, regarding a multi-day implementation task, the person running the standup is an incompetent project manager If, as others have given examples of, people zone out, or become unconfortable, the project has become toxic and the standups can't fix that If standups adhere to dogma more than they solve problems, the person running them lacks critical thinking skills and knowledge of project management techniques

asynchronous13 14y ago

I think the summary of this could be, "Ineffective meetings are ineffective." Meetings are one tool among many for team communication, it's just that very few people are able to run a meeting effectively. I used to believe that all meetings, in any form, were a waste of time. Right up until I worked for someone who actually knew how to run a meeting. It was amazing - in a 12-15 person meeting, everyone person contributed, tangents were quickly cut-off, and they rarely lasted more than 30mins. Sadly, she was promoted (i mean, good for her, bad for my group at the time) and without her guidance our group meetings quickly reverted back to a multi-hour mostly useless waste of time. The lesson I learned is not to dismiss meetings outright. Spend some effort learning how to run them effectively, and it's still a useful communication tool.

hermannj314 14y ago

A few times a day, I say to my colleagues "Want to grab some coffee?" and then we go to the coffee machine and get coffee. It is inevitable while doing that we talk about what we are doing, roadblocks, etc. and sometimes we have nothing to say and we talk about something else. That works for our team of 4-5, but I understand that it can't scale. Of course, if management started calling it a stand-up meeting and took away the coffee, I'm fairly certain we'd get less out of it. tl-dr; why is a stand-up meeting better than just grabbing a coffee with your colleagues?

datalus 14y ago

We run stanups at my place. Everyone keeps their time to talk brief as possible and we have a rotating leader to keep people out of the weeds. It works out quite well, so I agree strongly with the article that stand ups are not a waste.

dreamdu5t 14y ago

At my company, we have a HipChat room for "Daily Updates" and an automatic reminder that notifies everyone to post what they did yesterday and what they plan on doing today. That's it. Most people post by noon, and the manager has a written log. It's been working well so far.

Evbn 14y ago
Do you read what people post after you do? That is important too.

philwelch 14y ago

Standups, when well done on a healthy team, aren't poisonous. But I've found that they're rather pointless as well. If you have enough unforced communication in your team, you don't need the standup.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

Standups are like communism, great in theory, often horrible in practice. Of all the standups I've participated in going back 5 years I'd say only one was any good. It was every other day, it was forcibly limited to 15 minutes or less, it was always on time, it was never allowed to go off on a tangent, it only had about 3 or 4 people in it, and it was actively pushed away from being a status meeting. This contrasts with every other standup I've been a part of which almost always cut into productivity, and worse. For a while there was a daily standup with 12+ members that often went for 45 minutes and sometimes went for an hour and a half. The problem with a formalized methodology like standups (or agile in general) is that if you don't have very well defined and explicit reasons and goals and you don't make that a part of the system then people will just drift into doing what seems to make sense to them, which is status reports and aimless meetings.

bmm6o 14y ago
A 45-90 minute meeting with 12 people doesn't even sound good in theory. I know defenses of agile can run into "no true scotsman" territory, but that is pretty objectively not agile. Your last paragraph explains why you have to be committed to doing it right. It's easy to do it wrong, and it becomes worse than doing nothing. But if your complaint is that doing it right is hard or that you need management buy-in, that's different than it doesn't work in practice.
- bmm6o 14y ago
  I should probably say "scrum" where I say "agile" above. I would edit but I'm on my phone.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  That was just the worst example. Most of the other examples ranged from more or less useless to actively harmful. As I said, the problem is that the reasoning and goals become too easily separated from the activity. And then before you know it you've got cargo cult behavior on your hand. Wouldn't you know it, the instances where standups were used effectively was when the team had a lot of experienced people who knew how to work well. A methodology that is only effective for people who already know how to work well is not a good methodology in my book.

static_typed 14y ago

Standups are a symptom of a failing software engineering disease called 'Agile', which is the real toxin to the system of all healthy developers.

ender7 14y ago

This just seems to boil down to well-run meetings vs. poorly-run meetings. Standups are meant to be light-weight meetings where everyone gets back on the same page. If that's not happening, then someone isn't running the meeting correctly.

kabdib 14y ago

My old group started "doing agile." We had daily scrums. They quickly turned into status meetings for the PMs to bubble up micro-progress reports. This, on a team with four engineers and three QA types. We sat next to each other. We didn't need standups, we needed to be left alone to do work. Finally, on one project the PM (who had appointed himself scrumlord) finally let us meet only twice a week, and had the common decency to call the meetings "status". Call things what they are.

ardit33 14y ago

I personally hate standups. They are the 21st century version of Chinese Communist style Daily Morning Exercises. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_2C3bvh6ms http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_2C3bvh6ms Usually they either are void of real information (as they are supposed to be quick) and nothing is discussed in depth, or if things do end up discussed they end up taking too long. Unfortunately they have propagated in most work places/engineering cultures. Information should flow naturally between engineers. If you have a jelling team, people should communicate with each other naturally, without having to be forced to stand up and listen to status reports (that's exactly what standups are). I prefer once or twice a week engineering 30mins sync ups. Short meeting, that get to the point on whats going on, and you have some time to discuss things in depth if needed. For any small things, the expectations would be that engineers should communicate with each other directly. Instead of having 5 interruptions a week, you have one or two (slightly larger ones). At the end of the day accountability should be on the delivery of projects (end results), and not efforts (which standups are more about showing efforts, rather than results). From personal experience, experienced engineers tend to highly dislike them, and the over-reliance on standups is an indication of a weak engineering culture.

sultezdukes 14y ago

Who's doing standups with a 6 member team for 30 minutes? That's nuts. We're a 6 member team and our standups are typically 5 minutes or less. We stopped that "what you did yesterday, what you're going to accomplish today, do you have any roadblocks" rigor nonsense. We just turnaround to see what's going on. In the beginning, I was pretty turned off by the rules we were using for standup, but once we stopped all that, they're pretty helpful, just so we know where we all stand. My first job out of school, we had a developer that claimed that he couldn't get any work done around the office because he was constantly being interruped. Well, his boss let him work from home on this very important project with a hard deadline. Well, he wasn't checking in and he was being vague about where he stood. Lo-and-behold, 3 months later he has nothing to show for, and he's history. As a previous poster put it, standup can be a canary in the coalmine.

garagemc2 14y ago

We don't do standups. Trello does all the communicating. 1) It tells me whats done and what is not, through the checkboxes 2) On larger projects, the guys leave updates in the activity section every couple of hours or when they hit a milestone or a are stuck with a problem or are unsure of something. Think of these as like facebook style updates but for large projects. These updates are delivered to me in real time. We can then discuss any problems etc at a suitable time at their convenience or I can pre-emptively direct them to someone who can help. Unless the problem is urgent in which case we discuss it then and there. This way I know what's what and the guys have an open channel to me.

parnas 14y ago

For my show and tell, sniff sniff, I ...