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"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. H

"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.

"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.