[HN Gopher] Are daily standups hurting your team?
___________________________________________________________________
Are daily standups hurting your team?
Author : ajaynomics
Score : 308 points
Date : 2021-11-03 12:47 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ideas.krishnan.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (ideas.krishnan.ca)
| byteface wrote:
| I find it's the opposite. Are Cheap hires, 10x devs that think
| the rules don't appply, bad managers, the work shy etc hurting
| your stand-ups?
| rimliu wrote:
| This comes so close to "does your actual work hurt your stand-
| ups"?
| Shaddox wrote:
| This article's conclusion isn't wrong but the premise is.
| Standups are NOT for developers, they're for business types to
| tighten grip over a project, to make sure everyone is there at a
| certain hour, reporting to clients, etc.
|
| We have two daily standups, one in the morning and one in the
| evening, each about 30 minutes or more. Moving from a company
| with no standups to one that treasures meetings so much has been
| a killer on my soul...
| purpleidea wrote:
| Daily standups is a form of evil micromanagement for competent
| devs and a bad substitute for good mentorship that junior devs
| need.
|
| Ban this horrible practice and start trusting your employees
| more.
| TheJoYo wrote:
| What does good daily mentorship look like?
|
| I ask because I tried to set up daily checkins with my junior
| dev if only to make myself available to them.
|
| What do I do when they just go radio silent for a week?
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| The thing I like about agile development is that you constantly
| evaluate your process and change it to the better. In most teams
| I worked with we reduced the dailys to occur two or three times a
| week. Also trying to keep them to only be a short status update
| for the team. Who is working on what and if there are any news or
| issues everybody should know about.
|
| And you can always use a safe word like SUMO.
|
| What is really hurting a team are the renegades. People who think
| they are so great that they can bypass any process or agreement.
| People that are always talking and never listens. People with own
| agendas. People never showing up when key decisions are about to
| be made. People that take huge risks for no good reason. People
| that always try to solve problems themself and then blame others
| when they fail or have to much work. People that do not care
| about adding business value. People always making vague comments
| implying incompetence among others in the team by using basic
| mastering techniques. People that never works on anything that is
| in the backlog.
| jcpst wrote:
| We cut out standup a few sprints ago. We replaced it with an
| automated post on our team's channel, and we leave a comment in
| the thread with statements for "yesterday" "today" and
| "blockers". Everyone on the team loves it.
|
| To compensate for some of the social aspects, we now do a 30m
| "coffee chat" Monday morning, and a "engineering roundtable" on
| Fridays, which is a time to sync up around coding conventions and
| practices we would like to adopt or get rid of.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| I get the standup hate, but i have also been to a company with no
| standups and no 1-1s policy and it was a massive chaos. People
| doing whatever they wanted, overengineering, working on features
| overlapping with others' work, creating silos, no actual
| organization and hierarchy which resulted in severe micro
| management by the PMs asking new features on a daily basis,
| people getting fired without ever receiving any feedback and
| other fun and toxic situations.
|
| In the end i would take a boring 15 min daily catchup anytime
| compared to that.
| roland35 wrote:
| I think it depends a lot on the what stage of the project we are
| in. In the beginning designing phase daily standups might be
| useful but once the work is well defined a more asynchronous
| communication style works better.
|
| I agree with the author that often the standup is the "ceiling"
| of communication in a group, and oftentimes most of the
| information presented isn't super valuable to anyone besides a
| project manager.
| lordnacho wrote:
| It's potentially quite expensive. Say someone costs the company
| $800 a day, all in (taxes etc), ie their salary is under 800x250
| = $200k/year.
|
| Dragging them into a meeting for an hour (8 hour day) is thus
| $100. 10 people perhaps, that's a grand a day you're spending on
| meetings.
|
| How much of that hour does each participant actually need to be
| there? YMMV of course.
|
| You can't have no meetings at all, but declining returns to scale
| will hit you on both time and people-count axes. I recall working
| for a firm with tens of thousands of staff that would do a global
| all-hands each quarter. Costs a bomb.
|
| Just keep is small and quick, preferable async so that the least
| productive times are used.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| _No_ , if the individual tasks are fraction of a day to complete,
| and multiple tasks can be completed in a day, _and_
| synchronization of status is necessary, _and_ stand-up do not
| last longer than a few minutes, _and_ stand-up have actionable
| /impacting outcome.
|
| _Yes_ , if they are more than a day long. Wasting time, and
| fragmenting work flow.
|
| (edit: added extra caveats to _no_ )
| sushsjsuauahab wrote:
| Standup is how they check you aren't working for two companies
| (or more) at once
| FpUser wrote:
| I think each team should work the way they feel comfortable and
| avoid those "unified ceremonies". If someone needs an input they
| can ask for it when needed. Or organize a meeting if it really
| required. Otherwise just let workers work and do not waste their
| time with useless talk. Leader can always monitor overall
| progress.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Leader can always monitor overall progress._
|
| If you have a leader. Standups were popularized alongside
| Agile, which is a framework for having all members of the team
| take on an equal leadership role. The idea of having standups
| under Agile was to provide a point for the "leaders" to
| coordinate themselves. If you have a designated leader, they
| are indeed dubious (and may also be dubious under Agile, but
| you cannot lean on a leader in that case, at least).
| FpUser wrote:
| Dubious leader is not the leader. And having a team without a
| leader is not very good idea. If team is 2 people and both
| are equally qualify let them sort it between themselves.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> And having a team without a leader is not very good
| idea. _
|
| I mean, I'm not sure anyone seriously claims that Agile is
| actually a good idea. It may look like a nice idea on
| paper, not having a leader to get in the way of the people
| who know what they are doing, but not even the Agile
| Manifesto signatories were able to make it work in the real
| world when they worked together.
| rimliu wrote:
| I liked the idea (I think it was from Semler's book, but may
| also be from 37signals), that meetings are always optional. If
| you have organised a meeting and nobody came, it just means
| that no one saw any value in it.
| [deleted]
| mr_tristan wrote:
| I've now successfully gotten two teams to put statuses in a daily
| Slack thread, so other managers can keep up on the progress of
| different work. One place basically used that thread to go around
| the room and basically announce questions or discussion topics.
| The other just completely eschewed status reporting in group, and
| just uses a separate doc to launch into complex discussion
| topics. And our "standup" is now a parking lot that's basically
| "sync up on complex topics".
|
| Once you start speeding past the "what did you do yesterday"
| topic, you realize how poorly organized communication is on
| serious topics. A lot of places spin up Google docs or the like
| to basically make agendas and take meeting notes. So now, unless
| you have the magic link handy you have no idea where it is. And
| 9/10 times it turns into a giant mind map of fragmented
| sentences.
|
| What I'm basically seeing, is that agile, and scrum, grew up in a
| world of synchronous meetings. To really embrace asynchronous
| communication needs new ways of organization. And there just
| aren't strong patterns for this yet.
| lumost wrote:
| Stand-ups tend to devolve into either show boating or phone it in
| updates. The former saps productivity and the latter saps morale.
|
| Best approach I've seen is an asynchronous yesterday/today
| standup via slack. If you keep it in a separate room there is
| also no obligation to make the update at a specific point in
| time.
|
| With asynchronous updates you can carefully examine if someone is
| stuck and has made the same updates N days in a row, or if
| someone is making rapid progress.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Trust me - The showboating also saps morale.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Best approach I 've seen is an asynchronous yesterday/today
| standup via slack._
|
| Did you have luck not falling into the "Yesterday I worked on
| X, today I will also work on X" trap in desperate attempt to
| find something to write? Synchronous standups regularly suffer
| the same problem, in fairness.
|
| Best approach I have seen is to simply not have meetings until
| there is something worth meeting over. They can actually
| productive when they have intent behind them, not because the
| calendar said it is time for one.
| saithir wrote:
| Not the above poster, but I also do and like the
| yesterday/today slack standups (with a proper zoom meeting
| once every two weeks to review/strategize/etc).
|
| Usually the "yesterday I worked on X, today I will also work
| on X" for me are a sign that I need to grab a second team
| member to get a second set of eyes on something.
|
| That is if X is specific enough, of course - but if working
| on something larger, I think it should always be if the
| standup message is to have any usefulness at all.
|
| So I'll try to always write something more in way of
| "Yesterday I was working on X, so I made X_1 and started on
| X_2, but had problems so I've skipped over to X_3. Today I'll
| be continuing working on X_2", with the numbered ones being
| subtasks or subsets of X.
|
| I'd probably do the same on actual spoken standups, but this
| is a kind of a meeting that could easily be a slack message,
| so I prefer slack :)
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Usually the "yesterday I worked on X, today I will also
| work on X" for me are a sign that I need to grab a second
| team member to get a second set of eyes on something._
|
| While I admittedly do not entirely understand why it
| requires writing that down to come to the realization that
| you need help, if that is what works for you, more power to
| you. But is external communication necessary? Writing that
| down in notepad.exe seems like it would trigger the same in
| you? Why bother your team with noise?
|
| Once you have realized, letting the problem be known to
| your team makes sense, sure, but that does not seem like
| something that happens on any kind of regular schedule.
| Pre-scheduling your chance to let your team know that you
| have a problem seems unnecessary at best. I've certainly
| never met a teammate who is unwilling to help with a
| problem without being given advanced scheduled notice, and
| I'm not sure a person with that kind of attitude should be
| on the team in the first place.
| saithir wrote:
| It's only noise when all everyone ever writes in them is
| noise. In that case, yes, I fully agree - it'd be a
| pointless waste of time and you should stop.
|
| I do like knowing what others work on, as we're all
| remote. Our project owner likes knowing what we're
| working on as well.
|
| If it was a daily zoom meeting I'd probably be against it
| every single day. As a slack message in a separate
| channel it's not really a bother.
|
| > why it requires writing that down to come to the
| realization that you need help
|
| It helps avoid tunnel visioning on the problem too much,
| I guess. The standup provides a chance to do so every
| morning, why not use it?
|
| It's not like it's the only way of me communicating with
| the rest of the team and asking for help, not sure what
| ever gave you that idea...
| randomdata wrote:
| If it is reserved for when you have something interesting
| to tell, I can see the benefit. An expectation of fixed
| interval contribution is excessive. Then you just get the
| ridiculous "I worked on X yesterday. I will work on X
| today." out of lack of anything else to say.
| warriormonk5 wrote:
| I've always thought that stand-ups are a lazy form of management
| brixon wrote:
| Stand ups are not for top down management or managers.
|
| Daily Scrum Meeting aims to support the self-organization of
| the Scrum Team and identify impediments systematically.
| nzmsv wrote:
| It aims. And misses.
| rimliu wrote:
| I am not even sure it aims. It aims to make the team look
| "professional" or something. Given that at most
| organisations the biggest problem always turns out to be
| communication, stand-ups are probably thought to be a
| remedy, but in reality they are more of a symptom than a
| cure. Where communication works, there is no need to waste
| anybody's time with stand-ups. Where it does not work,
| stand-ups fix nothing. Just another cargo-cult practice.
| ok123456 wrote:
| It's ablest to make standups required. What about programmers who
| are deaf or mute who would otherwise would have no impediment to
| working on a team.
| dcabrejas wrote:
| I disagree with this article. It is extremely rare to have s time
| of people who are senior enough to own their work to a point that
| they don't need stand ups. And even then, miscomunication will
| inevitably happen. In my experience, stand ups are the only
| reliable way to find out about blockers/issues before it is too
| late. At least from more Junior members of the team.
| rconti wrote:
| Oooh, we're in the Third Wave of software development! Will it be
| like Third Wave of coffee? [1] I can't wait to have artisanal
| software.
|
| Thankfully, this BlogPost has concluded that, not only is three
| the correct number of waves (and yes, the number of waves shall
| be three), but it has also backed up this conclusion with strong
| evidence from the paragons of innovation and efficiency, Ford and
| GM. One cannot disagree with how great market segmentation works
| for GM, selling the same truck under both Chevrolet and GMC
| nameplates, or the same SUV as a Chevrolet, and a Buick, and a
| GMC. This cannot be wasteful or driven by internal fiefdoms.
| Because, look at Ford, they sell Ford trucks under both the names
| Ford and... well, uh, okay, that's it.
|
| It's indisputable that Ford building the Explorer in the 90s, and
| then begrudgingly allowing Mazda to sell the same SUV under the
| Mazda name as the Navajo, but only with 2 doors, is a killer
| innovation in market segmentation leading to larger overall
| sales, rather than a I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine
| agreement that gave Mazda a way to quickly get popular SUVs in
| the showroom in order to drive foot traffic and (hopefully)
| sales.
|
| But seriously, I get that cars are segmented by lifestyle these
| days, and the "same car under different badges" was just a crappy
| example. But why does everything have to be a groundbreaking
| innovation, and allocated to a wave? Why not just say "there used
| to be only a couple of different cars because they were expensive
| and hardly anyone bought cars, and variety was an obvious and
| inherent outgrowth from increasing sales volume and customer
| demand"?
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_wave_of_coffee
| cletus wrote:
| I've always hated standups. Very rarely do they provide value for
| the ICs (IMHO) and that should be the key measure.
|
| The biggest problem is that managers can easily fall into a trap
| where they have everyone in the same place so they can ask
| individuals questions that only really matter to them. Beyond
| about 8 people (and maybe as low as 5) this means a bunch of
| people are standing around while other people give updates on
| things they don't really care about. I've seen standups with 20
| people that last 45 minutes as the manager goes around the room,
| basically. That's not a standup.
|
| It's even worse if PMs and other non-eng are there. Just, stop.
|
| This brings me to my second point: size. Standups need to be
| small. No more than 4-5 people ideally. In an office environment
| these people should be in a pod of 4 desks (possibly minus the EM
| and/or TL who might have broader responsibilities) and they
| should be able to turn around and talk to each other, at which
| point you don't really need a standup anyway.
|
| But I can't tell you how many times some EM has triggered crisis
| mode due to impending deadlines and we end up spending an hour a
| day with 20 people in a "standup" until the situation improves.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| This is exactly my experience at multiple companies. Remote WFH
| has made it more tolerable.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "The biggest problem is that managers can easily fall into a
| trap where they have everyone in the same place so they can ask
| individuals questions that only really matter to them. Beyond
| about 8 people (and maybe as low as 5) this means a bunch of
| people are standing around while other people give updates on
| things they don't really care about. I've seen standups with 20
| people that last 45 minutes as the manager goes around the
| room, basically. That's not a standup.
|
| It's even worse if PMs and other non-eng are there. Just,
| stop."
|
| A lot of managers or PMs really can't be allowed into a
| standup. Especially if they show only from time to time and
| take over the meeting.
| handrous wrote:
| I've been at a place with PM-driven standups. It was fine
| because:
|
| 1) If the team was like, "our team on this project is tiny
| and we all sit next to each other, so we don't need them", or
| "we'd rather do Slack messages for standups, on this
| particular project", he'd let that happen without a fuss,
| aside from ensuring that any communication he needed from it
| was still, somehow, happening. So it was still team-driven
| and very flexible.
|
| 2) He was _very_ disciplined about not turning them into
| project status meetings, or making standup messages take the
| form of status updates.
|
| [EDIT] I should add that the benefit to _him_ was that he got
| to hear a lot of unvarnished truth about what was going on,
| which micromanagers don 't get, because he was at all times,
| in the face he presented to the team, on "our side". That put
| him in a _much_ better position for polishing up the
| information he had for consumption outside the team(s), which
| benefited us, too. He might have questions or something, and
| it 's not that he never pushed back on anything, but he let
| standups be standups, and kept that stuff separate and as
| non-confrontational as possible.
| bmhin wrote:
| > Especially if they show only from time to time and take
| over the meeting.
|
| I do not understand the mindset that goes into thinking that
| somehow a person is 1. Not required for a meeting and so can
| only attend on occasion and 2. If present must drive the
| entire thing.
|
| I guess in theory they might think they are improving things
| if they assume it is an unguided, unfocused disaster with out
| them, but in my experience it is the exact opposite: a
| focused, relevant, quick stand up without vs a meandering,
| drawn out, ritualized boilerplate, "explain to the PM stuff
| everyone else knows" meeting with.
|
| PMs can be genuinely useful too. They just need to use the
| most important words in their toolkit: "you 2 (3,4) discuss
| offline/afterwards, next person". Not to be used if people
| are casually chatting, but to fix that problem of 2 people
| having a conversation while 6 others listen for no reason.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| It's called "pulling rank". And in most situations it's not
| considered an option to tell a director or VP to shut up
| and not disrupt the meeting.
| jseban wrote:
| Having a daily casual meeting where everyone brings up all of
| their problems and issues, and anyone in the company is welcome
| to listen, but not talk, is just a dumb idea. And there are
| never any recurring (easy) obstacles that the scrum master can
| resolve, and that can always wait until the next daily, the
| work of developing software simply doesn't work that way.
|
| Edit: this is some bullshit inspired by rugby where you have
| regroup and change strategy as you learn about your opponents,
| what does that have to do with developing software I don't
| know.
| dagw wrote:
| If they where going to use a rugby term, I've always thought
| "ruck" would have been better. A ruck is quickly and
| dynamically formed every time progress is slowed, a scrum is
| a big formal process that is only necessary to restart the
| game after someone has screwed up.
| splistud wrote:
| Team rituals that trigger a productivity phase have no
| usefulness. Team communication has no value. Team leader
| having a chance to quickly gauge progress is not helpful at
| all.
| malermeister wrote:
| > trigger a productivity phase
|
| [Citation needed]. I find standups and their context
| switching cost me at least an hour of productivity each
| day.
|
| > Team communication has no value
|
| If you want to communicate with your teammates, just use
| Slack and communicate instantly, why wait for the next
| morning's standup? If anything, standup slows down
| communication.
|
| > Team leader having a chance to quickly gauge progress
|
| You mean like the [insert ticketing system] board? Why do
| we have to waste time talking about stuff that's already
| being tracked?
| handrous wrote:
| > You mean like the [insert ticketing system] board? Why
| do we have to waste time talking about stuff that's
| already being tracked?
|
| This doesn't fully excuse it, but the more closely
| management is watching team-work-coordination tools like
| ticketing systems, and the higher the level of management
| that's looking at them, the more prone they are to drift
| from reflecting reality. That a standup is, by default,
| _not_ transparent and recorded for anyone else to look
| at, is, in some organizations, and _if_ they 're run
| properly, most of their value. Granted, yes, that's a
| work around for a broader cultural problem and shouldn't
| be necessary, but the real world's a mess.
| corey_moncure wrote:
| You may have a leadership team that doesn't understand the
| problem domain, that is, the "opponents" in the rugby
| analogy. They fumble around blindly, placing their faith in
| the Process and the herculean effort of the dev team to
| eventually attain expertise through trial and error which it
| is leadership's responsibility to provide in the first place,
| or to hire appropriate experts to provide.
|
| Alternatively, it may be the case that your leadership team
| is relying on the Process to insulate them from their
| responsibility to promote the well being of their employees,
| and from the loss that naturally follows when an important
| member of a vital team leaves the company. Rather than
| viewing their team as a resource to be nurtured and
| developed, they view you as a liability. Such companies
| instead develop their Process to such an extent that any
| member's agency and responsibility is effectively zero. Team
| members act like hamsters in a wheel, spinning endlessly,
| consuming an infinite treadmill of tickets and producing
| result units in 3x to 10x the amount of time it would take an
| empowered, impassioned developer. These inefficiencies are
| viewed as acceptable, even inevitable-- so deeply do they
| fear their employees taking meaningful ownership of their
| work.
|
| Many such cases.
| randomdata wrote:
| Taking time to regroup and change strategy as you learn more
| about your opponents (competitors in business speak) has a
| lot to do with developing software.
|
| In practice, it turns out that you don't normally learn
| things about your competitors on a fixed regular schedule. As
| a result, I have yet to meet a daily (weekly, etc.) standup
| that hasn't devolved into "I worked on this, I will work on
| that." to escape the awkward silence.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Lol...there is no escaping the awkward silence on my team.
| We just had a meeting where every manager over our team
| wanted to meet with us and thank us and pat us on the back
| and look at us etc because we have absolutely kicked
| ass...not one team member said a single word the entire
| half hour.
|
| No one wanted to tell them that it isn't cool, we are all
| burned the fuck out, the work load and pace are rediculous
| and most of us can't wait to fucking leave (I'm on the way
| out). They worshipped us, kissed our ass, were genuinely
| sincere, but they just don't get it. Oh well, the managers
| will get promoted, again.
| JasonCannon wrote:
| My BI, Data Engineering, and Project Management team all have a
| shared standup. They all work on a bunch of different projects
| at any given time so we can't really do project specific
| standups. I am amazed at the dedication that the PM who runs
| the standup has on keeping things short, direct, and moving.
| About 15 folks are in on that meeting, and he's always done
| within 15 minutes. 17 minutes on a bad day. Any side
| conversations try and start up? "Let's table that".
| colechristensen wrote:
| Matches my experience with standups: let's all go around the
| room and think of something to say and then one or two people
| have a long drawn out conversation with the manager.
|
| What seems pretty universal is the amount of information i
| share nobody cares about and the amount of information other
| people share that i don't care about are both quite high.
|
| It serves as an opportunity to be bored and frustrated for a
| half hour each day and does a rather good job of interrupting
| my daily flow.
|
| I think a key to a needed standup is a small group of people
| actually working collaboratively on something whereby the
| shared information is actually good to know.
|
| I am though a fan of short meetings of any topic where you
| literally are standing for the meeting, it seems to change the
| quality.
| colmvp wrote:
| > What seems pretty universal is the amount of information i
| share nobody cares about and the amount of information other
| people share that i don't care about are both quite high.
|
| Yesterday, I asked a team member if they had QA'd my project.
| They said, "oh I wasn't expecting to QA your project."
|
| Yet I told them in the standup that I needed them to QA the
| project and I tagged them in a story. Clearly paying
| attention...
|
| During standup, I've also had people say "colmvp, you can go
| next" despite having already spoken.
|
| And near the end, we often don't even remember who hadn't
| spoken.
|
| I feel like standups work well for small teams, but in larger
| teams it just feels like it becomes impersonal and more of a
| thing to do to make yourself appear obedient to your manager.
| kovac wrote:
| In my case it doesn't stop there. There's sprint planning,
| sprint retrospective, then a backlog grooming.
|
| After all that there are still more architectural
| discussions, meetings to clarify stuff. And then we break
| interfaces every other day. Reason given is "way of the
| agile". I can't speak in general, but it seems that we
| couldn't design a solid software for the long run if our
| lives depended on it anymore.
|
| I wonder what kind of processes industries like aviation,
| defense, and other high stake industries have?
| Silhouette wrote:
| _Reason given is "way of the agile"._
|
| That's just this season's excuse. How often have we seen
| some change that is obviously going to make things worse
| for a lot of individuals being justified because it's
| supposed to foster better team communication and so make
| the overall unit more productive? Open plan offices,
| frequent meetings, ever shorter cycles for everything,
| ever less up-front thought before diving in, real-time
| messaging on all the time, etc.
|
| I wonder how many of today's developers, including the
| relatively senior ones, can even remember how productive
| you can be if you work out a clear brief with whoever
| else needs to be involved and then you are left alone to
| concentrate on doing the work for a while, where "a
| while" means at least a half-day and possibly several
| days.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Processes in aviation and defense are long, drawn out
| affairs but they're also the result of successfully
| managing projects orders of magnitude bigger than any
| software company could dream of. (say, a decade between
| drawing board and first prototype, another decade until
| full production)
|
| Lots of up front planning in great detail with timelines
| and details dependencies. Lots of understanding how
| schedules slip. Some space systems go to the levels of
| planning for a number of bugs and if the result is off
| high or low, it is a matter for investigation.
|
| Also, no daily meetings (unless culture has changed since
| I was inside a while back).
|
| The most important things are an advanced method of
| requirements generation and change management.
|
| It seems like almost everyone in the software industry is
| just making shit up as they go along which is... themed
| to the right way to do things but not actually doing it.
| Cargo cult processes.
| handrous wrote:
| > Also, no daily meetings (unless culture has changed
| since I was inside a while back).
|
| I can confirm that the big management consulting firms
| are selling modified "agile" processes to the MIC and the
| US military itself. I suspect that means they're selling
| them to most large orgs with that sort of culture.
|
| I don't know whether they're complete bullshit and don't
| actually mean much as far as how things actually operate
| --hopefully that's the case. If it's actually changing
| anything and not just shuffling around some names for
| processes, I assume it's making things worse.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Oh yeah? Well I have Sprint planning, Sprint planning,
| Sprint review, retro (maybe), emergency epic planning
| cause management something something, and
| drumroll....vulnerability management. These are the
| regular meetings and I'm a contractor so my schedule is
| really clean compared to the FTEs.
| davidw wrote:
| I am getting the feeling that there is a whole set of these
| cargo-cult "best practices" like standups, "1-1's",
| retrospectives and so on. They're not stupid ideas, but
| they often seem implemented in a way where... "that's the
| done thing", rather than something evolved organically.
|
| I'm not a 'process guy' though so I have no idea what to
| replace these things with, if anything.
| dugmartin wrote:
| Where I work now everyone (devs, PMs, managers) have
| internalized that if you are not talking about something the
| whole team needs to know about you just briefly mention it as
| an "icebox" topic (we use Pivotal Tracker) which the PM tracks
| during the meeting. At the end of the meeting the PM lists out
| any icebox topics mentioned and we all briefly sort them based
| on the number of people that care to listen and then we go
| through them in that order. It is a little bit of ceremony but
| it works for us.
| lucb1e wrote:
| What is an IC? (in your first sentence)
| mateo411 wrote:
| Individual Contributor
| jonathankoren wrote:
| "The dramatic reading of the status reports," as one former
| coworker put it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| We used to call it "Executive Storytime". We'd even _project_
| the status doc onto the screen AND have everyone read their
| part aloud to everyone in the room. Although in reality, the
| message was entirely for the VP and other big shots in the
| room, who would occasionally have questions. I imagine these
| are the kinds of things you think about on your deathbed,
| while you wonder if you spent enough time with your family
| throughout your life.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > The biggest problem is that managers can easily fall into a
| trap where they have everyone in the same place so they can ask
| individuals questions that only really matter to them.
|
| In the one place I was in that did Scrum, the org had rules:
|
| 1. The "Scrum Master" is external to the team.
|
| 2. If the manager behaved this way, the Scrum Master would kick
| him/her out of the room - permanently if need be.
|
| Worked well, and realistically, managers don't really want to
| be there.
| cdavid wrote:
| > The biggest problem is that managers can easily fall into a
| trap where they have everyone in the same place so they can ask
| individuals questions that only really matter to them.
|
| That can easily happen. On the other hand, where would you
| expect an EM to ask individual questions that matter to them ?
|
| My experience as an EM is that this really depends on the team,
| including domain and maturity. For example, if you have a team
| of mostly junior members, well, the "micro managing" version of
| standup is often useful. It gives a way to see how people can
| communicate their issues to other team members, especially when
| you're new as an EM.
|
| For more mature teams who don't have issues, I generally don't
| do standups, unless there is something critical and the project
| priorities at risk.
| closeparen wrote:
| The weekly 1:1s or project syncs that are also happening on
| top of standup, schedule a new meeting with the relevant
| participants if that's too late from now, Slack or email if
| it's a simple Q&A, JIRA ticket if it requires some work to
| investigate and answer.
| jackconsidine wrote:
| I didn't find this article compelling. The analogy between the
| "phases of automobile development" and standup wasn't tight. The
| only reasons given for ditching standup were "decentralization"
| and "ShapeUp"- which isn't necessarily at odds with standup- and
| the author didn't develop these.
|
| In my experience, my business went from no standup to standup and
| it was a huge boon. "Decentralization" for us was a euphemism for
| disorganization and chaos. Obviously you can do standup way
| wrong, but that's a matter of fixing it not ditching it.
| cwkoss wrote:
| We do standup on slack, which I like quite a bit. I'm a PM now,
| so it's very valuable to be able to quickly figure out what
| someone has been working on for the past few days, but it's async
| and minimally disruptive. Threaded conversations can happen when
| someone has a question. Easy to scan for the info you need and
| team doesn't have to post at a particular time of day or spend
| much time on it.
| nkotov wrote:
| We stopped doing daily standups completely. It just felt like a
| waste of time. If we had to bring them back, I'd use something
| like Standuply on Slack to do it asynchronously.
| brixon wrote:
| "Show up for 15 minutes, and then it's safe to hide for the rest
| of the day."
|
| Lack of stand ups makes it safe to hide for multiple days.
|
| Short of reading the Shape Up book (which I will probably do),
| the article is weak in action and reason.
| paulcnichols wrote:
| Haha, I totally agree.
| baconforce wrote:
| The question should be "does my standup provide enough value to
| the participants to be worth the time? Why or why not? Are there
| other ways in which we can provide this value?". There is no 1
| size fits all solution. Some teams may not find any value in
| standups, so they should be removed. Some teams find it a
| valuable time to sync up as a team so they should be kept. Some
| teams adapt standups to add value in ways that were not
| originally intended.
|
| All I see here are arguments around a one size fits all
| solutions. Be fluid. Observe, listen to your team, and adapt.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I've had a lot of various stand-up formats. Most are junk. Many
| are mainly for the PMs and managers at the cost of everyone else.
|
| But my current format for over a year is:
|
| - One day a week about 20 of us get on Zoom, the 6 "group leads"
| give 1-2 minutes of updates. The director gives big picture
| updates, chases down any critical issues. Anyone has a chance to
| raise anything. About 45 minutes long.
|
| - Every day, a "stand-up" channel in Slack, everyone adds 1-4
| bullet points of what they're up to, things they're fighting
| with, etc. Takes about 30 seconds to write, another 30 seconds to
| skim. About once a week I see an item I need to be more aware of
| and I follow-up on it directly.
|
| It's... fine? I wouldn't call it great, or "the solution to
| stand-ups" but for once I'm actually feeling an appropriate
| balance between spending time and getting value.
| shane_b wrote:
| I feel we need a middle ground between standup and pair
| programming.
|
| Standups aren't enough to meaningfully contribute but pair
| programming is frequently wasteful and dominated by one person.
|
| I have been thinking about a daily meeting of 5-8 people with a
| rotation for the presenter to give a tour through their code. I
| would keep it 15-30 mins.
|
| Then other devs can catch any glaring issues without getting
| caught in the details.
| nanis wrote:
| Shitty standups happen because 1) team members do not believe in
| their core that their work is valued; 2) in such an environment,
| meaningless, destructive competition on dimensions other than the
| teams ability to deliver and maintain code that does the stuff
| the business wants takes hold; 3) in such an environment, team
| members become hesitant to actually share that they are blocked
| by something (in case that counts as point against them come
| promotion/comp time) etc
|
| In that environment, the individually rational strategy is not to
| reveal much, look busy, don't stick out much etc.
|
| So, people end up listening to the newly minted scrum "master"
| pontificate on value or the grooming habits of their pet.
|
| In a healthy environment, standups are developer-to-developer
| conversations. Dev A says "I am having a problem solving X" or
| Dev B says "I found out that 3rd party service API we are relying
| on was suddenly phased out, we need to rethink the entire
| approach", and people can figure out a quick response. Sometimes
| the solution is pairing, sometimes it's a change in other plans.
|
| Public information (who is working on which ticket, which PRs are
| open etc) do not need to be repeated. Standup is not a place to
| list accomplishments: Of course, if a particularly thorny problem
| has been solved, that calls for celebration, but 30 seconds is
| more than enough if nothing unexpected happened since the last
| time.
|
| I do prefer in person synchronous standups so that an impromptu
| discussion of how to handle anything unexpected can happen with
| everyone's input.
| hvidgaard wrote:
| A standup, or daily scrum as it's called in scrum, is a simple
| daily coordination for the team. Nothing more nothing less.
| It's there for the team to gauge the progress towards the
| sprint goal and in some cases give a status update on team
| relevant stuff. You can use it to evaluate prioritization,
| perhaps a team member is sick, perhaps some task took longer
| than anticipated. How do we need to adjust to still meet the
| goal, or are we unable to and should notify the relevant
| people.
| EarthIsHome wrote:
| > team members do not believe in their core that their work is
| valued
|
| Yes, that's the reason. If you know the work you do doesn't
| matter, you're going to get subpar results.
|
| I won't speak for everyone, but the work I do doesn't matter. I
| do the work to get paid. The alternative is not get paid. I
| don't really have a choice. Something that I would consider
| matters more: building something with my hands like
| construction, electrician, trades, grocery workers, social
| services, train workers, factory workers, agricultural workers,
| bus drivers, etc. That stuff matters in my mind more than
| whatever widget I'm being paid to make. Those jobs are what
| keep society moving.
|
| I suspect that for most people in tech, most of the work people
| do isn't benefiting society and the masses in a good way, it's
| just a way to make more money for other people. So, it's
| natural to not believe that their work matters. You have to
| convince yourself that it matters.
|
| With that said, the solution is a restructure of society that
| encourages and reinforces work that people find meaningful. No
| little scrum standups will change any of that. If you truly
| believe that what you do is meaningful, then you'll get better
| results. Along those lines, you often hear the question, "What
| would you do if you didn't need a paycheck?"
| nanis wrote:
| > the solution is a restructure of society that encourages
| and reinforces work that people find meaningful.
|
| Upvoted, but, I've seen non-shitty standups where the effort
| people put into to make stuff work was valued both by team
| mates and management and that did not involve venturing into
| Marxian territory.
| EarthIsHome wrote:
| > I've seen non-shitty standups where the effort people put
| into to make stuff work was valued both by team mates and
| management
|
| Agreed, but those people must truly believe that their work
| matters.
| MathYouF wrote:
| > the work I do doesn't matter. I do the work to get paid.
| The alternative is not get paid. I don't really have a
| choice.
|
| The alternative is to switch to paid work that does matter
| (to you). If you lack the skills to do work you find
| meaningful, then learning those skills is the next step.
|
| Your comment seems pretty thoughtful overall so I'm wondering
| if I'm misinterpreting the world view you tried articulating
| at the beginning.
| g051051 wrote:
| "Shitty standups" happen because in anything like a healthy
| team, they're a complete waste of time. Things like "I am
| having a problem solving X" should not be deferred until the
| next standup, they should be communicated in real time, at the
| very least to the team lead.
| alexashka wrote:
| This.
|
| I'd extend this to the very existence of rigid roles such as
| 'project manager', 'qa', etc.
|
| We've traded the existence of healthy teams and healthy
| individuals in exchange for predictable insert/delete
| commands of any team member by the management caste.
|
| That this destroys morale and human's natural desire to
| connect and form lasting bonds doesn't seem to bother the
| management caste. I guess why would it, it's modelled after
| master/slave or aristocrat/pleb relationship of the past.
| g051051 wrote:
| > I'd extend this to the very existence of rigid roles such
| as 'project manager', 'qa', etc.
|
| I don't go that far. Project management, qa, ops, and
| programming are largely disjoint skillsets.
| [deleted]
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > in such an environment, team members become hesitant to
| actually share that they are blocked by something (in case that
| counts as point against them come promotion/comp time) etc
|
| Your blocker can be used by another opportunist to talk garbage
| solution. It makes the opportunist appear as if they are doing
| something that the blocked engineer isn't doing.
|
| The blocked engineer could counter - but it will quickly
| devolve unless one side concedes.
|
| Standups are only a tool for micromanagement - nothing more.
| flipflip wrote:
| I don't mind them, but I would like if people keep it short. I
| work on feature X, I have this problem, I need help. Or I work on
| feature X, I don't need help. It always devolves into whole blog
| posts.
|
| Also when you are in a small team and communication is fast and
| efficient, they are superfluous. Team members already can ask for
| help and you know what everybody is doing.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Exactly. Around here we have daily standup via Teams even when
| we are all in the office. Sometimes it seems more an excersise
| on 'look at all the tools we got to our disposal!' than a
| functional communication. Plus the fact nobody has time/the
| mood/the mindset/the care to help with complex problems. You
| touched it, you're the owner, the solver and the guru for
| eternity for this particular thing. Oh well. It gives me plenty
| of time to drink coffee.
| miah_ wrote:
| Daily stand ups are _hell_ because they always end up taking ~1
| hour for 3 people.
|
| If you say more than what you're doing, what you've done, and
| whether you're blocked or not you're saying too much during your
| standup. It shouldn't take you more than 3 minutes to give your
| status. The entire stand-up shouldn't take more than ~10 minutes.
|
| Remember, you're supposed to stand up to make it kinda
| uncomfortable and informal. Everybody video-chatting their
| standup has made it too easy to be relaxed and waste time.
| icoder wrote:
| An hour sound terrible, given it is daily. That's a serious
| part of your workday (week, year)!
|
| Where I work it's 10-15 minutes for 10-15 people. We're with a
| bunch of disciplines (hardware, embedded, mobile and cloud) so
| it gives me a birds eye view of the bigger picture and some
| insights into where my activities will touch others, and where
| I can help or provide ideas.
|
| In addition, especially now we're remote, it's a way to sync up
| the devs time-wise. Some days a small ad-hoc group (2-4) will
| stay in the meeting to discuss an issue at hand. Plus often
| bilaterals are planned 'after the standup', since we're all in,
| and in meeting mode at that point anyway.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Daily stand ups are _hell_ because they always end up taking
| ~1 hour for 3 people.
|
| In the one team I was in that had standups, most of the
| developers would definitely leave after 15 minutes whether
| someone was talking or not. This put pressure on the others to
| keep it short.
| spicybright wrote:
| I'm sorry for your pain, a 1 hour stand up isn't a stand up at
| all.
|
| My company has a hard 15 min limit for ~8 engineers.
|
| It's a good opportunity for people to speak up if they can
| help, and give a simple "let's talk after about this".
|
| Tech details get shut down by the PM after a minute or two
| unless it's actually useful to most of the people there.
|
| It's very rare we go over the 15 min mark.
|
| That said, I still have some long and pointless meetings, but
| I'm thankful I can throw them to a third monitor and keep
| working in the background.
|
| Doing a boring meeting in person would be hell without that
| ability imo!
| notjustanymike wrote:
| We transitioned to Slack standups a few years ago and never
| looked back. I put together a daily standup channel with a custom
| form containing two questions:
|
| What are you working on today?
|
| What are your blockers?
|
| Any conversation which needs to happen is managed in threads.
| It's a win for everyone: No more mid-day interruptions, a good
| well-documented log of work, and the timing is flexible (submit
| by 12pm EST).
| theknocker wrote:
| I basically stopped working in software because of managers
| thinking their processes (i.e. their nagging) are more important
| than code.
|
| Most of the benefits we supposedly get out of agile could be
| accomplished by a non-dumbass technical lead looking at git
| histories for 10 minutes a day. I suspect this is how real world
| software teams get things done behind their so called managers'
| backs.
| the_jeremy wrote:
| Once we finally got buy-in from management, we switched our
| (3/week) standup from "justify why we pay you and mention
| everything you did" to "only mention blockers or items you think
| the rest of the team needs to know". Standups went from 45
| minutes (!!) to <15, and the things we mention are actually
| relevant to at least a couple people.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| The stand up ritual is a complete and utter waste of
| time/resource for everyone involved. It can be replaced entirely
| with an async chat bot if anyone is actually interested.
| brightball wrote:
| It depends on the team. 99% of the time stand ups are there to
| help your manager/scrum master/team lead get a read on whether
| there is a problem that somebody on the team is trying to avoid
| mentioning.
|
| One of the biggest reasons to time-cap it is that overall...it
| really isn't a good use of time.
|
| On the other hand people are far too over the top acting as if
| it's the most awful thing they've ever had to deal with (it's 15
| minutes and in most cases the only meeting you're going to have
| that day). People who can't tolerate a 15 minute chat with their
| team tend to have a lot of issue working well with others in my
| experience. The "I can't spare 15 minutes" mindset tends to live
| with people firmly in the "all about me" world.
|
| It can be hard to get out of the bubble of the work that you are
| doing.
|
| EDIT: I totally get bad scheduling that interrupts flow time. IMO
| either beginning of the day, end of the day or just before lunch
| is the ideal time to do it for that reason. Time zones also
| complicate it.
|
| People need to emphasize that the problem is the bad scheduling
| of the time slot rather than the 15 minutes itself. Also, it's a
| good idea to make skipping it periodically totally acceptable.
| brixon wrote:
| Agreed, views against stand ups are either team members hiding
| issues or the team is not doing stand ups like best practices
| suggest.
|
| Most of my teams problems with Agile/SCRUM come down to
| skipping steps or not following best practices. Once we fix
| those, it gets better.
| malermeister wrote:
| In a thread about the time wasted by blindly following
| "agile" rituals, you suggest... more pointless "agile"
| rituals?
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Yeah, but devs can be finicky about waking up early. Half my
| team was fine with 9am and the other half preferred working
| more of a 11am-7pm shift. We experimented with asynch Slack
| standup but it fizzled out after a few weeks.
| solidasparagus wrote:
| So do 11am standups?
| mdtusz wrote:
| What are the steps to agile?
|
| If you read the agile manifesto, there are no specifically
| prescribed steps or rituals, and in my experience, most teams
| implementation of scrum is entirely counterproductive to
| actually being agile. The core tenet of being agile is
| essentially people over process, and things like daily stand-
| ups, extremely formulaic retrospectives and backlog grooming
| meetings do nothing to empower the people and allow them to
| be truly agile.
| icedchai wrote:
| It's supposed to be "people over process", yet most "scrum"
| is all about process: too many meetings and other assorted
| bullshit like filling out your sprint planning and
| retrospective report every 2 weeks.
| ryathal wrote:
| Scrum is about getting people to talk to each other and
| that's what all the process is about. If you already have
| good communication between developers and those making
| the business decisions, then sure scrum is probably a
| waste. Places that actually have that communication
| without having scrum force those people into a room
| aren't common. It's also common that places that don't
| really do scrum don't have empowered PO's or devs, so the
| meetings are wasted time.
| d23 wrote:
| It's not that the 15 minutes isn't tolerable. It's that it's
| going to be scheduled poorly for _someone_ , perhaps the entire
| team, in such a way as to break focus and drop context.
|
| A previous team I was on had standups at 10 am. This meant even
| if you wanted to start working earlier and get heads down on
| something, there wasn't much point. Add in the typical context
| loading time and that meant you weren't really able to get
| going until 10:30. And guess what? At that point, lunch is an
| hour and a half away.
| rnotaro wrote:
| My team have "Daily Scrum" at 9AM every morning all year long
| so it's booked into everyone calendar. Sure once it a while
| someone have a meeting with an external team and it's
| perfectly fine that they don't come to the daily.
|
| Most of the time there's no managers and it goes like that:
| - What you work on yesterday? -- I've worked on
| automated tests X, Y and Z, had a few meeting with an analyst
| to validate the tests. - Did you had any issues.
| -- No / I had a few issues about the X process, is there
| anyone that could me, I have a few questions ?
| - What are you doing today. -- Today I'm going to work
| on X Y Z with XX and I have a few personnal meetings about X
| Y Z with Team X for Project Z.
|
| Our Teams meetups are 25 minutes (for a team 10 individuals).
| We finish the round-table in usually less than 10 minutes and
| keep the extra time for the people that wants to talk in
| depth about the issues they talked about in the "Stand-up".
| Others can leave the meeting and go on about their daily
| operations.
| papito wrote:
| Oh, God, I hate that. I would rather get the stand-ups out of
| the way first thing in the morning so I can have interrupted
| time before lunch, but most software engineers are massive
| divas, who think it's a horrible affront to be in the office
| before 10AM. And even _then_ some people are regularly late.
|
| And now with no commute for most of is, it's still somehow
| difficult.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Just block out the rest of your day and auto decline
| meetings. I do that and it works great. Forces everyone to
| schedule everything before noon. Also make sure to schedule
| lunch in as well. It make sure you auto decline that's the
| trick. If you're manually approving/declining each one
| you'll end up allowing some which signals the blocked out
| time isn't that blocked out to the rest of the team.
| papito wrote:
| If you are not a manager, that sounds a little agro. I
| can stand for my untouchable lunch break, but the rest is
| not up to me.
| malermeister wrote:
| Not everyone's circadian clock works the way yours does. I
| hate having to schlep myself out of bed to join a pointless
| status update meeting half asleep.
|
| 10AM already is before my definition of "first thing in the
| morning".
|
| Maybe we should just kill the synchronous status update
| meeting altogether and avoid conflicts like these?
| etripe wrote:
| A lot of developers are of the late chronotype. That has
| nothing to do with being a diva, immature or lazy, it's
| just how we're built. There are plenty of reasons
| developers can be divas, but being a night owl isn't one.
| Chronic sleep deprivation will drastically shorten one's
| life span.
| g051051 wrote:
| > On the other hand people are far too over the top acting as
| if it's the most awful thing they've ever had to deal with
| (it's 15 minutes
|
| It's awful when it's interrupting valuable flow time.
|
| > in most cases the only meeting you're going to have that day
|
| If only that were true!
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > It depends on the team. 99% of the time stand ups are there
| to help your manager get a read on whether there is a problem
| that somebody on the team is trying to avoid mentioning.
|
| In other words - micromanagement.
| brixon wrote:
| Well, the manager is not supposed to be there. A scrum master
| is supposed to keep it organized and time boxed, but the team
| is supposed to self police/organize themselves.
|
| It's supposed to be like a restaurant where all the waiters
| share tips. It is in everyone's interest that one, all
| customers are being served well and two, that all waiters are
| pulling their weight.
| jseban wrote:
| Yeah which never happens in reality, as it's completely
| incompatible with a normal (risk averse) corporate
| environment. And the main premise is that there's recurring
| daily obstacles that the scrum master somehow can resolve,
| which never ever happens in reality. The daily is just an
| idea that never work out that way in reality.
| vannevar wrote:
| It _does_ happen in reality. I 've seen it many times,
| and it works.
| jseban wrote:
| Almost always the best way to solve an issue or a
| blocker, is for the person to simply continue to work on
| the task, alone. Very rarely is it productive to involve
| other people, and when it is, the person who is closest
| to this part of the work should be involved. To have a
| generic "issue solver" that solves everybody's issue is
| just not a good idea on a software team.
| vannevar wrote:
| _Almost always the best way to solve an issue or a
| blocker, is for the person to simply continue to work on
| the task, alone._
|
| No. There may be occasional cases where that's true, but
| it's almost always better to get another pair of eyes
| (and accompanying different experience) on a problem.
| There is some great software that comes from solo devs,
| but most commercial projects are simply too big for one
| person to accomplish in the time necessary. Business
| software is very much a team sport.
| malermeister wrote:
| But why does anyone need a daily scheduled meeting for
| this? If I get blocked by something, I message the
| appropriate folks on slack immediately.
|
| Why would I wait for some meeting the next morning?
| vannevar wrote:
| _Why would I wait for some meeting the next morning?_
|
| You wouldn't. Why are you under the impression that scrum
| prohibits communication outside standup?
|
| Daily scrum is a floor on communication, not a ceiling.
| It guarantees that focused communication happens at least
| once a day. Sometimes people miss slack posts and emails.
| Scrum makes sure the entire team is aware of progress and
| blockers. It's a tiny slice of the day when it's done
| properly.
| papito wrote:
| Stand ups are not as much for developers as much as they are
| for transparency. But this overhead is deadly in a small,
| under-resourced team. Kanban is a better choice. Just let
| people blow through cards with as little communication as
| possible. The wonderful dynamic of a tiny team is that
| everyone still sort of knows what everyone else is working
| on.
| jseban wrote:
| > Stand ups are not as much for developers as much as they
| are for transparency.
|
| Except the requirements for transparency is only for the
| developers, which makes it feel very degrading, all of the
| other people in this meeting, the leads, scrum master,
| product owner, ux etc, don't say anything about what
| they're doing, and they have no board with their tasks
| either so no transparency whatsoever.
| cloche wrote:
| It's not micromanagement when the manager is trying to
| understand what is happening on the team. That's part of
| their job. If they were asking for updates from you every 5
| minutes, that would be micromanagement.
|
| How long do you think your manager should go without knowing
| what you're doing?
| skydhash wrote:
| If you want to know immediately, ask me. If not, I guess a
| good indication would be the slack channel for the team
| (I'm working remotely), or the JIRA board update.
| imbnwa wrote:
| _Thank you_. There are multiple tools and channels for
| reading and querying all of this information. Between
| JIRA, and, if necessary, your VCS remote, you can figure
| out almost everything about what a team is doing. Any
| grey areas? _Ask directly_ , with whatever channel suits
| the urgency.
|
| I once suggested that instead of standups developers
| write an end-of-day comment into whatever ticket they're
| working on. This would enable managers, others, by
| filling the blanks that status change/VCS timestamps
| might not tell you. People just looked at me like I was
| crazy when this would be even more efficient.
|
| Don't like the Burndown Chart over the course of a year?
| You can literally look at the Sprint Reports to see what
| issues/assignees are spilling over a course of time.
| Managers have all the tools they need but that's not the
| point of this stuff. The point of this stuff is to
| reinforce that _they are the boss_. They could even make
| the SCRUM Master 's job actually useful and be
| responsible for this kind of research but I've yet to see
| a SCRUM Master be anything but a proxy for this
| antiquated posturing.
|
| Just as much as there's a general fear that labor is
| hiding behind process, so is management.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > How long do you think your manager should go without
| knowing what you're doing?
|
| A weekly status update is good enough for regular status. I
| must mention that if you are looking at status reports from
| the time dimension, you have already failed.
|
| The manager should cultivate an environment where engineers
| and managers talk in small groups at any time. There is no
| need for a standup for this. Everyone can decide for
| themselves if they need to spend time with someone else.
| The manager can decide for themselves if they need to chat
| with a report instead of taking away time from all reports
| everyday.
|
| Of course, this would require the manager to do the work to
| chat with reports and figure out what's going on.
| pram wrote:
| My main problem with standups is people really like to turn them
| into soapboxes. They're supposed to be short but if it's
| scheduled for 30 minutes, people WILL make sure it lasts exactly
| 30 minutes. Even if theres awkward silence at some point, they'll
| come up with something to bitch about. I think this is to show
| they're "engaged" or something. IDK.
|
| Doesn't really hurt the team overall I guess, just an unpleasant
| interruption to my nap time.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| No.
|
| Shitty MANAGEMENT might be, but a true standup / checkin that
| follows actual agile/scrum methodology is FINE.
|
| Key here is that it's SHORT. What are you working on, what's
| next, are you blocked, do you need help from a team member? Ok,
| next.
|
| Remember it's called STANDUP because the whole thing should be
| short enough that nobody needs to sit down.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > To be clear, I am encouraging more communication, not less
| communication. For internally aligned teams, you get more, and
| better, communication through a system that replaces daily
| standups with asynchronous collaboration.
|
| Coming from a perspective of managing distributed teams:
| Asynchronous communication is a decent way to replace synchronous
| standups if (and only if) everyone involved can respond in a
| timely manner and is willing to schedule a synchronous discussion
| when necessary.
|
| The pitfall of asynchronous communication is when team members
| start trying to force _everything_ to be asynchronous. In many
| cases, getting on a call with someone or even just taking 10-20
| minutes to have a synchronous chat is all it takes, but the team
| needs to be willing and ready to go synchronous when necessary.
|
| Purely asynchronous environments sound great when you just want
| to go heads-down and work on something, but the downsides become
| obvious when people start getting blocked on responses from other
| people for sometimes days at a time while async emails ping-pong
| back and forth instead of a 10 minute conversation that could
| clear everything up.
|
| Of course, the other extreme is also bad: If everything is forced
| into synchronous conversations over chat or calls then you've
| given license to the team for everyone to disrupt each other all
| day. There needs to be some guidance about what's appropriate for
| communications and interruptions as well as some authority for
| individuals to push back and delay meetings that interfere too
| much with their work.
| g051051 wrote:
| > Asynchronous communication is a decent way to replace
| synchronous standups if (and only if) everyone involved can
| respond in a timely manner and is willing to schedule a
| synchronous discussion when necessary.
|
| This is the true measure of what makes someone a good team
| member.
|
| > the team needs to be willing and ready to go synchronous when
| necessary.
|
| Who gets to decide what counts as "necessary"? This philosophy
| sets the value of my time and concentration to 0 relative to
| the person calling a team meeting.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> In many cases, getting on a call with someone or even just
| taking 10-20 minutes to have a synchronous chat is all it
| takes_
|
| I have only found that to be beneficial if you work with
| horrible communicators who struggle to get their thoughts out
| without repeating themselves in a multitude of ways.
|
| In the age of testing candidates to death, ready to throw the
| baby out with the bathwater if they cannot calculate how many
| golf balls fit on a bus in O(n) time using a reversed linked
| list, why are you hiring horrible communicators in the first
| place?
|
| Having had the luxury of once working with a team of effective
| communicators, the idea of needing a 10-20 minute call would
| have been laughable.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I have only found that to be beneficial if you work with
| horrible communicators who struggle to get their thoughts out
| without repeating themselves in a multitude of ways.
|
| That's true, that's just around 99% of the people, while it's
| useless for the 1% that can't communicate even with
| synchronous audiovisual aid.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> that 's just around 99% of the people_
|
| True, although it is a learned skill so the only reason
| that is the case is because they haven't taken the time to
| learn. Which is fine. But, given the tech industry's
| obsession with hiring only those who have learned rare
| skills, it is an odd exclusion given that this quality it
| is arguably the most important facet of effective team
| software development.
| escot wrote:
| Standups feel good because the uniform process gives a sense of
| control. But software requires constant decision making based on
| the specific problem of the moment, and you can't globally define
| a process that works across all these problems.
| thrower123 wrote:
| The biggest problem with standups is that they inevitably balloon
| into all-encompassing, dragging status meetings where 95% of the
| stuff discussed is not relevant to more than one or two people
| present.
|
| The other problem with standup meetings, although this is more of
| an issue back in the before-times when we actually went to the
| office, is that they turn into a de facto clock-in time. If the
| standup is at 10 AM, then over time, nobody bothers showing up
| until 9:55, because there's not sufficient time to do anything
| worth doing before being interrupted the standup, and if you had
| plans for the day, they'll get tipped ass-over-beanbox by some
| new urgent request from somewhere at the standup.
|
| I'm deeply envious of those fabled software developers of the
| past, before the Agile Manifesto, who were allowed to go work by
| themselves in a room for a whole day at a time, sometimes even
| two or three days. What luxury! Just imagine what you could do
| without people poking you with a stick every hour or so?
| malermeister wrote:
| The waterfall bogeyman agile types conjure up honestly sounds
| like such a nice way to work.
|
| You get requirements that don't change and you get time to
| implement them without bullshit status meetings interrupting?
|
| When did we decide that was a bad thing? And how did we get
| brainwashed into thinking agile was better for ICs?
| ajaynomics wrote:
| time for "agile waterfall?"
|
| ;)
| thrower123 wrote:
| Is this the one where we have all the Agile gymnastics, but
| we're still locked into a featureset and a timeframe by
| management, or the one where we do 2-week waterfalls and
| call them sprints?
|
| To be honest, I'm usually in a purely reactive mode most of
| the time. Planning what work I'm going to even do tomorrow
| is not really possible, until I see what crap has been
| landed on my calendar overnight...
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| While everyone else here discusses the daily standup, I was
| curious if anyone, outside of Basecamp, has tried this "Shape Up"
| process thing. The 6-week cycle sounds interesting to me.
| Sometimes I fel like the typical 2-week cycle is enough and
| sometimes it's too short so this longer one intrigues me.
|
| https://basecamp.com/shapeup/webbook
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I think daily standups are fine as long as soapboxing and ranting
| is kept off the table. Daily nagging is not helpful. But daily
| interactions are helpful.
| kemiller2002 wrote:
| Our standups are great for us but not for the reasons it should
| be. My team keeps itself up to date with constant communication.
| Not bothersome communication, people "go dark" when they need to,
| but we make sure to communicate. We use the standup to make sure
| the other teams/management takes us seriously. We use it to set
| the tone. No one is late to our meetings. We don't wait, and we
| don't recap what a visitor missed by being tardy. We set a clear
| expectation that we're busy, and we don't waste time. We also use
| it call out problems where other teams are involved. Our standup
| last about 4 minutes, and then we disperse. Admittedly, sometimes
| we stay around, or we join another channel and b.s., but mainly
| it's quickly meet and go.
| soneca wrote:
| Where I work we have something that other software developers
| might consider _"shitty standups"_ or a waste of time. We show up
| one or two minutes late, we often chat about life, topics outside
| of work for anything between 2 and 15 minutes. Only then we
| actually start the standup routine. Each person chooses if they
| want to just say _"worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue
| to work on feature X today"_ or to share a complex coding problem
| or business doubt they want help with. Then it is over and a bit
| more chatting until someone decides to leave.
|
| But it works great for us. We have explicitly discussed it before
| and that's how we want it, at least for now.
|
| The thing is, it's a completely remote team of 9 people (two PMs,
| two engineering managers that code, 5 developers). 5 of us never
| met in real life and the rest were remote even before the
| pandemic. For us developers it is the only group meeting in the
| day 90% of the days. The PMs and Managers have lots of meetings,
| so they are often the ones leaving the standup early, and that's
| ok.
|
| We want that meeting to be loose, to allow for non-work
| conversations, to be flexible in what and how each person share
| their status. It works great for this team, of this size, with
| these people.
|
| That's the thing with advice like the OP. You have to make
| assumptions about how teams behave. But teams behave in an
| infinite combination of size, members, companies, and time (we
| might decide a year from now that we want to run standups
| differently).
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| We've settled on a similar setup as well.
|
| We want most of our meetings to be effective, but we're
| intentionally about that one being a bit "sloppy". It's a good
| time to get to know people and uncover challenges that people
| might not raise asynchronously otherwise.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > But it works great for us. We have explicitly discussed it
| before and that's how we want it, at least for now.
|
| This is the real key, IMHO. As a manager, I push the team to
| figure out what works best for them. I've seen daily standups
| w/status reports, no standups where we simply message the
| details, and bi-weekly where we talk more about status and
| challenges and save "what I did" for other mediums. In all
| cases, it's what the team wanted and worked best for them.
| mnsc wrote:
| We had the same experience and just renamed the calendar
| booking from "standup" to "morning meeting" and made it 30
| minutes. Great for morale and team building! Small supporting
| team though in a highly moving complex domain with lots of
| consultants coming in and out so ymmv.
| brightball wrote:
| Yes, that's critical. We've used entire stand-ups to discuss
| how to make stand-ups more effective. Finding a way that makes
| it quality time for the team is ideal. The goal is for
| everybody to be able to work and communicate better together.
|
| My favorite version is one in which we just went through the
| daily Merge/Pull Requests in the system and let that be the
| check in. It set aside regular time for small code reviews and
| let everybody showcase things clearly, with room to ask people
| to dive in for a deeper review right then and there.
|
| IMO it was much more effective than the normal standup ritual.
| mateo411 wrote:
| That's a good idea. It's basically a group code review.
| Everybody can see what's getting merged in and what's going
| out to production.
| RegBarclay wrote:
| Something that I've noticed as a remote employee (before and
| after the pandemic) is that the usual interpersonal
| interactions that happen organically in the office have to be
| done intentionally. You've decided to have some fluff in stand-
| ups. My team has a social meeting every week for about 30
| minutes. It's not running into people in the breakroom, but it
| meets the need to be social.
| irrational wrote:
| Ours used to be similar, then we were assigned a scrum master
| to act as a mentor (despite most of us working together for
| more than a decade, we are fairly new to agile). He made stand
| ups much more regimented. All the chit chat is completely gone.
| I'm now realizing that standup was the only time of the day
| that my coworkers and I connected about anything not strictly
| work related. It does feel like we have lost out on something.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| you should try virtual happy hours with the team. once every
| couple weeks, generally just an hour or just long enough to
| finish a beer. If the group is kept small it can be a pretty
| good team builder as long as an effort is made to include
| everyone in the conversation. Felt forced in the beginning
| but generally most teams have at least one person that can
| get and keep the chat going. Still keep it going now with
| people I used to work with even though we all went our
| separate ways.
| midrus wrote:
| Yeah, scrum masters. Just when I thought it couldn't get any
| worse.
| humanlion87 wrote:
| Such a great setup! I wish my team would follow something like
| this. Everyone seems to be in their own silo or they interact
| with people only for doing a specific task.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> "worked on feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on
| feature X today"_
|
| This is what makes standups shitty. I couldn't care less to
| know if you are still working on something. When you are done
| working on it, I'll know because the tooling will let me know
| of the changes. There is no time where vocalizing this provides
| value, unless you have no tools at all, which seems pretty
| silly if you are not working with a team of prehistoric
| cavemen.
|
| If you have a fun story about what you did last night, a recap
| of last night's reality TV show, whatever floats your boat -
| that's much more valuable use of the time. I can get behind
| that, although don't be upset if I don't always show up.
| keithplayer wrote:
| If a team member says they worked on Jira #X and will
| continue working on it other members should be asking for the
| technical details. Everyone should be giving 1-2 sentences of
| the technical details of what you worked on yesterday and the
| same for today. It is up to the team to question what is
| happening not just for accountability and ensuring people
| aren't going off on already explored paths, but also to
| ensure the standup is actually interesting. A blocker isn't
| the only reason other team members might need/want to get
| involved in what someone is working on.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _This is what makes standups shitty. I couldn 't care less to
| know if you are still working on something._
|
| If that's all anybody ever says, then I'd agree. But, in
| practice, with my team, there might be one person with
| nothing much to report, but several others who needs
| assistance, want to demo something they've built, are ready
| to transition something to QA, or something else. If you
| aren't getting any of that in your stand-up then the team is
| "broken" and could likely use an open conversation about the
| meeting's purpose and value.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> If that 's all anybody ever says, then I'd agree._
|
| If it gets said at all, you should also agree. If the goal
| if your standup is simply to hear people talk, talk about
| what you did on the weekend instead. That will actually
| provide value to the team in building a better relationship
| with teammates. "I did X yesterday, I will do X today"
| provides no information potential or bonding potential. It
| is flat out worthless.
|
| More realistically, if all you have to say is "I did X
| yesterday, I will do X today" it is best to not say
| anything at all. The goal shouldn't be to hear someone
| speak, but rather to achieve a business objective.
| Sometimes people won't have anything to contribute towards
| that objective and that's okay. Other times they will. They
| can speak then.
|
| Team meetings can be beneficial. Having the team meet so
| that they can utter practically-gibberish canned messages
| to each other is not beneficial. On the bright side, I see
| (from the parent comment and many others) that we have
| finally dropped the equally useless "no blockers" routine.
| We're making progress here!
| alistairSH wrote:
| The problem I have with saying nothing is that the act of
| saying "still working on X" can be a trigger for more
| conversation. Is X taking longer than expected by the
| rest of the team? Let's dig into that. Did somebody
| else's work unexpectedly intersect with X yesterday? Now
| they have a mental trigger to mention that. Etc.
|
| But, in practice, I'd prefer somebody gave a little more
| context than a simple "working on X" (assuming X isn't
| trivial - if it was, you would have finished it already)
| - what part of X... Design? Coding? Testing? Any
| roadblocks? Do you expect to turn it over to QA today or
| tomorrow? Nobody is working a vacuum and all our work
| intersects at some point.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's not best to skip saying ten words that explain
| you're fine. It takes 10 seconds.
| randomdata wrote:
| That works if you are saying it to yourself in front of a
| mirror, perhaps. If there are other people listening in,
| it will take another five minutes just to wake them all
| up.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Your objection seems entirely fictional at this point.
| randomdata wrote:
| Let's hope "I worked on X, I will work on X" goes the
| same way.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Perhaps when it's someone's turn to speak they could
| instead be silent for ten seconds so people knew they had
| nothing to say. That sounds cool.
| randomdata wrote:
| Unless someone has something to say, why would they be
| given a turn? That is completely nonsensical.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| How do you know if they have something to say to decide
| whether or not to give them a turn?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| No tooling is as reliable and enduring as speech. And the
| phrase you quoted as an example takes less than 5 second to
| say.
| randomdata wrote:
| Five seconds to say and two hours of lost productivity from
| the context switch required to hear it[0]. And I still
| don't care. What am I going to do with the information?
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| > Five seconds to say and two hours of lost productivity
| from the context switch required to hear it
|
| What a gem. Whenever the next "silicon valley" is made
| I'm waiting for a character to say this. Simply
| hilarious.
|
| Get off your high horse. You can afford an interruption
| or two per day.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Usually standup meetings are scheduled at a given time in
| the day (usually, it's the very first thing in the
| morning). You know when it's coming; it's not like people
| randomly poking at you and making you do a context
| switch.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I moved my team's standup to just before most people take
| there lunch. Initially it was an accomodation for someone
| who was temporarily working in a different time zone but
| after they returned home no one on the team wanted to
| change it.
|
| I like it for two reasons, I go for lunch straight after
| so don't have two context switches. And it sometimes
| works as an effective midday target for me to try to get
| a ticket progressed before the standup.
| randomdata wrote:
| The productivity is still lost. I can try to get
| something done before being interrupted by the scheduled
| time, or I can accept that nothing will get done
| beforehand and wait idly until he clock finally smiles
| upon me. The end result is the same either way. Try to
| fight back against reality as hard as you might, but
| there are only so many hours in the day and that is
| beyond your control. As engineers, we should recognize
| that we have to work in the confines of what we can
| control.
|
| Fine, catch me the moment I wake up. But good luck
| finding two team members who wake up at the exact same
| time each day. That never happens in the real world. No
| matter how you slice it, productivity is going to be
| destroyed.
| 8note wrote:
| Standup has a known time that you can plan around, and
| makes a spot to put all those short bits of info in one
| time, so you can avoid being interrupted and context
| switching when it's not standup
| nitrogen wrote:
| _What am I going to do with the information?_
|
| The purpose of a functioning standup is
| contextualization. If you know your teammate is still
| working on feature X, maybe you notice that your own work
| is related and you can design some shared data structure
| that speeds up both of you.
|
| If you want to be an IC with no responsibility, that's
| fine, just make it clear to your team that your assigned
| work is all you are going to do. If you want to be more
| productive individually and as a team, though, the
| interconnectedness of the team is just as important as
| what any one member is working on.
| Salgat wrote:
| Isn't this a very basic function of a kanban board?
| randomdata wrote:
| If I know when the teammate starts working on X and stops
| working on X, why am I not able to infer that he is
| working on X during the period in between? In reality, I
| already know that he is working on X and anything that is
| relevant to that already applies.
|
| I'm still not clear on what information "worked on
| feature X yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X
| today" gives me.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Tone of voice, body language, hesitation, etc. Non-verbal
| clues that maybe you can help your teammember, or that
| they can help you.
|
| It gets better if there's some detail about the task,
| like "Still working on X, runtime is too slow but I found
| a paper linked from Wikipedia with a promising
| algorithm." Lots of inferred and implied knowledge
| transfer can happen through intetactions that seem simple
| on the surface. E.g. in my example here, ideas of how to
| approach research for a task, what kinds of obstacles are
| normal, etc.
|
| If you're not building camaraderie, then maybe your
| standup isn't set up right or at the right time, but that
| doesn't mean the concept or the information is useless.
|
| And as a last resort, if you can't change something, then
| put in your own effort to make the best of it instead of
| just wasting the time entirely.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> if you can 't change something_
|
| Oh, but I can change something. If you remember having
| this discussion last year, it was "worked on feature X
| yesterday. Will continue to work on feature X today. No
| blockers." To which I pointed out that the "No blockers"
| part serves no purpose as if anyone had a known blocker,
| they would have already let the team know when it became
| a blocker, not wait for a fixed time of day. It is not
| coincidence that the last part isn't said today.
|
| Today, I am here to share that the rest of the canned
| response is also useless.
|
| Build camaraderie. Actually talk about the work you are
| doing with your teammates. These things can be beneficial
| and you'll still get the same non-verbal cues if there is
| something afoot. Don't waste valuable time on
| nothingness.
| geodel wrote:
| Agree with sheer banality and vapidity of typical
| standups. Sometimes I feel organized religions have got
| nothing on Agile cult.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I consider "no blockers" to simply be a nicer way of
| saying "I'm done talking now". Developers aren't always
| the most socially gracefully, but hopefully we can
| continue to avoid saying "I'm done talking now".
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| You lose two hours of productivity if someone interrupts
| you with random information?
|
| I also have trouble getting back into the flow of where I
| was, but I think 30 minutes would be my max lost
| productivity.
| randomdata wrote:
| One hour to build up the universe, only to have it
| shattered. One more hour to get you back to where you
| were.
|
| I feel your assessment of 30 minutes to build the
| universe in the purest sense is fair, but I'm not sure it
| accounts for the additional friction involved. You might
| be the exception, but humans in general are known to
| avoid building up the universe, so to speak, if they
| anticipate an interruption. It takes even more time for
| the mind to accept that the time is right.
|
| And so, all told, I think two hours is quite reasonable.
| Silhouette wrote:
| There has been research in this area. It's shocking (in
| both the literal and figurative sense) how much time is
| wasted by interruptions for people who do "thought work"
| like software development. If you have a daily standup
| around 10am, like the last place I had them, it's
| possible that you have instantly reduced the effective
| productivity of your entire team by 20% or even more.
|
| Of course that is in addition to all the other costs that
| come with standups. For example any fixed daily meeting
| kills the possibility of flexible working hours. That is
| one of the top perks for many developers and some
| developers are also much more productive working at non-
| traditional times.
|
| The standup meeting can also feel like an inquisition,
| particularly for juniors or new starters. It doesn't even
| have to be the classic manager-holding-court effect, just
| whoever is leading the meeting having a bad day and
| speaking in the wrong tone. Again, there goes your
| productivity for that person for possibly the entire rest
| of the day.
|
| If anyone reading this does use daily standups and
| everyone on their team wants to then that's great. Every
| team is different and doing what works for your team is
| what matters. But personally I have found that while
| sometimes useful points do arise during standups the
| benefits are greatly exaggerated. Valuable insights and
| awesome collaborations do not happen anything like often
| enough to justify all the downsides of the meetings, not
| least because IME the same information would probably
| have been passed on some other way and often faster in
| any moderately functional development team anyway.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Most people have no idea what a productive standup looks
| like. I was on a team once where we had a standup on
| Monday mornings. Fucking beautiful meeting. Of course, a
| new dev manager killed it for some god forsaken reason.
| That meeting prevented so much bullshit. That manager
| ended up getting the boot because...chaos and lack of
| productivity.
|
| Now every where I go some douchebag paranoid manager has
| established daily stand-ups because it makes them feel
| better. I resent telling people I'm working on a story we
| all groomed together and brought into the Sprint....it's
| right on the board: In progress, In Review, Ready for
| acceptance, Done. Clear as day. I'm still working on X,
| gonna work on X some more...everything is going great.
| Not adult-like behavior.
| Silhouette wrote:
| _Most people have no idea what a productive standup looks
| like._
|
| Given how common standups seem to have become, that
| probably tells us something. Maybe the typical daily
| standup as widely advocated _isn 't_ usually productive
| and it's actually some variations used by some individual
| teams that have been more worthwhile for those specific
| teams?
| ipaddr wrote:
| Yes and I'm surprised by how many non programmers fail to
| understand this.
| handrous wrote:
| Meanwhile, I'm constantly realizing that something I
| remembered didn't happen in Slack or Email or the issue
| tracker, but on a call, so now I have to hope I thought to
| take notes, in the moment, and then go find them, when
| calls are basically the _only_ thing I ever have to take
| those sorts of notes for, and they 're infrequent enough
| that I'm not so great at consistently remembering to do
| that (I'm working on it, but still, for god's sake, say it
| in Slack unless it's _impossible_ to, which is almost
| never).
| randomdata wrote:
| When I started working from home, AOL Instant Messenger
| was still the hot new thing and long distance charges
| would kill you. Residential bandwidth simply wasn't there
| for calls. For all intents and purposes, it was textual
| communication or nothing.
|
| It was glorious. Having record of all conversations for
| easy reference really did help build better software, as
| far as I am concerned. These days, everyone wants to do
| video conferencing, it seems, and half the time the job
| doesn't get done right because someone misheard something
| or forget what was said. It makes no sense to me.
|
| I can only imagine that those who think voice
| communication is the best communication haven't tried
| anything else.
| wnoise wrote:
| Reliable? Maybe. Enduring, definitely not. Chat logs,
| e-mails, bug-tracker tickets endure. Speech is completely
| ephemeral.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I mean we'll still be talking after Slack is gone.
| Sometimes you want to establish a ritual that will
| outlast everything, including that switch from Slack to
| Teams because corporate reasons.
| soneca wrote:
| You are not on my team, so your perceptions what is shitty
| for you do not matter. That's more the point of my comment:
| each team should discuss and reach their own ideal dynamic.
| If you were on my team, from your strong opinions here, the
| dynamic would certainly be different.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > we often chat about life, topics outside of work...
|
| Because your standup is primarily providing team bonding and
| meets other emotional needs.
| muzzio wrote:
| I agree that especially in pandemic times this is hugely
| beneficial, although I'd recommend doing it in the opposite
| order: quick 1 minute updates followed by casual off-topic
| chatter for the rest of the meeting. I've found that folks are
| much more relaxed after giving standup updates :)
| speeder wrote:
| Thing is, what you are doing is NOT a standup meeting.
|
| The reason it is called standup it was because the meeting was
| literally done standing, the idea was to force people to talk
| as quickly as possible whatever needed urgently and make them
| leave because they are tired of standing in one place.
|
| What you are doing is some kind of daily meeting, but not a
| standup in any sense.
| Closi wrote:
| Of course it's a standup, its a metaphor these days you don't
| have to literally stand (otherwise how would a remote standup
| work? Do you have to insist everyone gets out of their office
| chairs?).
|
| We used to have huddles at work, but it didn't mean that we
| were actually nestled closely together for warmth.
| speeder wrote:
| You and the guy below missed my point grossly.
|
| What made the meeting not-standup is the fact the meeting
| is not short. The fact people take time to talk about their
| daily lives, and other random stuff, means it is not a
| standup meeting.
|
| I mentioned the original standup meeting was standing,
| because the point of it was force people to want to leave
| the meeting.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| A standup meeting was also in 1 room and in person.
|
| More people work remote now, it's not 1995 anymore ( history
| of scrum). As most things, scrum evolved. It's a guide, not a
| strict protocol/law
|
| The idea is to have all the technical things in one time to
| eliminate interruptions later on, not to eliminate personal
| connections with the team. So what is a better time for the
| casual talk, since people don't have coffee breaks anymore? (
| If everyone of the team is onboard fyi)
|
| I kinda miss in person with the entire team. I see some
| people seriously slacking and those are the ones not really
| involved with casual talk too ( coincidence? ).
|
| While many people are perfectly able to work remotely, it
| made the job of a eg. teamlead much harder to confront more
| difficult things. They can't notice the body signals anymore
| when a person's cam is just off ( and even then).
| rhacker wrote:
| > in any sense
|
| I think he's meeting 99% of the idea behind a scrum standup,
| except for standing up. So for some reason the lack of
| physically standing up reverts the 99% to 0%?
| karmelapple wrote:
| Great to hear we're not the only team who does this. We are
| fully remote, and most articles on this seem to revolve around
| cutting standup to 15 minutes or less. Ours still stays pretty
| short, and is even 15 minutes sometimes, but frequently edges
| out towards a half hour.
|
| Since we're fully remote, and we do standup over voice, we only
| see each other via video a couple times every three-week
| iteration. So a little chatter at the beginning of standup is a
| way to just check in and see how people are doing, including in
| their personal life.
|
| Another idea to perhaps add: we've informally agreed that the
| time right after standup is typically reserved for small group
| discussions for any subset of the team.
|
| We're fully remote (and have been for 10 years), so when
| standup starts, our brains have already shifted to "talking"
| mode (rather than planning/coding/reviewing mode), so it's easy
| to just keep going and help talk through any issues that would
| benefit from synchronous communication. Sometimes we
| screenshare, but frequently not - we just talk through whatever
| we're stuck on or could use insight from others.
| soneca wrote:
| > _" we 've informally agreed that the time right after
| standup is typically reserved for small group discussions for
| any subset of the team."_
|
| This happens with us as well. Usually for technical
| discussions that will take longer than 5 to 10 minutes.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| The worst standup I ever had were where it wasn't a standup at
| all. It was a role call by the managing director to check up on
| what you did the day before and to generally berate you for any
| minor transgression in his idea of what you should have been
| working on.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That would certainly suck. The worst in my experience (at
| least recently) are standups where the PO shows up, then
| proceeds to get in long-winded discussions about features and
| implementation, and invariably tries to guide priorities for
| the day. 90 minutes later...
|
| For a time I was managing a team that used this PO, and I
| quickly banned him outright from standups. Told him to keep
| his guidance granularity at the sprint level, make sure his
| stories were written well enough to not require constant
| elaboration, and otherwise leave the developers alone. He
| could show up for sprint review & planning. Standups were
| just to unblock anyone who needed it, and should only last a
| couple minutes.
| mc32 wrote:
| I hate places that have stand ups. It mostly amounts to being
| in a work collective where the apparatchik gets to show you
| it's still the boss of you.
|
| There are other routines that are actually helpful but don't
| feel like the red guard roll call.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| To me, Agile is micromanagement in disguise
| handrous wrote:
| Worst ones I've ever had, the dev manager was also still
| doing some dev work, mostly _not_ on the company 's main
| product, but other crap, but was in on the stand-ups and set
| the tone for it being a "moan about how hard your work is, to
| justify why we pay you" fest, by going into _way_ too much
| detail about every little difficulty he had yesterday. This
| on top of the fact that there were like 6-7 people on these
| meetings, no more than two of whom were working on the same
| thing, so standups weren 't even _theoretically_ a good idea
| to begin with. The meetings existed only for him, and he was
| ensuring the form they took was terrible, stressful, and took
| up way too much time.
|
| He also liked to take really shitty notes, then treat them
| like the gospel truth. I _read_ my stand-ups from notes I 'd
| written beforehand--never done that anywhere else, but the
| amount of crap one was evidently expected to talk about was
| large enough there, that I did, after the first week or two--
| so I could tell for a fact when he'd recorded something about
| mine that was flat-out wrong, and it was often.
| konschubert wrote:
| We have the exact same and it's awesome.
|
| Made me feel close to people I only knew remotely.
| jidiculous wrote:
| It's good that your team is empowered to tailor its rituals to
| its needs. It seems that a lot of people forget that the Agile
| manifesto[1] is loose enough to allow for team-specific
| customization: "Individuals and interactions over processes and
| tools".
|
| 1: https://agilemanifesto.org
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| True, but not at all in line with how Scrum was sold back in
| the days. I even believe there was a rule saying if you do
| not follow all the rules of Scrum it is not Scrum.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Companies should not dictate a team's process. If they do,
| you should leave (if you can) or change it (if you can).
|
| Process should always be owned by the team as a whole. It
| should also be ever improving (even if this means complete
| change) and, almost more importantly, you should have as
| little of it as possible (it shouldn't get in the way).
| brianmcc wrote:
| Same here. It's a little bloated maybe but the balance of chit-
| chat vs real work seems to be one that works for us. It's
| productive and also good social session to start the day.
|
| Feels like it's probably been positive for people since we all
| went 100% remote March 2020.
|
| Good team rapport and trust etc are important factors, it's
| vital no one is "scared" to give honest updates.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _But it works great for us_
|
| And that's the key: Do what works for your group.
|
| The problem is that we have middle managers and project
| managers and middle project managers who go to conferences and
| watch lectures online and hang out in social media echo
| chambers talking about the latest, greatest innovation in
| managing projects without thinking about the people or the
| tasks involved.
|
| Too often development teams are forced to work for the process,
| rather than the process working for them.
|
| I've been in places where the PM would say things like, "We'll
| do it this way because it's what Google does." Well, Google has
| seventy brazillian people, and we have six on our team. What
| makes PMs think that one size fits all? It doesn't.
|
| I currently have a guy who's trying to impose a project
| management method he learned from a video game company on us.
| We work in healthcare. But he refuses to deviate from what
| worked for the video game company, and thinks it's OK for the
| users to "discover" features on their own, rather than letting
| us spend time documenting how the system works. Again... _in
| healthcare._
| soneca wrote:
| > _" Google has seventy brazillian people, and we have six on
| our team."_
|
| I spent a good few minutes trying to understand this
| sentence. Mainly because I _am_ Brazilian and was stunned how
| did you know that I was. Then trying to understand how the
| number of Brazilian people might affect standup dynamic. Then
| trying to understand exactly how many Brazilians there were
| in Google and how many of the six of your team were
| Brazilian. Just then I understood it was an expression for "a
| lot" hahaha
| swman wrote:
| We have shit standups on my team. People show up 5 minutes late
| to standup so we don't actually start for like 5-10 min past
| start time.
|
| I get it, not all are morning people. Please mute your mic, I
| really don't want to hear you yawn half a dozen times. It's
| obnoxious. If you're talking and you need to yawn, just mute
| for a second.
|
| I know you're still working on this ticket (what's the point of
| JIRA otherwise?), just tell me if you need help on it or are
| blocked. That's more important to the team.
|
| Standups over zoom or as a dedicated meeting are honestly a
| waste of time when people show up late or yawn just to go over
| mostly the same status every day. Just post your update in
| slack, let others know if you have any blockers.
|
| I'm pretty much checked out these days, so I don't really care.
| What should be a 5 min exercise (90% of the time) turns into 20
| minutes of pain. Others enjoy it as it is though, so I don't
| really care. Also every other meeting is similar nowadays too,
| way too lax and people seem to be okay being slow/lazy.
| saltminer wrote:
| > I get it, not all are morning people
|
| This is why I prefer standups to be right before lunch (back
| when you'd have lunch with your coworkers). People are awake
| and have a reason to not want things to drag on.
|
| Of course, when one of your coworkers is on the west coast
| (and the rest are on the east coast), it's not lunch time for
| everyone, but it still tends to go quicker than if the
| meeting was an hour earlier.
| the_arun wrote:
| We follow similar structure, but it is not a daily thing. We do
| this 3 days a week. So far useful. Besides, we extensively use
| Slack to notify team for any blockers.
| dustymcp wrote:
| This is out setup aswell with and added friday 1 h where we
| show off stuff we done/found interesting its great for team
| building imo
| rdruxn wrote:
| >But teams behave in an infinite combination of size, members,
| companies, and time
|
| Slightly off topic, but I realize this is a subject I'd be
| interested in reading more about. Would be interested in
| suggestions in the same vein as Creativity, Inc. by Edwin
| Catmull?
| freeqaz wrote:
| I really can't emphasize this enough. I work with a small team
| (2 other devs) and our morning standup happens 3x per week.
| We're remote and we're building Open Source tech[0].
|
| We do it similarly to how you describe here -- we have a short
| intro (5 mins) before diving into each of us presenting. Each
| of us presenting may take 2 mins or take 30 mins. If one of us
| is struggling or blocked, we use this time to collaborate +
| pair program/debug.
|
| Eventually, we get through everything and then go about our
| day. Sometimes (because I am the "lead"), I'll use the
| opportunity to ask questions about roadmap or other items that
| I need their input on. They're already distracted and not "in
| the zone", so chaining on the additional "meeting" works quite
| well.
|
| Because of this, these are our only meetings every week. We get
| a bit of "water cooler" chatting in, we are able to unblock
| each other, and we are able to have a short iteration loop for
| re-prioritizing our work. (New tasks can be delegated by
| quickly going through the backlog)
|
| The pandemic has really changed work, and I really feel like
| we're still iterating on what the best dynamics are for teams
| to be productive. Thanks for the insight into your team
| dynamic!
|
| 0: https://github.com/lunasec-io/lunasec
| quambene wrote:
| Sounds great. Which tool do you use for pair programming?
| noodle wrote:
| For a remote team, you have to make space for people to get the
| face-to-face hallway/watercooler chat time if you want to build
| a solid culture. Time for people to get to know oneanother that
| is easy if you're co-located. Easiest place to make space for
| this is to have padding on your meetings. Especially standups.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > For us developers it is the only group meeting in the day 90%
| of the days.
|
| That seems so fantastical to me :/. That works out to 1 day
| with other group meetings every 2 weeks. Glad to hear there are
| places like that though!
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Standup for me is about a daily ritual--to show each other you
| respect each other well enough to show up and honour your
| working agreements. I believe that so long as you are
| intentional about it, you can do standup however you want. But
| I'll reiterate that it's really important to be intentional
| about it, and that's exact what you seem to be doing, so that's
| great!
|
| We've stripped out standup completely bare. We're fully remote
| and use JamBoard. There's no going taking turns to give long-
| winded updates that causes people to tune-out. If you have an
| update, you must put it on a sticky, otherwise there's no need
| to talk. At the end of standup, the devs will discuss what
| we're going to work on for the day. We only talk about what
| we're working on with the full team if things aren't on track
| and we need help from product or design.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > Standup for me is about a daily ritual--to show each other
| you respect each other well enough to show up and honour your
| working agreements.
|
| As someone with narcolepsy, your daily ritual is everything
| that makes my life horrible.
|
| I got lucky not to be a part of companies with this mindset
| now. Every other company was like this, and it was truly a
| miserable thing. I remember the secretary at my first job
| calling me every day whenever I was running slightly late,
| and one of my coworkers joked that someday he'd sabotage that
| phone.
|
| The whole idea of it being "respect" is just bogus. My
| inability to put my ass in a chair at 9am every day has
| nothing to do with how much I respect you, the team, or the
| company. People are just different, and work in different
| ways.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| The problem was not the standup, but the people. In my
| previous job the standups were early afternoon, because
| some people started at 8 and some at 9 - and we also didn't
| care much if someone was late.
|
| As the parent mentioned, there should be respect, and seem
| they didn't have any for you
| zeroxfe wrote:
| > As someone with narcolepsy, your daily ritual is
| everything that makes my life horrible.
|
| I'm sorry you're in a shitty situation, but it's unfair to
| blame GP's perfectly reasonable ritual for it. It's your
| narcolepsy that makes your life horrible, not their ritual,
| and it's quite unfortunate.
| 34523trefds12 wrote:
| You seem to have missed the point of not just the
| article, but the OP.
|
| If you read the article, it advocates asynchronous
| conversation, and 'micro' updates.
|
| In other words rather than forcing people to update at a
| specific time, that whilst convenient for you, is not
| convenient for all we should consider allowing people to
| do what they need to do and empower them to respond
| appropriately.
|
| This is why OP mentioned that _your_ daily ritual is
| hurting them, because you are _forcing_ them to adhere to
| what works for you at _their_ expense.
|
| It also goes both ways, but we cannot ask one to always
| considers us, and allow their needs to go unattended
| because it doesn't fit our narrative.
| Talanes wrote:
| >This is why OP mentioned that _your_ daily ritual is
| hurting them, because you are _forcing_ them to adhere to
| what works for you at _their_ expense.
|
| Technically true, but it's not like the "ritual" is some
| weird obscure requirement. Showing up on time is pretty
| much a default requirement of society. At least they're
| in a field where being slightly late results in
| embarrassment instead of firing.
| 8note wrote:
| The ritual is ok, but assuming people don't respect you
| because they aren't good at following it isn't.
| mpfundstein wrote:
| dude (m/f), i guess EVERYONE would respect you being late
| if they knew you had a condition..
| hinkley wrote:
| You have no idea how many neurodiverse and chronically
| ill people in your company are trying to pass for normal.
|
| Our fixation on "normal" makes people resist getting help
| that would make their lives easier and possibly make it
| easier for them to be "out".
|
| You have no idea what your coworkers are struggling with.
| I found out one had stage 4 cancer by asking why it was
| taking him so long to fix a problem. I've had exactly one
| coworker in >20 years who was open about being on the
| autism spectrum, and people were weird about it.
|
| Nobody wants to be defined by these things so they don't
| bring them up.
| YokoZar wrote:
| By far the most common complaint from support groups for
| people with sleep disorders is the sheer lack of respect
| people have for different sleep schedules. We get called
| lazy even when we work past midnight. By coworkers, and
| even family.
|
| The usual advice is to find a different job with actually
| flexible scheduling or night shifts, for good reason.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's gatekeeping, when you get right down to it.
| Angostura wrote:
| If you have been diagnosed with narcolepsy your
| organisation should probably grant you a formal
| accommodation to cope with your disability.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| So yeah, you would work with your team to do it in a way
| that works for you and makes you and your needs and working
| style feel respected too.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| > People are just different, and work in different ways.
|
| That's exactly the point I was trying to get across.
|
| I was expressing what standup is to my team and why we
| bother doing it at all, not what I think it should or must
| be. The point I was trying to make was around being
| intentional around the team's behaviour. If everyone wants
| show up whenever they want to, that's fine, let's just call
| it what is so that no one is wondering what the rules are.
| My team decided that we all want to start the day at the
| same time, so that's what we do, but processes aren't set
| in stone and this can change at any point. For example, if
| you were on my team, then we would change our process to
| accommodate you.
|
| It sounds like you worked at incredibly toxic companies.
| madarcho wrote:
| And in my team, we would have taken this into account.
|
| And that starts with a conversation (like the thread OP
| implied in their answer). Hopefully the conversation would
| then avoid any pressure on you in saying that the meeting
| doesn't work for you.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| In my experience you can't really have that conversation.
| The conversation is equivalent to "please change the way
| the team works, just for me."
|
| If a company isn't set up for that, it's hopeless. You're
| asking to be more special than everyone else, and
| everyone else is going to notice.
| Oddskar wrote:
| I have had that conversation multiple times in multiple
| teams. We adjust things when they don't work; e.g. if
| someone is obviously not making it to a meeting in the
| morning.
|
| I don't see why you couldn't make that ask.
| 8note wrote:
| There's no reason to beleive that youre the only person
| who wants a similar change. Not without bringing it up,
| and even if nobody already wants the change, they may not
| have thought about it, and will decide its a good idea
| when they have
| sodapopcan wrote:
| It's unfortunate that there are companies that operate
| this way.
|
| Presumably you are there because they wanted you there.
| Making a change to accommodate one person shouldn't be a
| big deal. I've said it a few times in these threads
| already, but processes should never be set in stone. You
| should always assume your processes will change. It
| doesn't have to be a huge change, just finding something
| that works for everyone. Of course, there is always going
| to have to be compromise, but the conversation should be
| allowed to be had.
| mdoms wrote:
| It's an incredibly shitty thing to say that some guy on the
| internet "makes [your] life horrible" because he has a
| standing agreement with his team - a team you will never
| work on and a team that presumably doesn't contain any
| narcolepts and presumably would do their very best to
| accommodate one if they did.
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| > The whole idea of it being "respect" is just bogus.
|
| It's worse than that. The insistence that 8 am or 9 am
| indicates a "respect" for the team is in fact disrespect
| for the team.
|
| It says we don't give a shit about why it's hard for you to
| be here at 7:45 or 8:45 (because doing a standup cold is
| bad too), do it anyway.
|
| It's a show of power. And a petty one at that.
| wffurr wrote:
| Standup ought not to be at 9 AM then.
| alistairSH wrote:
| This.
|
| For a while, I had a 9:30 meeting. It existed as a direct
| result of people hating the previous 9am meeting - no big
| deal, a few team members complained, I moved it, and
| everybody was happy.
| kfichter wrote:
| Hah, we dedicate the first 5 minutes (used to be 7 minutes, but
| the company grew) of our daily standup to non-work related
| subjects. After which someone makes an airhorn-like noise
| (think "pew pew pew") to mark the beginning of "actual"
| standup. It started as a way to accommodate people who were
| running a minute or two late but it's become a ritual at this
| point. Rituals are nice!
| Rezwoodly wrote:
| Sounds pretty sweet. The last "leader" I operated under used
| to lock us into 1.5-2 hour daily stand ups every morning and
| would use the time to either bitch, delegate or brag about
| his work. It's was a fucking nightmare.
| uhtred wrote:
| Are you one of the managers or PMs?
| soneca wrote:
| No, I am one of the IC developers.
| uhtred wrote:
| Interesting. Thank you. I was just wondering if your
| viewpoint was from a non-developer perspective.
| JasonCannon wrote:
| Fully remote team here. We decided that the chit chat starts at
| 10, the standup at 10:15. That.... often doesn't happen. So our
| running joke is no matter what time it is getting (sometimes
| 10:30, sometimes 10:40) we always say "Alright guys, it's
| almost 10:15" to signal that we should probably get started.
| koonsolo wrote:
| I said this before: the only thing you really need is
| retrospectives. When you have that, you can adapt your process
| to anything your team wants.
| bww wrote:
| There seems to be a surprising amount of antipathy towards
| standups in this thread. Reasonable people may disagree about how
| useful they are, sure, but the suggestion that 15 minutes of
| daily coordination is somehow a foundational problem in modern
| software engineering strikes me as pretty unrealistic.
|
| I would suggest that if you truly believe standups are some
| deeply destructive tool of mismanagement you probably have much
| bigger problems with your company or role that you're projecting
| on to this rather innocuous meeting.
| Jensson wrote:
| > There seems to be a surprising amount of antipathy towards
| standups in this thread
|
| What is surprising about a bunch of introverted people not
| wanting to be forced to stand up and loudly declare what their
| day was like to the entire team every day?
| lmilcin wrote:
| The problem is simple. Whatever you do, don't blindly implement
| something just because it is written in a book or an article.
|
| Agile is about focusing on constantly improving processes.
|
| Ask yourself, "Are the standups paying for themselves? Are they
| improving my process? If they are not, can I do something to fix
| them? Is there something else I can do that would be less
| disruptive and more worthwhile?"
|
| If there is no benefit, continuing to run inefficient process is
| anti-agile and, frankly, stupid.
|
| Over the years I have participated in a lot of standups that are
| basically progress reports to the manager. Those teams usually
| already had a Jira, so this was just a stupid waste of time for
| something that did not provide any value.
|
| The value of standups is in interactions between team members
| that would not normally happen without them. Like finding out
| somebody has a problem that I know an answer to. Or figuring out
| your task is no longer needed because of somebody else is doing
| something that makes it obsolete. Or noticing somebody is
| overworked and that I can spare some time to help them so that
| the team collectively delivers more on its promise.
|
| I have learned that low trust between team members precludes
| exchange of useful information on a standup and basically negates
| any value you could get from it.
|
| When people treat standup as progress report to the manager and
| have low trust towards their manager and peers, they tend to
| guard any information to not pass anything that could by accident
| backfire on them.
|
| Another reason I have seen standups be a waste of time is when
| people don't really work as a team but rather as a collection of
| single person projects. When other people work on things that are
| completely unrelated to what I am doing and in fact understanding
| requires knowledge that I don't have, there is very little value
| coming from telling the progress of what I am working on.
| cube00 wrote:
| The project manager interpreted what they thought a stand up was
| and enforce we follow a template, they see themselves as part of
| the "scrum team" so they also attend these meetings.
|
| You have to open with "Today I commit to..." and then the
| following day you had to start with "Yesterday I committed to ...
| and I achieved or did not achieve my commitment because ...".
|
| This was followed up with a new commitment for the following day
| which was again followed up the next day, five days a week.
|
| It's horrible. I hope one day I can be part of the kind of agile
| which hasn't been weaponized against developers.
| viburnum wrote:
| That sounds insane.
|
| In my experience agile works when it's led by developers and
| not management.
| wgj wrote:
| That's rare. The majority of agile/scrum/standup is led by
| some kind or another of project manager. Specific titles
| vary.
| jseban wrote:
| In what company are management not leading
| vlunkr wrote:
| Are they sometimes useless? sure. Are they hurting anything? no.
| As long as you keep them brief, as intended, they are a good way
| to quickly spread lots of info. And you have to live with the
| fact that they mostly aren't for the developers.
| ravenstine wrote:
| The only value I've ever gotten out of standups is just being
| able to quickly hang out with coworkers I like. If the standups
| are online then they're pretty much worthless.
|
| If I were to lead a team and help develop the processes and
| methodologies we were going to use, I'd still have a form of
| standup but it wouldn't be the kind of standup typical to SCUM
| methodology or anything like that.
|
| My idea of a valuable standup would be for the team to get
| together for a short while in the morning to shoot the shit for
| 10 minutes at most. Nobody has to talk about their work, although
| it would be a good time for team leads to introduce intel about
| new or changing priorities. If team members want to talk about
| their work or challenges they are facing, then all the better.
| There would be no pressure to attend them all the time, or to be
| there on time. If people aren't showing up to them enough then
| that's a sign that they aren't valuable in the first place.
|
| Why treat standups like something out of public school? It just
| ends up turning standups into an exercise where students are
| _coerced_ to attend even if no value is being provided. Such
| standups quickly turn into status updates and an exercise in
| subordination for many of the team members.
| timvdalen wrote:
| Thanks for reminding me I never received my 5 pack of Shape Up! I
| should get on that...
| Communitivity wrote:
| I have been on teams where a daily standup was no issue, ones
| where we needed to go to a weekly standup, and ones where getting
| everyone to attend the standup was problematic. Each team is
| different. Use what the team finds beneficial, modify or chuck
| what they do not. My personal experience is that on a team of
| mostly senior engineers a daily standup is a good thing.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I absolutely hated standups until I found myself in a team where
| everyone's very siloed. Nobody knows what anyone else is doing in
| detail and expertise isn't shared. I may as well be moving from
| solo project to solo project. Now I kinda miss standups.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > Really, doesn't the idea of gathering a team for a status
| meeting feel quaint in an era of ubiquitous instant messaging?
|
| No! Talking to people face to face is infinitely better than
| using shitty messaging apps like Slack.
| crabl wrote:
| It's interesting: we've been running our own take on the Shape Up
| model for a bit, and when we started out, we did not run a daily
| standup. After a few weeks, however, we decided to bring the
| group together every day: it gets lonely when working remotely,
| and having a daily ritual to center ourselves around is actually
| quite nice.
| [deleted]
| syngrog66 wrote:
| they dont scale. across people or time. in person, and actual
| standing (which one boss insisted on) are the worst. phone conf a
| little better but still bad. wastes so much time. even the
| textual status versions can be annoying and put pressure on you
| to "game" it to not look bad. if someone is working on
| essentially one thing only and that lasts over many days or weeks
| it becomes a maddening grind to have to say the same exact thing
| everyday. and it can make you feel bad as a "slacker" if you dont
| have as much exciting stuff to report new each day. in short it
| becomes yet enough tool for coworkers to abuse in the name of
| politics and getting ahead
|
| that said... I like the potential of them. and I think it might
| be possible to do them right. but theyre certainly optimized to
| be best for the manager, maybe a net win for him, and a net lose
| for each of his reports.
|
| caveat: I might have experienced them "done wrong" more than done
| right. so will keep an open mind that the latter is possible
| g051051 wrote:
| > The daily standup may have done more than any other ritual to
| improve developer productivity.
|
| In what universe did this happen? Certainly not ours.
| ahurmazda wrote:
| What worked for our team:
|
| 1. strictly time-boxed (1 min per person)
|
| 2. we stick to stating 3 things and then move on:
|
| - I accomplished X yesterday
|
| - I am working on Y today
|
| - I am blocking Z or blocked by Z
|
| (edit: I suck at editing markdown on HN)
| sanitycheck wrote:
| Funnily enough, you were able to express that perfectly in
| text.
|
| I don't think this information which needs to shared in person,
| simultaneously, at a set time every day, while standing up.
| ahurmazda wrote:
| We do stand ups but nobody is standing :-) We are all remote.
| This is the only time we see each other in a group. We tried
| doing it slack-only but ppl liked getting to see each others
| face once a day.
|
| Finally, if something comes up, its as easy as saying "lets
| do :standup-emoji over slack". No questions asked
| randomdata wrote:
| Unquestionably. Just yesterday I was asked a quick question about
| something we are working on. I made the mistake of saying that it
| could be a problem, but I would have to confirm since I did not
| have the needed information in my head at the time. Once I was
| able confirm, there was no problem, but that lead to wasting an
| hour later in the day to explain why it might have been a problem
| and why it isn't actually a problem.
|
| In asynchronous mode, I would have taken the five minutes before
| replying to perform that confirmation step and all would have
| been right with the world. I would have been far more happy that
| my time wasn't wasted and far more productive in the end. Not to
| mention that there would be written record of the answer, which
| is always useful later when the same question arises. So much
| valuable information is lost in the traditional standup. It is
| heartbreaking.
|
| I know, it is ultimately my failing that I don't have the full
| knowledge of the universe stored in memory at all times and often
| say the wrong things when put on the spot, but then again, a well
| structured team is designed around the failings of people rather
| than trying to shoehorn failing people into a fixed structure.
| sime2009 wrote:
| Man oh man, so many people here doing the worse version of
| standups, the status update meeting. I understand the bile in
| these threads. It is a shit format. Stop doing it.
|
| Instead try this:
|
| Standups are time for a team to plan their day and coordinate on
| how they will tackle the issues on the board. So, go from right
| to left on the board and discuss each issue and what needs to be
| done to finish it. Maybe some people can team up today. Maybe
| someone else has expertise regarding some problem. Maybe the team
| decides to drop an issue and give prio to another. etc etc.
|
| That's all.
|
| None of this "what I did yesterday, what I'm doing today"
| bullshit. No one cares. Stop it. Also, you don't need any
| managers to be present. The standup is for the benefit of the
| team. No managers need to be involved.
|
| Try it. It is much much better.
| hcrean wrote:
| I'm a DevOps engineer embedded in a Development team, (something
| about Spotify models being popular). Stand-Ups are a complete and
| utter waste of time and a lovely way to break flow in the middle
| of the morning.
|
| No one knows what anyone else is doing, 99% of the time no one
| cares, Moreover people are all dealing with context switch and
| ineffective at relating how their thing might have a knock-on
| effect for others.
|
| Sure makes team leaders feel like they are in the loop and
| valuable to an organisation though, especially ones that don't
| know how to ask effectively.
| dahart wrote:
| I totally understand it, but I'm still a bit surprised by the
| sheer amount of dislike for standups here.
|
| I used to be there myself but changed my mind after years of
| seeing programmers who complained about having to do too-frequent
| status updates go off into the bushes and take their code off the
| rails for weeks at a time to build the wrong thing.
|
| While standups are indeed a context switch and feel like they sap
| productivity, there's nothing less productive than people who run
| off quietly and build something you dont need or want, or people
| who over-engineer things because they're worried about
| requirements they don't have, or sometimes just to flex. The
| scale of productivity loss that I've personally witnessed of
| programmers not talking things out properly is so much larger
| than the 30 minutes it takes to sit through standup, they're just
| incomparable.
|
| Standup doesn't automatically fix this issue, but it seems to
| have helped, from what I've seen.
| malermeister wrote:
| We spend so much time interviewing people, we should be
| filtering those folks out before they even join the company.
| dahart wrote:
| There's a real danger that if we filtered out everyone who
| doesn't see the value in meetings, we'd have nobody left to
| write any code. ;) I suspect all programmers are prone to
| this in varying degrees, and in decades of experience in
| companies of many sizes I've never seen a counter-example. I
| have absolutely wrestled with preferring less talking and
| more coding and felt at many times like I was wasting time in
| meetings, even though my mindset has shifted over time to see
| the value in communication that brings team alignment even if
| it uses up some of my time and attention.
|
| In my first job in CG films, there were 1-hour dailies twice
| a day that I was expected to show partial progress. And it
| might take 30 minutes to render & prepare for it every time
| too. It could use up half my day sometimes, and I fought with
| the producer about it. I was writing code to control crowds
| that wouldn't be ready for weeks, so what was the point of
| showing every day, or of being present only to watch other
| people's updates? There's a balance for sure, but years later
| I feel like I was in the wrong, and I see the value in
| showing partial work often. It's because people often don't
| agree even when they say they do, language is way too
| ambiguous. So a planning meeting once is never finished, you
| have to keep agreeing on the goals over and over with
| tangible results until it's finished before you actually know
| if everyone's in sync.
| gumby wrote:
| This is the blog equivalent of a business book: long text to pad
| out a simple insight.
|
| Isn't everyone using something like a slack standup bot? We get
| the advantage of the daily "did this, will do that, no blockers"
| in a highly distributed team.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| We have to post our daily standup into a Slack channel, so it's
| just a matter of posting my (planned) task list for the day.
| There's no discussion, just something my manager reviews. I don't
| really see the point but I play along anyways.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| This seems like way more micromanagement than a daily, sync
| stand-up
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Empower decentralized decision making. Back it up with
| centralized control.
|
| This has nothing to do with standups. Decisions aren't even
| particularly made in standups, other than "how do we solve
| today's problems".
|
| I keep reading apparently revolutionary next gen agile articles
| that are full of non sequiturs such as this.
| moon_other wrote:
| Yes, they do.
|
| A few developers have taken advantage of the stand-ups to avoid
| updating tickets with information as it comes up and just wait
| until the stand-up.
| randomdata wrote:
| When I was on a team that caught the agile flu and wanted to
| experience the standup fever, it soon became very confusing to
| the team to know when communication should occur.
|
| What was naturally communicated throughout the day became
| bottled up for standup. "Taken advantage" suggests nefarious
| intent, but I expect in a lot of cases it was simply because
| people have no idea what purpose standups serve if they
| otherwise communicate normally.
|
| And since standup advocates suggest that people should be
| called upon to say their piece, there is even more incentive to
| save up something in order to have something to say. "I'm
| afraid I have no new information to share" every day gets old
| _very_ quickly. I know first hand, because that 's exactly what
| we were left with when we tried to also communicate outside of
| standups.
| seanhunter wrote:
| For all meetings, I think it helps to evaluate on an ongoing
| basis:
|
| 1)what the meeting is for (ie the goal of the meeting)
|
| 2)whether a meeting is actually the best way to achieve that goal
| and if so, who actually needs to be there to achieve that goal
|
| 3)whether the meeting on an ongoing basis is achieving the goal
| and if not, why not
|
| In my experience a lot of daily standups degenerate into being a
| very inefficient "serial hub-and-spoke" information-sharing where
| one dominant boss person asks each person in turn a series of
| questions and everyone else shuts off their brain until it's
| their turn. It's a tremendous waste of everyone's time and just
| there to stoke the overinflated ego of the person running the
| meeting.
| vbtemp wrote:
| Agile, "SCRUM", and daily "stand ups" are the worst thing to have
| happened to me during my career. In the mid 2010s they started to
| become a serious thing, and my career/work satisfaction really
| steadily declined.
|
| Now, I only work in teams and projects that are pointedly non-
| Agile, non-SCRUM, without anyone holding a title of "SCRUM
| Master". My love of software development is coming back, and it
| really feels great.
|
| Every time I interview for a job, the only time I permit myself
| one foul-language word, is when I make the point that "I'm not
| going to work in an Agile team, I'm too old for that shit". When
| what follows is an awkward, silent few moments, I know it isn't
| going to work out. When what follows is enthusiasm and agreement
| (happening more and more these days) I know we're on the right
| track to do great work together.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > without anyone holding a title of "SCRUM Master"
|
| I always wondered why small teams need anyone dedicated
| exclusively to be a "scrum master". Outside regular meetings
| and checking the project board once or twice a day, what is
| their purpose?
|
| I would much rather have another dev in the team.
| LimaBearz wrote:
| I've also hated that trend. Ill preface this with the caveat
| that I'm extremely biased against PMs.
|
| What we've seen is the birth of a new profession, "Project
| Manager" (Agile/Scrum); and its filled by a ton of people who
| read a travel brochure size sheet of paper detailing how to be
| one and that's how they all operate, all while demanding
| outsized pay for the "skill" (really if they were paid minimum
| wage that's still too much)
|
| They take zero consideration for team structure, working
| dynamic, the business that the org is operating in and tries to
| shove every uniquely shaped team into a square peg.
|
| What's more annoying is that I've seen some hardcore PM run
| shop promoting project managers into people managers, often
| overseeing highly technical teams while they themselves not
| being technical which leads to all sort of pain and cost to the
| the ICs they oversee.
|
| Agile has managed to 'codify' middle management, very poorly.
| vbtemp wrote:
| Agile is _exactly_ the corporate management hellscape that,
| circa 2000, the Agile Manifesto authors explicitly sought to
| subvert. Things from Office Space (1999) have come exactly
| full circle.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| I agree w/ you broadly but I want to add a counterpoint that
| a great PM/TPM is worth their weight in gold.
|
| We lost one on our team and immediately we were worse off.
| Having someone who can unblock engineers by making and
| updating trackers, knowing who to talk to to get projects
| unblocked, and having a larger view of things sped us up so
| much. (Which I'm sure is why he got ferreted away to a very
| important project for the company ;)
| 0des wrote:
| Shitty standups are first the fault of the leader, and second the
| participants. If everyone limps into the meeting and 'phones it
| in' by repeating common responses "uhh, work orders, reviewing
| PR's", then of course you'll get a weak result.
|
| Addressing standups as the sole issue completely ignores the
| holistic factors that influence the outcome. If a team is bored,
| undercompensated, overworked, undersupervised, then they're going
| to deliver shitty standups, and those standups will be a waste of
| time. When the participants are _eager_ to provide a handoff of
| knowledge and prompt eachother for interchange, then you get the
| good standups that leave people racing back to their desks to
| build off of that synergy.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > "uhh, work orders, reviewing PR's", then of course you'll get
| a weak result.
|
| What are you supposed to say then?
|
| Daily is way too ofent to have anything interesting to say. It
| is a low effort way for the manager to keep track on things and
| make people feel stupid for not doing progress in the maner the
| agile scoreboard dictates.
| remedan wrote:
| In my team it is okay to just say "no update". We don't do
| dailies to justify that we aren't slacking off. Everybody
| trusts everybody else that they put in the work.
|
| Daily stand-ups are for coordinating with the other devs.
| E.g. "It will take a couple extra days to do this backend API
| that you are waiting for", "I'm a bit stuck, anybody will
| have free time today to pair program?", "Who is able to drop
| their low priority task so that the high priority one gets
| done on time?"
|
| If you're on track and don't neet anything, just "no updates
| today".
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "Daily stand-ups are for coordinating with the other devs.
| E.g. "It will take a couple extra days to do this backend
| API that you are waiting for", "I'm a bit stuck, anybody
| will have free time today to pair program?", "Who is able
| to drop their low priority task so that the high priority
| one gets done on time?"
|
| "
|
| Why do you need standups for this? They should talk to each
| other directly.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| Because sometimes devs might not be listening/talking to
| others, and just need someone to organize an offline
| discussion to unblock them.
|
| I have been to a team where X would need help on
| something that Y has solved in the past, Y does not care
| to listen in the standup and volunteer to help, and i had
| to ping him "Hey Y you have resolved this in the past,
| care to help X after the standup?"
|
| Shitty standups go bidirectional ways. Managers can make
| them terrible, but devs can do that as well.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Sounds like the relevant devs you mention just need to
| shoot the other a heads-up.
|
| The first 25 years of my career as a programmer we never
| had daily stand-ups, had never heard of them. We shipped.
|
| Something about all the "process" that has crept into the
| job over the last decade or so has really turned me off.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Yep, I love yeeting everything into master branch. Fuck
| process
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I too was coding 30 years or so ago. Back then we may not
| have had git, but we certainly had RCS and I recall
| switching to CVS.
|
| There's a huge difference between a "daily progress
| meeting" and "sensible development". I too have seen a
| lot of process creeping into things and I'm glad I'm
| getting close to retirement.
| 0des wrote:
| I feel what you said about the 'process' creeping in,
| however, if you don't mind, allow me to counter: My first
| N years had no version control, but that is not
| sufficient in my opinion to say it hasn't improved
| things.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Yeah, it's turned it from a more creative process into
| more of an assembly line sweatshop. All of the new
| excessive formalities bug me.
| johanneskanybal wrote:
| This is the truth of course. Developers develop in spite
| of the current process management buzz word not because
| of it. With that said a daily 15 min standup seems to
| strike a reasonable balance for me/us personally between
| creating awareness within the team that might not have
| come up otherwise whilst not stealing too much time.
| 0des wrote:
| Head's up - You might be one of the people detracting from
| your team's standup.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| If the team in general benefits from the daily stand-ups
| then you may be correct.
|
| Instead I see someone who questions the utility of this
| particular daily ritual. If others on the team feel the
| same way then it's more like they're calling the emperor
| naked.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| This doesn't address the issue of some participants
| perceiving the frequency of standups outpacing the amount
| of information worth sharing. Which is one of the largest
| recurring criticisms of standups.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Then make them shorter! and make it OK to say "No
| Update". If you have nothing to summarize of value to
| your team in a 24 hr block, what are you doing all day?
| xaedes wrote:
| Somehow these last two sentences seem to contradict each
| other.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Sometimes there just isn't much more to mention than
| "things are going well" or "things are done". Both of
| which I would expect a competent team to take as the
| default if nothing is being said, with the difference
| between the two shown through your list of issues /
| graphs / whatever people are using to track progress. At
| which point, if all you have to say is the default, it
| isn't that difficult to criticize the usefulness of doing
| things daily.
|
| On the other end, having to report things based on a
| timeframe that tight relative to the work done will
| quickly devolve towards finding things to report on, no
| matter how unnoteworthy. Teach people to speak up and
| show noteworthy things instead and have a bit of faith in
| your other metrics and report pipelines.
| rimliu wrote:
| So if the point is to gather and declare "no update"
| maybe there is no point, really? And if you have
| something else than "no update", why not to share it with
| relevant persons only, at any convenient time?
| Clubber wrote:
| The fact that its daily makes it like that. We do weekly
| meetings with biz then break off into our weekly dev
| meeting where we strategize. Valuable information gets
| communicated and we have no daily standups. If people need
| to talk, they use the group chat app or email or the phone.
| IMO, daily standup is a cultish ritual that rarely has
| value. Incoming downvotes!
| wppick wrote:
| Yes I can see your point. Why wait for a single point of
| day to bring up any issues or share information? Just do
| it immediately. We have tools to enable this (slack,
| teams, email, etc.). But, I do see the point of a daily
| sync up for team building, especially for remote teams.
| nzmsv wrote:
| Teams are built out of people, and I think if you ask
| you'll find that people overwhelmingly hate standups. So
| what exactly is this teambuilding building?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I hope teams aren't waiting for a daily stand-up to try
| and get unblocked, but there is definitely value in both
| sharing the summary of the blocker and publicly thanking
| anyone who helped unblock with the entire team. It (a)
| increases bus width, (b) builds the team and (c) takes 20
| seconds.
| Jensson wrote:
| > It (a) increases bus width, (b) builds the team and (c)
| takes 20 seconds.
|
| (d) creates a daily source of anxiety for developers who
| doesn't handle public speaking well. Which is a lot of
| them, but it is a shameful thing to admit.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Why wait for a single point of day to bring up any
| issues or share information?
|
| Nobody does this, they do it immediately, at least all
| the places I've worked. I need help, first I try to
| figure it out myself, then when I'm stuck or want to make
| sure I'm doing it right, I ask the owner of the code I'm
| working with. This makes standups not only redundant
| (information has already been shared) but distracting.
|
| >But, I do see the point of a daily sync up for team
| building, especially for remote teams.
|
| I've found it to be a morale killer more so than a morale
| booster. Fuck I gotta stop what I'm doing for this stupid
| standup, or I'm not gonna do anything because the standup
| is in 45 minutes; I'll just get distracted.
|
| I was once at a place where you actually stood up and the
| standups were 45 friggin minutes long. Total waste of
| time and I was so demoralized after it took me 30 minutes
| just to decompress and get stuff done.
|
| They would be slightly better if done on M-F-W or even
| more so on T-TH. Once a week meetings for about 30
| minutes with biz then 30 minutes with dev works great for
| our team.
| folmar wrote:
| I know a few teams that do "daily" two times a week, but
| longer than the usual 10 minutes, so that there is some
| time for team-wide discussion and people are not feeling
| like the meeting is there to pressure them. I'd say it
| works good.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| If you don't have anything interesting to say daily then how
| often would a stand up occur ? Biweekly? Weekly?
|
| Also see you working on one large project or a bunch of small
| projects ?
| nzmsv wrote:
| Ideally as close to never as possible. Just have meetings
| with people you are working on on an as needed basis.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Once a week is fine.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > What are you supposed to say then?
|
| Which work orders? Which PRs? How much progress? Are they
| harder than expected? Easier? Any blockers? Anything that
| could help?
|
| Standup isn't just for managers. It's for ICs to also
| communicate their needs, obstacles, concerns, or even just
| give everyone a heads up that a certain task is more
| difficult than expected. If you're just searching for the
| bare minimum to say to get your manager to move on to the
| next person, it's a waste. It's only a few minutes, so take
| advantage of it for some quick bidirectional communication.
| 0des wrote:
| I'm always flabbergasted when someone asks what's the
| point. It would be a very different game if the captain on
| the field initiates the huddle and expects everyone to get
| jazzed about "ALRIGHT LETS THROW THE BALL SOME AND THEN WE
| WILL CATCH IT SOME AND THERE MAY BE RUNNING INVOLVED! LETS
| GO, ON THREE! ONE TWO THREE GO TEAM"
| Jensson wrote:
| The difference is that in a football game you don't have
| time to talk to each other during the game. In a software
| team you do have plenty of time and opportunities to talk
| as soon as a blocker or issue appears, and everyone can
| see who is assigned to what tasks, who submitted what
| changes and read updates about blockers in the project
| management tooling the instant those events happens.
|
| In other words, if you have plenty to talk about in your
| stand-ups then you are doing something wrong. Which is
| the point of Scrum, this fixes communication issues, but
| your team really shouldn't need this.
| jseban wrote:
| > The difference is that in a football game you don't
| have time to talk to each other during the game. In a
| software team you do have plenty of time and
| opportunities to talk as soon as a blocker or issue
| appears
|
| Yes. The other difference is that football has absolutely
| nothing to do with software development whatsoever, so
| why organise as a football team, that just seems like a
| bad joke to me.
| Drew_ wrote:
| > In a software team you do have plenty of time and
| opportunities to talk as soon as a blocker or issue
| appears
|
| If only this we're always true. In reality your teammates
| can be busy which means queries to them will often go
| unanswered. Standup is the only time to guarantee
| responses from busy people on the team.
| watwut wrote:
| But we are not playing football, we are doing software.
| And it is much different occupation.
| Clubber wrote:
| Ok, let's do our football daily standup, every play in
| the huddle: Tackle: I'm going to block.
| No blockers (err). Tackle: I'm going to block. No
| blockers (err). Guard: I'm going to block. No
| blockers (err). Guard: I'm going to block. No
| blockers (err). Center: I'm going to snap the ball
| then block. No blockers (err). Running back: I'm
| going to run. No blockers. Wide Receiver: I'm going
| to run then maybe catch the ball. No blockers. Wide
| Receiver: I'm going to run then maybe catch the ball. No
| blockers. Wide Receiver: I'm going to run then
| maybe catch the ball. No blockers. Quarterback: I'm
| got to receive the snap, then do something with the ball.
| No blockers. Tight End: I'm going to block. My
| blocker is that my shoe is untied. Guard: You
| should tie your shoe. Guard: You should tie your
| shoe. Running back: You should tie your shoe.
| Quarterback: Would you guys STFU, we've got stuff to do.
| Tackle: Daily standups are important for morale and
| communication. Referee: Delay of game, 5 yard
| penalty, repeat the down.
| g051051 wrote:
| The huddle is play selection, not design. It's also often
| dictated by the coach. TBH, I wonder what point a huddle
| serves in modern football anyway. Just how much control
| to the players on the field have, anyway?
| 0des wrote:
| The design doc discusses design, the standup aligns the
| team by discussing the 'play' if you don't mind me
| elaborating on this analogy.
| g051051 wrote:
| I lack sufficient football knowledge to carry the analogy
| much further. My understanding is that there's no real
| discussion...the play is called by the coach, the QB (I
| expect) relays the play to the team in the huddle, and
| they execute it per the playbook that they all study. To
| be comparable, the standup would be where you get your
| work assigned for the day.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The huddle is about the QB disseminating the play they
| are about to run - he's the only one allowed to (in pro
| football) have a radio link to the coach. Not to vote on
| the play that is about to be run. My guess is feedback
| about people's physical condition and needing to be
| pulled from the game is the only feedback allowed (other
| than a question if they forgot something about the play,
| I guess?)
| ryathal wrote:
| Modern football plays are far more dynamic than ever, if
| the defense shows man to man then do x, if they show zone
| do y, if they show blitz Z is the quick target, or if
| star receiver is mismatched then go deep.
| watwut wrote:
| > How much progress? Are they harder than expected? Easier?
| Any blockers? Anything that could help?
|
| We are talking about _daily_ standups. In all likelyhood,
| you don 't encounter blocker that often. If you have
| frequent blockers, then you have larger issue. In most
| days, I don't need help at daily standup time. If I needed
| help, I asked before and did not waited for standup.
|
| > Are they harder than expected? Easier?
|
| What would that be useful for? Like, I do quick venting
| sometimes, everybody does, but I am not under illusion it
| is useful for others.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Isn't this what all these funky agile ticket management
| systems are for? So that both the managers and ICs can look
| at the board and know, asynchronously, what's going on?
| thrower123 wrote:
| This would require people spend like... an hour...
| figuring out how the ticketing system works, and then
| checking it, or at least paying attention to the emails
| that it kicks out when somebody changes something on a
| ticket.
|
| So it's basically impossible.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It would also require developers to close things when
| they're done, make regular comments on the tickets as
| milestones are met, filling in the correct keywords or
| components so that the ticket is included in the right
| board, etc. Just saying it's a two way street.
|
| Whenever someone says "This [meeting | standup] could
| have been an E-mail!" I respond "So do you read and
| respond to your E-mail?" I love asynchronous, but the
| entire team has to put in the effort to make it work.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Conscientiousness is the most precious and rare resource
| on planet earth.
| criddell wrote:
| If "no update" is a common report, then maybe that should
| be accepted as a reasonable update. If that is a frequent
| update then an experiment should be done. Get rid of the
| standup for a quarter and see what changes - positive or
| negative - come about.
|
| Sometimes things progress without any surprises or
| blockers. A meeting just for the sake of having a meeting
| seems like a waste of time and effort.
| playpause wrote:
| What is an IC?
| bosie wrote:
| Individual Contributor
| chaosite wrote:
| Individual Contributor.
|
| A plain old developer, who does not manage other
| developers.
| g051051 wrote:
| > It's for ICs to also communicate their needs, obstacles,
| concerns, or even just give everyone a heads up that a
| certain task is more difficult than expected.
|
| If the only time ICs communicate any of that stuff is at a
| set time each morning, then something is already seriously
| wrong.
| jseban wrote:
| > If the only time ICs communicate any of that stuff is
| at a set time each morning, then something is already
| seriously wrong.
|
| Agreed, It's much more productive to simply approach some
| of your coworkers, or write in a team chat after the
| daily. Mentioning problems in the daily just adds
| pressure and stress with no benefit.
| hnrodey wrote:
| >Shitty standups are first the fault of the leader,
|
| There are no bad teams; only bad leaders. -Jocko
|
| Took me a long time to buy in to this but it's 100% true. Sucky
| standups are the direct result of an ineffective leader -
| whoever that may be.
| kotrunga wrote:
| Woah- this is my first time seeing a Jocko quote on HN. Nice!
|
| And it makes sense- even if the team is "objectively bad", a
| good leader will help transform them.
| qaq wrote:
| I postulate that presence of mngmnt bs speak at levels below VP
| level will cause shitty standups :)
| alkonaut wrote:
| A process that works well for motivated, skilled developers
| working on a clean codebase is... any process.
|
| I agree with your sentiment that it's a problem of skill and
| motivation - but that said, the usual problem to solve with any
| process is: how do you make your day to day operations as
| efficient as possible given the level of skill, codebase
| quality and motivation you _do_ have, not the one you want.
| Developers (on average) are only average. Code bases aren 't
| great. Motivation will vary.
|
| So it's a chicken and egg problem. If the reality is that the
| developers are tired underpaid undersupervised and
| undermotivated. All that could change, but it would take time.
| The process happens now.
| nivertech wrote:
| Good leaders will never do standups by their own choice.
|
| They will only do them if they're dictated by the company, or
| the the team members are unable to work and communicate
| independently and requiring constant micromanagement. The
| latter is usually a case when the team members are provided by
| the outsourcing company, or they're some kind of "team
| extension".
| [deleted]
| dummyqwertyu wrote:
| Don't know about the rest of the team, but for me the daily
| "meaningless micromanagement meetings" provided the last drop of
| stress and burnout, leading to a depression. Quit my job just
| before Covid, and have not been able to return to work since
| that.
|
| (posted from a throw-away account)
| nine_zeros wrote:
| This. More people should call standup what it really is -
| micromanagement.
| cube00 wrote:
| Justify the last eight hours we paid you for code monkey.
| taf21 wrote:
| Had a job where that's exactly what happened- the manager
| took 30-40 min and went through the board, stopping at each
| devs name and their task.
|
| "How is this task going"
|
| Putting devs on the spot and demanding updates like you'd
| expect from a child doing their homework or completing their
| chores doesn't feel like team building...it feels like
| babysitting.
| viburnum wrote:
| Maybe I've led a charmed life but I've never seen any problems
| with stand ups. It's just a few minutes of "I'm working on this
| today" and "okay we'll pair on that after lunch." But I guess
| people can mess up anything.
| tester34 wrote:
| I struggle to understand why people hate daily this hard
|
| What so bad about having to tell what you've been doing
| yesterday? one up to few sentences per person, 10-15min max?
| Clubber wrote:
| Do you have 15 minutes to talk about your vehicle's extended
| warranty? It's kinda like that except every day, and you can't
| hang up.
| bjornlouser wrote:
| in a few years someone will write "I don't know why you have a
| problem with our group calisthenics. Jumping jacks are good for
| you and I like that our managers care about our physical well-
| being. It's just like when they changed lights out to 9pm in
| the company dormitory. It does help me get a good night's
| sleep!"
| rimliu wrote:
| I hate doing stuff that I see no point in. Especially if it
| wastes time.
| closeparen wrote:
| * Having something on your calendar that pulls you out of what
| you're doing
|
| * In order to mostly stand there and listen to irrelevant or
| redundant information
|
| * So that when it's your turn you can say something that the
| listeners don't care about, that could have been a Slack
| message
|
| The first point can be slightly mitigated by placing the
| standup directly before or after lunch or another meeting, or
| at the beginning of the workday, so at least you were already
| going to have to put down your task.
| cube00 wrote:
| It's bad when your management are considered part of your team
| and they challenge every sentence of your update:
|
| _" can we expect that done by stand up tomorrow?"_
|
| _" will that be a problem?"_
|
| _" let's have a quick meeting to discuss in 45 minutes"_
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| For me it's just another straw on this camel's back: process
| that detracts from my productivity.
| thrower123 wrote:
| If that's all you're doing, it's a huge waste of everyone's
| time and the company's money.
|
| Instead of 15-60 minutes of synchronous time, it could be
| replaced by an email that takes two minutes to write and 30
| seconds to read.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| Programmers tend to be introverted and have some serious ego
| issues.
|
| Therefore any mandatory social interaction will be met with
| resistance, even if it's useful for knowledge sharing or for
| letting your boss know how things are progressing or if they
| have to change resource allocation.
|
| We can afford 5-10 minutes to chat.
|
| Most of us spend an order of magnitude more time dicking around
| per day (as we should, for it's intellectual work)
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| "Why not switch to this new process, that, oh, gee, happens to be
| built around this software product that I sell."
| ajaynomics wrote:
| I have no affiliation or interest whatsoever with my
| recommendations.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Since I have become scrum master I have reduced the number of
| standups to twice a week and my main question is "Is anything
| holding you up and what can we do to resolve this?". I then
| follow up with the right people and make sure this really gets
| resolved. Daily standups are way too much. There is not enough
| happening to warrant daily reporting to the whole team.
|
| If people don't show I assume they are doing fine. But if they
| complain about a blocking issue weeks later I make it very clear
| that they had an obligation to bring this up earlier.
|
| After the standup often a group will stay on and discuss what's
| going on in more detail. Some people are interested and some
| aren't interested so they don't have to join.
|
| Works reasonably well for me.
| davidw wrote:
| Let's circle back and bring that up as an action item for the
| next team retrospective.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Not sure what the author is pushing here. But any process can be
| derailed without putting discipline into it.
|
| He talks about daily stand up being a communication pattern that
| is broken because it enforces people to be transparent and it
| forces, if applied correctly, that people can't hide.
|
| Agile is about delivering value to the business. That means that
| the team has to come together (as a team does) and deliver upon
| request.
|
| I see teams all the times where the process is detailed. Mostly
| it's because of weak scrummasters and/POs.
|
| And I have learned during my +20 years and 20 some teams that if
| someone tries to tell you something is better without objective
| proof they usually want to sell you something.
|
| Good luck
| mise_en_place wrote:
| > Standups are intended to set a 'floor' for communication, but
| they often set a 'ceiling' instead. In my experience, the 'daily'
| standup becomes a benchmark for minimum acceptable communication.
| Show up for 15 minutes, and then it's safe to hide for the rest
| of the day. This may or may not be a problem given the economics
| of the business in which a software team operates.
|
| I'm actually OK with this, and this is how my team operates. We
| treat each other as adults, instead of witch hunting who did the
| least amount of work yesterday. Works fine for the team, things
| get done, minimal toil, zero churn.
| inoffensivename wrote:
| > If you're weary of a future without standups, you need to Shape
| Up
|
| People need to know the difference between "weary" and "wary".
|
| * weary: tired
|
| * wary: watchful, cautious
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| I think we're all weary of the future.
| ajaynomics wrote:
| many thanks -- correcting!
| croutonwagon wrote:
| My team doesn't really do stand ups.
|
| But we do spend a lot of time in a daily meeting on Teams. Often
| there's lots of dead air. Free to come and go. If you are in a
| zone, don't be there in that meeting. But also free to bring up
| questions, including work related or not.
|
| I started them years ago as one of my admins has been remote for
| 6+ years. When I started he griped he felt distant and out of
| touch to what was going on.
|
| I don't think he feels that now. And now that we are often remote
| or roaming. We stayed pretty well In sync.
|
| Definitely not for everyone or every team, including some I've
| worked on. But it works for us.
| paulcnichols wrote:
| Ah yes, the mythical high ownership, high autonomy engineer that
| just magically does what you need and also wants to work for you
| and your company. Sure, no stand ups required then. Or how about
| the mythical perfectly written ticket with zero ambiguity about
| anything. Yep. Total autonomy. The rub is everything about
| building software is imperfect. The only place perfection exists
| is in the mind of "senior" engineers gazing lovingly at their own
| code.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| For my own environment, I find standups themselves to be
| worthless, but not pointless.
|
| The worth, what we get out of them, is very very little. "Oh hey,
| people are working on different, unrelated things. Alright. Bye."
|
| The point, the purpose of having the standup, is at least
| theoretically valuable. It gives us all a reason to reflect what
| we've been doing, and what still needs to be done. It also gives
| us the opportunity to ask "What's next?", although this is rarely
| needed, as upcoming events are usually conveyed effectively
| through email or larger meetings once every few months.
|
| Do I want more meetings? Absolutely not! I hate talking to people
| about work. I just want to _do_ the work and not blather on about
| it.
|
| Do I want less meetings? Absolutely! I hate talking to people in
| a way that makes me feel like I'm somehow justifying my job. I
| justify my job by the work that I do, not by telling someone
| about the work that I do.
|
| Do I think we should actually have less meetings? Absolutely not!
| They have a point. There is a purpose to them. There is a need.
| If everything were strictly through email, everyone would ignore
| everyone else entirely.
|
| There is a purpose to have meetings, even if it has very little
| value.
| RegW wrote:
| In some places standups work, in others they don't, and it can
| change overtime as people move in and out of the team.
|
| Standups don't work when the team isn't getting anything out of
| them. Perhaps we all know what's going on because its a small
| team and we all talk to each other. Perhaps. its because we don't
| talk to each other in or outside the standup. Reeling off a load
| of ticket numbers without challenge is not communicating.
|
| From the article: standups aim to: "seek out and destroy
| misalignment". How can we do that without putting the mis-aligned
| on the spot and making them uncomfortable? I think standups start
| to fail when we're all being too nice and don't ask the awkward
| question. After a while we just stop listening.
| m0zg wrote:
| In the world where Slack exists, standups are simply an idiotic
| cargo cult and a waste of time. Just post your goddamn status on
| a Slack channel at a predetermined time and read other people's
| status if you feel you need to know that neither you nor other
| people haven't accomplished much in a day. 3 minutes, async,
| done. And for communication use VC or Huddle _without_ waiting
| for a standup, or ping your peers on Slack too.
|
| Or better yet, just treat your people like adults, give them
| sizable chunks of work, and give them a bonus if they do it with
| high quality and quickly, which is otherwise known as
| "management". That's how Google worked back in the day, and it
| works fine, as long as you hire well, and pay well.
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