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Ask HN: What percentage of teams do daily standups, do you think?

6 points by Kepler-131b ↗ HN
I currently work on a team doing blue sky research. We do daily standups. It's the lamest thing ever because everyone always wants to look like they know what they're doing so they always choose tasks that they already know how to do, so that they appear competent during the standup. No innovation actually ever gets done.

The thing is this seems to be fairly common, I see it a lot in other blue sky groups. Who also get nothing done...

16 comments

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dchuk
You need someone involved who is willing and able to cut through the bullshit and call people out for doing that then. Daily standups quickly devolve to status updates, when the true purpose is to identify blockers and dependencies before they become problems.

One quick trick is to eliminate the "what did you do yesterday" question. It doesn't really matter. What matters is if each person is on track with the work they committed to, and people aren't being lazy.

And also, if people are basically taking the easy way out, sounds like you have a really bad project manager/product owner who isn't keeping tabs on things.

flukus
> when the true purpose is to identify blockers and dependencies before they become problems.

I don't see why we need daily stand ups for this either. What's the point of saying "everything's going fine" every meeting?

genbit
> everything's going fine

for good team lead it should indicate that "something is wrong". It possible cannot be "fine" every meeting, if team is really solving some problems. If team doesn't solve anything complex - there is no need for standup.

flukus
But unless there is a problem then "going fine" is just a reiteration of what's on the job board.
dchuk
if you have a ten person standup, and 8 of those people say "everything's going fine", and they're being honest (key), then you had a good standup. It's good because those other two people are saying "I'm blocked by XYZ".

It takes 5 seconds to say "I'm good, no blockers".

flukus
But why can't those two just tell the team they're blocked via email/IM?
dchuk
They can, and if that works for your team then go for it. Generally, forcing people to talk to each other as human beings tends to get things resolved much more quickly than easily dismissible messages/emails.
seanwilson
> But why can't those two just tell the team they're blocked via email/IM?

I agree with you. You're better having this kind of stuff on a planning board so you can easily see the status of every task with all the information in one place. Why do I need to know the reason for a task being blocked when I'm not working on it and can't do anything to help?

genbit
Standups are for teams who solves problems and need constantly keep in touch to see if the whole team moving in the same direction. If your team is bunch of people working on independent projects - no need for standup. It sounds like you have manager who has no time/skills to put things in order.
FrancoDiaz
Daily standups are horrible. It's another "agile" thing that sounds good when somebody made it up, but is completely pointless and counter-productive in practice. And stand-up usually occurs when developers are actually starting to get productive in the morning.

I'm just not doing it anymore..along with open office.

rmeertens
I led several (non-daily) standups in various formats in a research environment. What you might want to do is:

- each 2 weeks determine a set of tasks/goals for the next 2 weeks -> write down in a tool like Trello what this task is and assign a set of people to it.

- each standup, instead of discussing each person, discuss each task with the group. People don't have to be competent individually (leading to what you are seeing), but have to be competent as a group.

You might also be interested in this paper about SCORE (Scrum for Research): https://www.cs.umd.edu/~mwh/papers/score.pdf

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me!

pyb
In my experience, standups are meant as a sort of quick fix for teams that have communications problems, but they don't actually help.
seanwilson
I find them fairly pointless.

- What you did yesterday, what you're doing today and what you're blocked on is all information that should be on a planning board.

- It creates pressure to come up with something productive to report instead of letting you just get on with things.

- Most of the time the information isn't relevant to everyone.

- It creates unwanted breaks when you're trying to work.

AznHisoka
i did them in my last company and found them a waste of time. i could care less what my coworkers weee currently working on
msound
We have a distributed team, and switched to howdy.ai bot to ask the standup questions on Slack and post them to a channel. During our actual standup call, we only discuss blockers.

(Not related to howdy.ai in any way, just a happy user)