[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did "daily stan...
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Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did "daily standups"
asynchronously?
In the past, all of my teams have had daily-standup meetings. Ie,
recurring meetings scheduled for a specific time, when everyone
would join the meeting (either physically or virtually) and give
their updates In an attempt to reduce people's meeting load and
avoid interruptions, we're considering doing asynchronous slack
standups instead. Ie, everyone posts their daily-update on slack at
the start of their workday (no specific time). People can then
follow up either on slack, or in-person, or offline, regarding any
of the updates that others have posted. Has anyone had experience
with doing similar asynchronous daily updates, as an alternative to
daily standup meetings? If so, how did it go?
Author : retention456
Score : 9 points
Date : 2021-12-24 20:59 UTC (2 hours ago)
| zarfzarf wrote:
| Yes, one day a week devs post the standup update on slack. We
| call this "No meetings Tuesday".
| oweiler wrote:
| I did, it worked beautifully but got Shot down by the Scrum
| Master :/.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| Yes, I work at a asynchronous first dev shop. This is all we do
| and it works alright.
|
| The underlying prerequisite here is that you need to have a
| strong reading culture on your team.
| ok_dad wrote:
| At my small company with 4 developers we post YTB: yesterday,
| today, blockers. It goes into a special slack channel and we all
| try to take the time to read other's updates to help with
| blockers and stuff. Just a small sentence for each section. It's
| works nicely but we also are super small. I prefer it to spending
| a 15 or more minutes on a video call listening to two people talk
| while everyone else ignores them. If we need to chat on video we
| self organize.
| nivertech wrote:
| What's the point?
|
| If you closed/updated a ticket the interested party will see
| it, or you can explicitly mention them in the ticket.
|
| If you're blocked, you usually know who's blocking you, so you
| can contact them directly.
|
| Let's say you're a FE dev waiting for a BE dev to finish a
| specific API request for you. You ask him how long it will
| take, and if it's possible to provide a dummy API in the
| meantime. Alternatively you can mock this API by yourself. If
| no solution found you can switch to another task or escalate it
| to the PM.
|
| But this problem shouldn't exist in the first place. It's only
| exists b/c of Scrum. In mini-waterfall based SDLC methodologies
| (i.e. Design/Plan->Build(Iterate)->Ship cycles) developers are
| working on much larger work chunks (i.e. mini-projects),
| they're opening and managing tickets by themselves, instead of
| being assigned tickets opened by PM/PO. So if they're blocked
| on a specific API request, they still have other things to work
| on.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I hate people taking multiple minutes in standups (we have 1
| person who almost always takes far too long) but I wouldn't want
| to do them asynchronously. It's certain that people aren't going
| to even glance at text updates. As much as I hate phone calls and
| meetings, I think a proper daily standup is a good thing.
| sanjayio wrote:
| We do this every Tuesday and Thursday. It works extremely well. I
| feel like it gives me time back without sacrificing too much
| human interaction.
| osivertsson wrote:
| I have done that a few times and I feel the value drops to almost
| zero, or in some instances even negative, by doing this.
|
| Standups should be short hence do them standing with no digital
| screens around and team-size is optimally ~5. 30-60 secs per
| person probably. Writing a line on Slack spreads them out and
| takes away more focus IMHO.
|
| Many people will just ignore what is written in the Slack channel
| and you lose the advantage that everyone knows what is going on
| and can give feedback. Instant helping out or course correct does
| not happen.
|
| You lose the team feeling a sense of the _team_ making progress,
| it easily becomes each dev for themselves.
|
| It often devolves into ticking a box and keeping up the
| appearance that you are on track, instead of quickly catching
| those potential situations. I have seen devs then get into
| terrible psychological pressure since they have over-reported in
| a way that is much harder in a real standup.
|
| If you need to focus more I would prefer to just drop the daily
| standup completely once or twice a week.
| celticninja wrote:
| We do slack stand up on a Friday, works well
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(page generated 2021-12-24 23:01 UTC)