5 ms·

Standups can be very useful for entire team. But what bothered us was the sync aspect of it. People knew standup is coming at given hour and they need to schedu

Standups can be very useful for entire team. But what bothered us was the sync aspect of it. People knew standup is coming at given hour and they need to schedule their work around it because they know they will be interrupted. So we decided to went with textual async standups on dedicated slack channel. Example: "Yesterday I finished the “fix the price calculator” feature, which was mostly about removing the Coffee code and rely on the value retrieved from the backend, via ajax. The nice thing was that the backend code was already covered with tests, while the Coffee one wasn’t. After that I helped Jack with the “allow logging in with email” feature (we need it now because we have a batch import of users from system X soon). After that I did a small ticket, where I block buying licences for special periods of time. This was nicely TDD'ed, thanks to the concept of aggregate, introduced by Robert recently - all the tests pass < 1s. Here is a commit worth looking at. Today I’m going to start with foreman'ing the recent commits and after that I want to work the XYZ system to allow a better editing of entries. I’m not sure how to start it, so all help is welcome" Blogpost where we describe this technique: http://blog.arkency.com/2014/06/async-standups/ http://blog.arkency.com/2014/06/async-standups/ and list of them where we explain the async&remote approach: https://blog.arkency.com/story/async-and-remote/ https://blog.arkency.com/story/async-and-remote/

MCRed 12y ago
That's excellent! I find the cost of a "15 minute" standup is more like 1.5 hours. First, it's hard to get any work done in the 30 minutes leading up to the meeting because I'm trying to come up with what to talk about. The meeting never lasts 15 minutes, it's always 30 minutes, and it always involved being immediately ordered by the manager to talk about some BS nonsense that came up in the meeting. Then it taks an hour to get back in the zone to be productive after the meeting.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  My current team does a standup immediately before lunch, scheduled for 15 minutes and often coming in shorter. Those "oh, we should talk about that" realizations that come up then often wind up, when they do (and it's not every day), then often happen casually over food. It winds up pretty comfortable, although I certainly see ways it could go bad if we were focused on keeping the form of it rather than whether things were working well.
  - calineczka 12y ago
    So you have the comfort (or lack of it) of everyone going for lunch at the same time?
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      Everyone on our particular team, yeah. We're not rigid about it, but as a tendency it reduces the number of interruptions.
- strictnein 12y ago
  Ouch. A 30 minute standup? Even in places where I worked that had insane 20-30 person standups (we pleaded to have the group split up, but to no avail, as they were really for the multiple PMs and POs to keep track of what all the devs were doing) it only took 10-15 minutes.

MCRed 12y ago

That's excellent! I find the cost of a "15 minute" standup is more like 1.5 hours. First, it's hard to get any work done in the 30 minutes leading up to the meeting because I'm trying to come up with what to talk about. The meeting never lasts 15 minutes, it's always 30 minutes, and it always involved being immediately ordered by the manager to talk about some BS nonsense that came up in the meeting. Then it taks an hour to get back in the zone to be productive after the meeting.

dllthomas 12y ago
My current team does a standup immediately before lunch, scheduled for 15 minutes and often coming in shorter. Those "oh, we should talk about that" realizations that come up then often wind up, when they do (and it's not every day), then often happen casually over food. It winds up pretty comfortable, although I certainly see ways it could go bad if we were focused on keeping the form of it rather than whether things were working well.
- calineczka 12y ago
  So you have the comfort (or lack of it) of everyone going for lunch at the same time?
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Everyone on our particular team, yeah. We're not rigid about it, but as a tendency it reduces the number of interruptions.
strictnein 12y ago
Ouch. A 30 minute standup? Even in places where I worked that had insane 20-30 person standups (we pleaded to have the group split up, but to no avail, as they were really for the multiple PMs and POs to keep track of what all the devs were doing) it only took 10-15 minutes.