by strife25 on 4/6/21, 9:46 AM with 98 comments
by ineptech on 4/6/21, 4:19 PM
So, if your standup is too long/short/etc, bring it up at retro, propose a fix, try that for a while, and iterate until it's working well. And if you're not empowered to change your process, well, change the title of your essay to, "Agile-in-name-only is a waste of time."
by eloff on 4/6/21, 3:37 PM
However, I still think it's worth it in remote teams. The daily standup is that morning coffee pot discussion with my teammates, before we get on to what we're working on. We make smalltalk and banter a bit. There aren't as many chances to do that in a remote setting, I think it's worth it for that alone.
However, often times I'm having a problem that my teammates give valuable ideas or feedback about and visa versa. Or we discuss some hairy edge case and come to a decision about what the behavior should be. So some percent of standups are really valuable.
by dragonwriter on 4/6/21, 10:24 AM
Everything does. Teams don’t scale, its not a special feature of daily standups. Beyond that, you need teams of teams.
But, sure, the standup format is a waate, because the filler is stuff that should be evident from a status board, and the meat—impediments—should be addressed as they emerge, not delated for a daily meeting.
> Now, you may be thinking that this format takes a lot of time. It doesn’t!
I think that it just means that the dominant personalities that have touched any given ticket will be the only ones who talk, which is part of my the reason the classic format is organized by people, not tickets. It also has the same redundancy issues as the classic format, and while it may have a linear improvement in time over the classic format, when both formats are followed equally well, the scaling is exactly the same as classic. So, the problem it seems to solve is “standups aren’t adequately venues for social dominance displays”, not “standups don’t scale”.
by thrower123 on 4/6/21, 3:24 PM
The biggest thing that I hate about standups is that it ends up being the de facto start of the work day. If you're supposed to start work at 9am, you can't do the standup at 9AM, because a third of the people who are supposed to be there will be running late any given day. So you do it at 9:30, or 10:00, or, god help you, at 10:30. And then it just works out that you can't actually do any real work in the morning with that hanging over you, so you diddle around doing email, or everybody just starts planning on getting to the office five minutes before the standup is scheduled to start. And then it's just a big waste of time because nobody has read their email or thought about what they are supposed to be discussing, and you start getting pressure behind your eyes and the irrepressible urge to scream.
by brhsagain on 4/6/21, 8:32 PM
Like... why would you ever do x with the vague intention of getting y as a side benefit? Why don’t you just do y directly?
I frankly don’t care what my teammates are up to. I don’t care what the team is up to. It’s not my job to care. It’s my job to send commits and get paid. If I need to collaborate with a teammate why wouldn’t I just reach out directly? If I need “context” about something, whether it’s company goals or how some piece in the code works, why don’t I just have a meeting specifically about that? If we want team bonding why don’t we have the team bond over actually working together in real ways?
I hate this culture of by default having all these regular meetings for no explicit reason.
by jonathankoren on 4/6/21, 3:33 PM
There’s only one situation where a daily stand up makes sense, and that’s when you have a small group on a very tight deadline, ie an emergency situation.
A daily standup is a many to one communication meeting. The implementing engineers are telling a project manager how much progress they made. Engineer to engineer communication is rarely meaningful. So many daily stand ups I’ve attended I either had no need to know what anyone else was working on, or I wanted an update from exactly one person at the meeting, yet I had to stand around and wait for for a bunch of irrelevant updates.
What works better? Let the engineers self organize their communication. As long as everyone knows who is doing what, then they know who to ask. Have each engineer write an update a team doc at the end of the week saying how much was done, then update the tickets. Quickly review the doc at your team meeting, and move on.
by vletal on 4/6/21, 4:13 PM
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by flyingchipmann on 4/6/21, 4:24 PM
It's like shell scripting of the meeting, use it when you need to. You don't use bash as your primary language
by jiveturkey on 4/6/21, 4:00 PM
> I start thinking about my update to prove I should keep my job
In non-contract-work development, the entirety of Agile is micro or maybe "mini" management so that less performant people are managed into average performance. (The downside is that high performance people are dragged down to average. This is acceptable because it's infinitely easier to hire average and below average people who don't live and breathe the product.) The standup specifically puts very public, social pressure, on people who would otherwise be happy to be the slack that others have to constantly take up.
As such, it serves a critical function and is not a waste of time at all. The author just isn't seeing the forest for the trees.
by wideareanetwork on 4/6/21, 3:52 PM
Maybe once a week or perhaps Monday and Friday.
Still, I’m being paid for what I see as a waste of time so that’s the upside..... and it’s the boss who values it, so if they want to pay me well whatever I guess.
by beaconstudios on 4/6/21, 3:12 PM
What problem does the standup solve? in my experience it solves the manager's desire to know what each team member is doing every day, ie its a trendy rename of the status report meeting. It is an inefficient solution because you are setting up a parallel resource consumption (everybody's time) and then using those resources in serial (one person speaks at a time).
Either the format should change to a parallel one (everybody emails a report to the manager) or its supposed to be solving a different problem (you'd have to ask the organiser what the intent of the meeting is).
by flr03 on 4/6/21, 4:14 PM
Team of 7 we usually get this done around 15/20mins. In the office we used to grab a coffee after. We can't do that these days, but still nice to see each other face and hear each other voice (we all have the camera on).
by llaolleh on 4/6/21, 4:49 PM
It has to be a tight ship. If I ran my standup, I would say - standup lasts 5 minutes. The timer starts now and it exactly lasts 5 minutes. Everyone goes through once ASAP. Afterwards you can break out into your discussions, whatever. But don't waste everyone else's time.
by throwaway823882 on 4/6/21, 4:20 PM
In daily stand-ups, I go over all our current in-progress & blocked issues in Kanban. I ask about every task someone is working on or is blocked. Besides helping people unblock work, I also ask questions about in-progress work when something seems unusual. I can often either identify duplicate work, give someone information they would have spent time trying to find, or ask someone to rework something if a given solution looks like it will be a dead end.
There is no more efficient way for me to do all of those things in one place. Using this method, I can constantly help prune work in progress in one short spurt of time. It benefits junior engineers who are still learning how to juggle tasks. And it helps the team in general, as a lead is making sure there are tickets on the board and pushing when no progress is being made. As long as someone is actually doing something at the stand-up, it is definitely useful.
If you do it poorly, it's going to suck. I've been part of a lot of sucky, pointless stand-ups. I now make a point to ask more questions in those stand-ups if I think the lead/scrum master/etc isn't probing enough. It often starts a brief discussion that leads to meaningful work.
by xondono on 4/6/21, 5:17 PM
The rest of meetings have converged into a weird thing were everyone is interrogated about the tasks needed until the release, and everyone has learned quickly that the trick is listing your tasks in excruciating detail, because they will be valued at least 1 point, and you can inflate your way up into doing little while looking very busy.
Then we collectively assign point estimates, which is a nuisance because everyone is making the estimates in hours and then trying to convert to points with a very impractical 5/8 ratio, and also completely pointless because our team is so diverse and specialized, that no one really understands their tasks except themselves.
In the whole, I’ve estimated to be losing about 2 full days every 10 working days into this madness, while no clarity is gained. We (still) discover our blockers on our daily meetings and have enough backlog that blockers just imply reshuffling the work around.
by pyrophane on 4/6/21, 4:36 PM
by jraph on 4/6/21, 5:12 PM
I needed to interrupt any task I was doing (I'm usually early, and the standup often happens at a time my focus is best), or rush to arrive on time if I was ever late, listen to people in a state not necessarily fit for listening correctly, at a speed that is sometimes too high, sometimes too low, not always concerned by everything every people did or do. No note so I was stressed about remembering each thing that might be relevant to me.
During the lock-down, we started doing it using video calls. We had to wait for everybody to come, including those who where fighting the technology, the sound wasn't always great, the flatmate was still sleeping so it was not ideal for him too.
And then, we switched to text in a dedicated channel in our chat. The result? - I can write it whenever I want before 10 am, without needing to interrupt in the middle of something. I could even write it the evening before if I wanted. - everybody is efficient in their writing: the standup is actually short and to the point without needing a good moderator! - I can take my time to formulate, to forget nothing (I don't need to prepare in advance neither) - I can take my time to read, and to react to other people when relevant, and organize without stress. - all the relevant info is here - sometime someone forgets something and responds to there own answer to let people know, and this is good. - we are supposed to add an "eye" emoji to each standup message so we tell people we read their stuff.
Seeing people's faces is great but the standup was an awful occasion for that. But what we did during the first lockdown was following the standup by a "coffee break" to which people were advised to go, and then we got to see people and keep building relationship by speaking about anything, often unrelated to work. I recommend trying this.
I don't see a point for the daily synchronous stand up now that I lived standup in text format. If you need to build relationship, do breaks in which people get to speak about something else than work… or about work at times! But without rush and without lengthy unwanted digressions.
by nerbert on 4/6/21, 5:53 PM
"Daily standup are useless because one email would be enough"
If email were then required: "emails are useless because nobody reads them, jira is enough"
"Jira is shit"
If emails are then not required: everyone works by themselves without communicating and symptoms of that, frictions start happening "Our project is poorly managed."
People just don't seem to understand that yeah, ideally everyone would just do their work, and those pieces would perfectly fit into the project. Unfortunately, that's not how reality works.
by mempko on 4/6/21, 11:27 PM
The standup is a planning meeting, not a status meeting. If you feel your standup meeting is a status meeting, you are doing it wrong.
The reason the standup became popular was because the Borland Quatro Pro team was EXTREMELY productive and it seemed standup helped the team be productive.
Here is the relavant quote.
The core architecture team met daily to hammer out C++ class interfaces, to discuss overall algorithms and approaches, and to develop the basic underlying mechanisms on which the system would be built. These daily meetings were several hours in duration; from what I heard,the project was made more of meetings than anything else.
I hope this sheds some light on what the daily standup should really be. Maybe people should sit down.
by mytailorisrich on 4/6/21, 10:04 AM
This is not a problem with daily standups. This is a general problem with all meetings and discussions that are not ruthlessly kept on-topic and to the point by someone of authority who should be ready to interrupt as soon as the discussion goes off-track.
by piklsss on 4/6/21, 9:56 PM
by avelis on 4/6/21, 3:57 PM
We also have come up with a form of this called Library Time where we stay on one feature as a team for 2 hours. No outside interruptions. We hone in on architecture or bug bashing and solve it together as a team distributed.
by surfsvammel on 4/6/21, 4:17 PM
Before the pandemic my mornings felt pretty useless. First a face-to-face standup and then an online stand-up with another team. An hour in total.
Since the pandemic started that hour has proven more valuable than ever. I do these meetings on my phone now, while taking a brisk walk in the forrest. The morning check-in meetings now feel more valuable than ever, as a means to socialise.
by msla on 4/6/21, 4:48 PM
by duxup on 4/6/21, 3:46 PM
Agreed generally.
With my current employer we do it every day.
5 people, just a few / maybe one minute each... maybe a tangent here or there to discuss something that came up as a group that would benefit from more than one person on the team's input, etc.
by borvo on 4/6/21, 4:00 PM
https://agileforall.com/7-tips-for-a-more-effective-daily-sc...
by jpswade on 4/6/21, 5:42 PM
by rm_-rf_slash on 4/6/21, 3:57 PM
by AzzieElbab on 4/6/21, 4:43 PM
by srswtf123 on 4/6/21, 3:24 PM
by spacemanmatt on 4/6/21, 3:55 PM
by sabujp on 4/6/21, 4:53 PM
by thendrill on 4/6/21, 4:01 PM