Daily standups are often a panopticon for those who mine story points and their wardens that micro manage them. Anyone not coding (RE, BA, managers of any kind) usually don't need to justify their contributions to the team. It fits extremely well in the story point driven "agile" world where working on stuff that does not provide immediate business value, like code quality and technical debt, is highly discouraged.
I have seen so many dysfunctional standup cultures: Places where you had to showcase and exaggerate how much stuff you had to do and people were looking at you funnily when you said what you are doing in under a minute, places where discussion that only interested a third of the team were started and standups took half an hour, places where the managers interrupted and asked why stories took so long...
I’ve worked at two of the FAANGs, and some of my teams had daily stand ups and some didn’t. Some teams had stand ups but didn’t track points or velocity of any kind. Others did.
When we were working to disambiguate deliverables or working on design or implementation, stand ups were useful. They held everyone accountable, when folks weren’t making progress because of some issue, it was super obvious - it gave management a really good insight into where things are and what blockers are.
Your characterization certainly doesn’t represent my experience. We went through phases of launching a products or services and focusing on them and then going back to pay off some of the tech debt until product management, engineers, and leadership arrived on the next set of big features.
"The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century...[It] allows all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched."
Synchronous talking has a synchronization overhead. If you do the stand-up in the beginning of the day it forces everyone to arrive at the same time. If you do it in the middle of the day it is an interruption for everybody. It's usually just not worth the costs to create meetings just to satisfy the interaction needs of extroverts in your team.
As I see it, if managed properly, daily stand-ups is more about introverts. As one, I found the formal obligation to give verbal updates and a be in a place to hear updates very helpful especially when I was a junior programmer.
They're called standups for a reason: you're supposed to do them standing up so that people whine if they go over five minutes. That tracks out to 25 minutes or less than one-eightieth of your week.
The deep flow disturbance can be caused by any sort of communication. So basically, that’s an argument against communication, as opposed to being an argument against standups.
If anything, by being at a fixed time, either at the start, or the end of a team’s day, it’s far easier to prevent a standup from disrupting deep work than a Slack message would be.
Except async communication doesn't disrupt deep flow if done properly since it should be simply ignored until flow breaks or pauses naturally.
A slack message won't disrupt my deep work because I'll have notifications turned off, unless it's extremely urgent in which case it would be too urgent to leave until a standup anyway.
This is just not realistic, a standup of 7 or eight people will take minimum 15 to 20 minutes, from the moment that you leave your desk to the moment you get back.
Some standups go off track, and if you count everything you are looking at close to a third of a morning per week or so.
Obviously this is just my experience, but in my office of 13 (11 devs, 2 managers) our stand ups take 5-7 minutes (on exceptionally rare circumstances it’ll take 10 or 12, but that’s normally due to large production issues).
They are useful for knowledge spreading and understanding what everyone is working on - we switch projects quite regularly so it’s quite nice to have a birds eye view of where each project is.
It's an illusion, most people don't have a good sense of time. Just getting everyone in a room and waiting for the last person to arrive and everyone to leave, grab a cofee and start working again is at least 12 to 15 minutes for that amount of people.
Next time you have a standup, look at the clock once you get up to the standup, or that you stop working normally and start looking around to see when people are leaving to the meeting. And then look at the clock when you are back at your seat working again.
People start getting ready to the standup 5 to 10 minutes before, chatting while waiting, etc. Count the time that you have stopped working normally, where you can't do any large task because you know there is a meeting in 10 minutes.
Don't just count the time literally from the moment a person starts giving their status to when the last person finishes, as the real overhead of the meeting is not that.
I guarantee you if you do that systematically and count the complete overhead and not just the literal overhead, that at best it will be typically 15 minutes and for longer sessions half an hour.
I've had teams bigger than that with a fixed 10 minute slot for standups, where the next team would have their standup after those 10 minutes. It was not a problem, but it enforced meeting discipline.
As for going off track, you will need to learn to tell people (including yourself) to take a time out and discuss matters after the standup. If anyone says more than a sentence or two, and if there is more than a single counterquestion and a short answer, then that should be taken after the meeting.
In an ideal world everyone would be perfectly professional and not need any supervision at all. In the real world some times you might be in a rough period or have some other problem that makes concentrating hard. In an ideal world the thought of getting a paycheck would be enough motivation. Sometimes it isn't.
A daily standup, if done well and short, helps one to focus on what's important, sets the tone for the day, and unites the team as a tribe.
When one is not motivated enough by looking a big fat dashboard with tickets pending, or the though of getting another paycheck at the end of the period, one can be motivated by the thought of not failing to their tribe, their peers, their coworkers.
You gave them your word, face to face, that you would work on something, so you better do, they are your people.
That's the rub, though. Despite best intentions, sometimes things just go off into the weeds. It happens more often than I'd like, and it's happened on every team I've ever been on, at every company I've ever worked at. Sure, you can say, "well you're doing it wrong", but that's not helpful. Process should support how the team works, not define how the team works.
> helps one to focus on what's important
If you need to refocus someone every day, you've made a bad hire.
> sets the tone for the day
That's my job. I know what I'm supposed to be working on, and set my own tone.
> and unites the team as a tribe
Ugh, gross. We're not a "tribe", "family", whatever.
We're a team of co-workers working on a variety of tasks, who are not children and can be trusted to communicate adequately with the rest of the team, and honor our commitments. If you have someone on the team for whom that's not the case, again: you made a bad hire. Don't punish the rest of the team because you have someone who can't do their job.
I get that some people get off track sometimes. It happens, even to the most senior of people. The solution to that is called management. Regular 1:1s, making sure your team keeps their tickets updated, and getting regular (individual, asynchronous, as-needed) status updates. If someone is having an off day, or an off week, that should be addressed individually, not by preemptively assuming the worst of everyone on the team and instituting a daily standup.
True, I suppose. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find even a plurality of developers who'd embrace the whole "my team at work is my tribe" thing. Perhaps it's motivating for some, but I would guess that for the majority of developers it would be an active turn-off, or at the very least neutral and not helpful.
And, at it's face, it's simply false. Companies (and the teams within) are factually not families, or tribes, or anything of the sort. They are a group of people working together for economic gain. They share very little resemblance to families or tribes in real life, and I can't see making that comparison as anything but a plea for loyalty... loyalty that will never be returned by the company when it's not convenient.
If I were interviewing at a company and they tried to justify having a standup using this rationale, I would stop considering them, as would many (most?) developers I know.
This is closely related to one's self-assessment and the question of being right and doing right thing.
If one is right, stand up do not matter. If one is wrong, they help greatly.
You say : why should I suffer for unprofessional and weak team member who is wrong?
But you forget to note that the same person could be right sometimes and doing great things and be utterly wrong and solving wrong problems some other times.
Edit: a also wanted to add, that input from peers and peer pressure is not to be underestimated. Management is be wrong as often as any of us.
> But you forget to note that the same person could be right sometimes and doing great things and be utterly wrong and solving wrong problems some other times.
No, I don't forget that, and in fact specifically addressed people having an off day, week, whatever.
> In which case anyone present can (and in my view) should get the meeting back on track.
I absolutely agree that people can and should do that, but in practice, I often find that people don't. And I personally get tired of it; isn't it reasonable to take a dim view of a meeting where literally every time we have it, I (as an IC, whose job this should not be) have to prod people to stay on track?
> In an ideal world the thought of getting a paycheck would be enough motivation.
We'll just have to disagree on that. In my ideal world, getting a paycheck would be a natural byproduct of doing something interesting, that matters, and about which one would care.
> > In an ideal world the thought of getting a paycheck would be enough motivation.
> We'll just have to disagree on that. In my ideal world, getting a paycheck would be a natural byproduct of doing something interesting, that matters, and about which one would care.
I agree with you. It was mostly to curtail the capitalist view of "a paycheck should be motivation enough."
I like standups. They keep me updated on what's happening in the code base, and give us the opportunity to discuss what's going to happen next. The repo is vast and we're gown adults that don't need to be micro-managed because story A or B is taking too long.
The problem doesn't come from standups, but rather from dysfunctional startup culture.
I have a similar experience. Standups keep me at least vaguely informed on what other people are doing, provide an opportunity to take the pressure off poor souls buried under a new influx of tasks, and are perhaps some light team building (such as the canned joke that a burndown chart isn't supposed to look even remotely like that, or something in the lines of "help me, those goddamn morons from $OVERSEAS_BRANCH at it again"). 10 minutes tops, and back to work.
If I were to compile a list of workspace annoyances, even the most pointless standup would be way after serious business like "people standing behind my back while talking to someone".
I've long been sceptical of the three questions – well intentioned no doubt but way too prone to becoming an unhealthy exercise in individual self-justification. Much prefer to review the work "right to left", starting with work just completed, then work we can get over the line, then the bulk of what's in progress, and (if there's capacity), what's in the immediate pipeline. Now it's about what _we_ can do to finish the most important of what's in front of us.
I strongly disagree. People sometimes won't mention important things (e.g., blockers, possible misunderstandings) unless prompted and encouraged (you sometimes actually need to look at the person's face and hear the intonation). Async interrupts are bad (I don't have time to get into that one right now). I would have replace "Excitement" with "expectation management", "mental atmosphere monitoring".
I do agree that badly managed stand-ups are a waste of time.
> People sometimes won't mention important things (e.g., blockers, possible misunderstandings) unless prompted and encouraged (you sometimes actually need to look at the person's face and hear the intonation).
But that's a management fail. Every time I've managed a person that did this, I took them aside and had a short but firm word with them. You can't tolerate that type of behavior in a team if you plan to operate effectively. I seldom need more than one warning; I never needed more than two.
The point I was trying to make is that when a person is [inexperienced/shy/too aggressive/doesn't get along with somebody/lazy/does not like the current task/does not understand the motivation/etc] I need, as a manager, opportunity to notice it.
some of those are not necessarily "bad" or require intervention, just awareness.
some of those can change over time (and on daily basis).
(and in the case of bad behavior, in order to prevent "management fail", I want to take them aside for that short talk before things get spiraling)
(that being said, it's not the only reason for standups)
(if in my team everybody is in the same place, actually interacting in-person does give some added value)
I think what you're against are the sync daily standups, not the async, usually written, ones.
If I was an employee, I would prefer you to let me self-manage my work however I feel comfortable using whatever tool suits me and my team, instead of constantly interrupting on Jira, Trello, etc. And I'll keep you updated at a frequency we agreed on (daily or weekly).
It's also great to read daily updates of others on the team, and even other teams, to learn about what they're working on without having to check at multiple places or interrupt their work. It's usually a great way to discuss, give and receive feedback, asynchronously.
Also, it's strange that you're suggesting "reach out on Slack" as an alternative. Doesn't that promote the "incessant messaging that Slack allows" you're decrying at the start of the article?
That’s my biggest gripe with stand ups. Management has as much if not more access to all the project management tools the developers do, so if they need a daily standup they should be able to get a sense of what’s going on simply by correctly using the tool.
This is absurd to me. Standups are quick and it is helpful to know what everyone is working on. And they can serve as a time when you are up front about being stuck on something and get some help from a teammate when maybe otherwise you might have just kept tinkering or hammering away in your own world. It’s just a little nudge to share your status and keep everyone on the same page. It prevents wondering what your colleague is typing up a storm about which is a natural human curiosity.
And the author says make it async, I agree! That’s not against the spirit of standups, I’ve worked on remote teams with an asynchronous standup slack channel.
The most common problem I’ve seen with standups is they can become more than status updates and end up a time during the day to brag about your accomplishments or justify your status within a team/project. Usually to keep management happy or angle for an agenda other than keeping the team together.
Don't agree with this assessment at all, we do stand-ups and it rarely takes more than 5 minutes. It help immensely with production as your colleagues often help keep things from falling through the cracks. (I.e. someone forgets something). Or they might be able to help you out, or further along because they've done something similar. When they do, you don't do it during the stand-up to not disrupt that.
Overal I don't think it's disruptive at all to do a short stand-up, constant nagging however is very disruptive. That person that just walks in or starts spamming you on slack takes more time altogether per instance than a single stand-up does. It takes you out of your process, you then have to pick that up again. If you're working on something complex that can mean it takes an additional 10 minutes before you're back on track. That's the kind of disruption stand-ups can help prevent.
This of course only works if you actually stick to what the stand-up is meant for.
> That person that just walks in or starts spamming you on slack takes more time altogether per instance than a single stand-up does. It takes you out of your process, you then have to pick that up again.
Walks in? Yes. That should be discouraged always.
Spamming on Slack? If that is a problem, you're doing Slack wrong. It's an asynchronous method of communication. Don't be buried in it or feel the need to respond to every message as it comes in. Check it during natural breaks or stopping points.
If something actually is urgent and requires your immediate attention, then they can break the above rule and walk up to your desk (or call you if you're remote).
Some of my colleagues had a hard time with this. They would actually ask me to come to their desk whenever I had a question, and come to mine when I didn't answer fast enough (only after I had gotten them to understand I really preferred slack. Seems they never got the why though, despite making it very clear...)
Yep, there are some people who just don't get it, and it's hard to get them to. I find that most developers have a hard time even bringing up the issue with someone face-to-face, even though all it usually takes is: "Hey, just wanted to let you know, I really prefer having these sorts of exchanges over Slack. Otherwise I find it really disruptive to my day. Could we give that a try next time and see how it works out?" And you have to be willing to escalate if the behavior doesn't improve: "Listen, I asked if we could take care of these things over Slack, and I'd really appreciate it if you could accommodate me here." Then: "Hey, I know I keep bringing this up, but it's really important to me. I need to keep a lot of my day interruption-free in order to be productive. Please try harder to respect my time when coming to me for help."
It seems most developers aren't even comfortable with the first bit, let alone escalating things. Instead, most people just seethe and complain privately to other colleagues, and nothing changes. At the very least, the team's manager should be brought in to do a better job of protecting the everyone's time, and you'd think that would be easy for a developer to do, because it outsources any sort of confrontation. But it still often doesn't happen, for whatever reason. (Of course, if it's the manager who is the offender here, you're probably screwed if the diplomatic method fails.)
Yeah same here. Everywhere I've worked standups have been really beneficial and usually only last about 5 minutes. I think the issue here is maybe the team size and stand ups dragging on for too long?
Agreed. Keep them short and focused. We use ours to review new PRs for the day and new requests that have come in from other parts of the company, in addition to covering blockers.
The PRs cover the “what did you do?” questions while getting eyeballs reviewing the work and for larger PRs we will schedule something. Keeps things moving well.
The inbound requests reviews keep us from having to have backlog estimating meetings as often since we are keeping up with it as they arrive.
If the time isn’t useful, find a way to make it useful.
It's a bad article. Standups shouldn't be disruptive at all. Just a couple of minutes to get some idea of what everybody is working on. Standups are in my experience much more effective at signalling blocking issues than slack. Nobody is going to spend their day checking what other people are doing on Jira, so the standup is the perfect time to inform everybody efficiently.
If any issues come up, you can discuss them immediately after the standup.
Long meetings are terrible, but short meetings are great. That's the whole idea behind the standup. If a couple of minutes per day kills your velocity, as the article claims, I wonder what else you're doing during the rest of the day. It only has a measurable impact on your velocity if you're only a working an hour per day. And even then I'd guess it's useful to have a quick refresher about what you're working on.
Perhaps they shouldn't be disruptive, but in practice they were a daily drain. I'd be happy to never go to one again. Now every day I can come in to the office, can grab a coffee and get to work. Far more relaxing.
Because you have to think upfront what are you going to say. You might me interrogated in front of everyone else about something that you are doing, and will have to come up with an answer on the spot.
This is obviously stressful, and psychologically pressures you to try to finish the task ASAP the day before, so that you can come up to the meeting and just say its done.
Which is the real actual benefit of the standup, and why managers keep doing it, despite they are obviously not needed and in most cases a waste of time.
The standup keeps everyone on their heels and feeling like their every breath is monitored and accounted for.
Everyone has to spend at least some time thinking ahead of time what they are going to say, and you probably do too.
Its the perception of yourself and your work from the eyes of the group that is at stake here, it's important and most people usually don't just improvise it.
Many times people have notes of what they want to say, which involves preparation, attention and energy put into it that would better be directed elsewhere.
I don't know, on a healthy team you should feel very comfortable giving an update on your work without having to prepare.
I've prepared for standup when I was new to a team, but it should pretty quickly get to the point where you don't need that. At least for my experiences, it's not like standup is a major factor in how teammates think of you - that comes from working together with people.
I don't. Often it's "What was I working on again? Oh yeah, that one issue. And I reviewed some code. The thing I'm working on I hope to finish today, maybe tomorrow. That's it. Oh wait, I also deployed a thing."
because they're unnecessary. I legitimately lose an hour a day due to them. I've started coming in late so I slide immediately into the daily standup because otherwise I fart around for the first 30-45 minutes until the standup starts.
There's just no deep work that can be done during that time, and that's every day.
I agree, that happens and it's really bad. When to hold standup is definitely an important question. I like first thing when people get in or two hours after everyone gets in.
You can't put 10 people in a room for a meeting for just a couple of minutes, that does not exist. The time people spend before the meeting not working just chatting around waiting, the natural inertia of the group it takes time to get everyone in a room.
Count the whole overhead time, from the moment people stop working normally waiting for the meeting, till the moment people come back to their seats, add up the extra coffee pause that people take afterwards that people would not usually take.
You are looking on average, at easily 15 to 20 minutes per person minimum a day, probably more.
20 minutes is a lot of time, add that and at the end of the week you got around 2 hours, that's half a morning per week and close to a whole 8h day of work per month just on the time for standups.
It's not just the time itself though, it's the interruption that prevents you from starting longer tasks effectively.
Can't really account for that, work is not only about summing up minutes on a time tracking tool. There is rythm, there is acceleration, there is a productive state and there is deceleration.
Standups disrupt all that without any real benefit, other than serving as a daily reminder that you better hurry up with what you are doing - which most people don't need.
20 minutes across my team of 12 is not nothing, it's 4 man hours. When I see it communicated in that manner, the sheer pointlessness of these daily meetings is very easy for me to identify.
> Standups shouldn't be disruptive at all. Just a couple of minutes to get some idea of what everybody is working on.
That's disruptive!
> Standups are in my experience much more effective at signalling blocking issues than slack.
If you are using Slack, you have already lost the battle for productivity.
> If a couple of minutes per day kills your velocity, as the article claims, I wonder what else you're doing during the rest of the day.
Literally any interruption destroys your focus. A pending appointment destroys your focus. If you use Slack or E-Mail notifications, people never even attain focus, so in that sense it's not a loss.
> And even then I'd guess it's useful to have a quick refresher about what you're working on.
To a first approximation, nobody cares what you're working on. Nobody should care what you're working on. If your developers need to constantly communicate with each other, something is likely very wrong with the way you split up your work.
Daily standups pre-suppose that there's always stuff to communicate and that everyone is always involved, but only once a day and only briefly. This is complete nonsense. You need to be able to adapt to the situation. You need a meeting? Have a meeting with whoever is concerned. Have a follow-up meeting. Take your time and focus on the issue, then nobody will even feel like time is being wasted.
This sounds like an argument for having a single stand-up meeting instead of communication through slack and email spread throughout the day. It keeps the disruptions concentrated in a single, predictable moment.
> "To a first approximation, nobody cares what you're working on. Nobody should care what you're working on."
I care quite a lot what the people in my team are working on. Otherwise why are we even a team?
If you're not in a team, obviously things are different.
> "If your developers need to constantly communicate with each other, something is likely very wrong with the way you split up your work."
It's the opposite: if developers are not communicating, they're probably not cooperating with each other, which means something is very wrong.
> This sounds like an argument for having a single stand-up meeting instead of communication through slack and email spread throughout the day.
It's an argument for having meetings when you need them, with whoever you need them with, with no particular schedule or routine attached.
> I care quite a lot what the people in my team are working on.
Do you really? Or do you just want to signal that?
> Otherwise why are we even a team?
You are on a team because that's the unit of organization above the individual.
> It's the opposite: if developers are not communicating, they're probably not cooperating with each other, which means something is very wrong.
If developers need to cooperate, you have a problem that you should avoid at great cost. Of course, sometimes cooperation is unavoidable, but it's not a good thing in and of itself. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Aim to split up your work to require minimal cooperation. This may sound like unconventional advice, but anyone with enough experience managing developers will likely agree.
This seems overblown. Yes we all get interrupted - lunch, phone calls/texts, even the end of the workday are interruptions. To single out 'standup' as a particularly disruptive interruption may be exaggeration.
Of course, some interruptions like lunch or the end of the day are unavoidable.
Phone calls and texts? Don't let your developers do them.
> To single out 'standup' as a particularly disruptive interruption may be exaggeration.
It isn't an exaggeration, because a standup is also a pending appointment and a mini-presentation. A lot of developer types actually get stressed out about this, no matter how small.
Similar thing with responding to an e-mail. It's insane how much time some people spend on just a one line reply.
Just minimize these things, don't make them part of your routine for routine's sake.
It sounds like you and your coworkers are failing to use your tools, and falling back to having a periodic meeting instead of fixing your process.
>Standups are in my experience much more effective at signalling blocking issues than slack.
Your messaging tool is not good enough to communicate urgency? You cannot send a message and say "this is urgent" and have somebody read it and respond in a timely manner? You would have better luck waiting until the next standup meeting?
>Nobody is going to spend their day checking what other people are doing on Jira
Your primary work tracking tool is not good enough to allow people to see who is working on what, and what the status of that work is? You can't get an overview of what is being worked on? You can't check on a specific issue to see how far along it is?
Here's how it works when you use your tools:
1. You have an urgent issue. You message the involved parties. Your message should communicate the urgency of the issue. They read it and respond / take action within an appropriate amount of time.
2. You want to know what your team is working on. You look at your issue tracker to see what everyone is working on. If you are curious about the status of any work in particular, you look at the details for that work. If there is insufficient information about its progress, you send the assignee a message (see #1).
> Your primary work tracking tool is not good enough to allow people to see who is working on what, and what the status of that work is? You can't get an overview of what is being worked on? You can't check on a specific issue to see how far along it is?
In my experience most people don’t regularly post summaries of their progress on their ticket. Even getting certain people to update their ticket descriptions at all (to add test instructions or to reflect that they decided to do something other than originally described) usually requires reminders.
This may depend on team culture but in my experience a lot of people just aren’t written communicators.
We're all professionals - we can learn new skills when they're high-value (like updating tickets with written communication)
I don't like the sentiment that developers doing things out of their comfort zone (like using JIRA) is unreasonable. Just get over it and be a professional.
That said, it's on others to motivate the use of such tools. It's easier to get buy-in when everyone understands the value.
It's not a bad article if it reflects the reality a considerable number of people face with this kind of cargo cult methodology.
A five minute meeting is not five minutes out of your day. Any scheduled interruption takes at least thirty minutes, probably more like sixty, out of productive time, as a flat cost, over and above the actual time of the meeting. It's all the time that you don't start biting into something worth doing because you look at the clock, and say "Oh fuck, I've got this fucking standup meeting in 20 minutes - I can't even get started on this before that rolls around and interrupts me." And it it all the time afterwards where you have had a bunch of shit laid in your lap that you have to spend some time following up on and frigging around with before you can get back to the work you already had planned to do.
> Don't agree with this assessment at all, we do stand-ups and it rarely takes more than 5 minutes
I do agree with it, because everywhere I've worked that does a daily standup does it wrong, and I think OA is more about those organisations.
For many old-fashioned companies, "doing agile" means waterfall + standups. Apparently that's all you need to reap that sweet agile-y goodness. The guy running the meeting doesn't enforce any structure, doesn't stop people rambling on for 10 minutes, doesn't try in any way to note or act on the points people raise. It's just about micro-management and cargo-cult development.
I'm sure with the right company a standup is a very useful tool. But wherever I've worked, it's been all about micro-management and a fundamental misunderstanding of what I actually need to do dev work (usually: a quiet office, no interruptions and time).
You are just counting literally the time the first person starts talking till the last person ends, and even then its going to be closer to 10 minutes.
If you add up the time people have stopped working while waiting for the meeting, the time you take to gather people to a room, wait for the last one to arrive, start, go back, it's been 20 minutes total, and when standups derail and people start talking a lot it goes over half an hour.
You need to count the total overhead time. I mean come on, 10 minutes before the standup you are not really working full steam, right? You know you are about to have a meeting, so you are chatting with colleagues and checking email instead of working on your main tasks. That time should count too.
It's not even about the time, either. I do my best work in the morning. Almost every morning on my last project went like this: Get into work, grab a glass of water, bring up my todo list, start polishing off the first item, make 5 minutes of really good progress and the bam, standup.
The comparison isn't between the benefits of a good standup and nothing, it's between a good standup and whatever productivity you lost by interrupting the entire team (same as any meeting). You need to make sure it's worth it.
What? Every engineering team I've been on has done standups at their office/desk/bullpen. It literally takes exactly the amount of time of talking. Then we sit back down and resume work. You don't have to make it a full blown meeting. In fact, you shouldn't.
> 10 minutes before the standup you are not really working full steam, right?
Some colleagues don't 'work' at all between getting to work and standup (opting for soft tasks like email).
Wasting 15 minutes for 5 people a day costs the company almost 6 man-weeks a year, or really a week per person. Providing that week as PTO/leave would probably result in tangible productivity improvements.
“It help immensely with production as your colleagues often help keep things from falling through the cracks.”
But your job as a developer is to not have this happen. It’s nothing something that would be a nice to have, you’re supposed to always keep your team informed about potential gaps. The standup is designed to catch gaps but really that should be something you should already be doing.
> This of course only works if you actually stick to what the stand-up is meant for.
This is my big problem with agile, scrum, and friends. It's like communism; it only works if you "do it correctly." Russia? China? Cuba? Yea, they didn't do it right, but if it's done right, it's really really great.
I have only ever read about agile and scrum being done correctly. Obviously, I'm just one person, and my experience is limited, but at every company have I ever worked at or consulted for, the practice of agile and scrum is very different than what I read about.
I have experienced the less than 10 minute standup maybe a dozen times ever. Not that there is usually much to talk about. "Yesterday I worked on on X. Today I will keep working on X."
But somehow enough people in one place just seems to create so much friction. There's always a tangent. A: "By the way, how long do you think until we finish X?" B: "I don't know. Kind of depends on Y and Z. I never did Y before." C: "Oh, I did Y before, it's easy, you'll have no difficulties" and on and on.
I can see two possibilities:
1) My experiences have been not been representative of the industry as a whole. On the whole, agile and scrum work well and are executed properly at most companies, but I've just had some bad luck.
2) My experiences are representative. In this case, agile/scrum is so difficult for the average company to pull off, that it's kind of a rare occurrence.
The fact that angst-ridden articles like this one are such a regular occurrence on HN kind of makes me suspect that it's #2, not #1.
I'm just an engineer, so project management is not my area of expertise, but my layman's opinion is that an actually good project management system should "fail gracefully," as it were. You shouldn't need a 1 in 1000 level PM to pull this stuff off.
> On the whole, agile and scrum work well and are executed properly at most companies, but I've just had some bad luck.
Not a chance -- your experience mirrors mine over the course of the six or so companies that I've worked for. It's definitely #2.
They all fail in very similar ways: story points become hours/days; stand-ups devolve from status updates to daily team discussions; the backlog becomes irrelevant because new stories are created for each sprint; and, in companies which report velocity to senior management, story-point inflation.
Also, I've noticed that Agile transformations always create Agile zealots within the organization which seem to act to quell dissent. I'm not sure why this is, maybe the transformations are tied to bonuses or something, but it's a universal thing. There's always somebody running around telling you that you're team is Doing It Wrong when you bring up any legitimate criticisms of the process.
See:
> It's like communism; it only works if you "do it correctly."
In my limited experience, one key to successful standups is making them as small as possible. The worst standups are the ones which contain over a dozen people working on a bunch of only vaguely related projects. The best ones are the ones that only involve the people working on things directly related to thing I happen to be working on. I you're a manager this might mean that you have to organize 3 or 4 standups instead of just one and keep track of who is working on what and being sure the right people show up to the right meeting. If it turns out that someone is being blocked by someone not at the meeting then either set up a new meeting with just the people involved in that problem or make sure that particular person is at the next meeting.
Completely agree with this. It just seems like ritual for ritual's sake. I tend to learn nothing from standup that I couldn't learn by checking Jira or just directly asking someone. And waiting a full day to raise blockers is foolish.
Sometimes things go a bit too far, with people delving too deeply into whatever topic, with a sort of side-conversation starting. Yes, these people should "take it offline", and often after a minute or so of back and forth, they will, but it still happens often enough that it turns into a waste of most of the team's time. "Be more disciplined!", you say? Sure, ok, wave your magic wand and make that happen, please.
The counter-argument I usually hear to anyone who wants to get rid of standup goes something along the lines of: "but it's great to get everyone together once a day, and sometimes people will spontaneously learn of something that they have useful input for, and save someone some time". Ok, so you want to waste 10-20 minutes of my time on the off chance that someone might randomly have a useful contribution that wouldn't otherwise come up? No, pass.
And regardless, this sort of attitude is actively hostile toward remote members of the team, who may be in different time zones and can't reasonably participate.
If your team really needs daily status updates, create a "standup" channel for your team on Slack (or whatever you use), and have people do a once-a-day post in there. No deadline, just when they get to it. But even that just feels like micro-management.
I'm having trouble parsing the last half of your sentence, but I'm going to assume (please correct me if I'm wrong here) that you meant:
"Just because you have a short sync meeting once a day, it doesn't mean you should delay all work until then."
And yes, I totally agree! If you're blocked on something, you should raise it immediately, so you're not delaying all work until your next standup! If you do have other work to do, you should still raise the issue immediately, figure out who should own the blocker (if it's non-trivial, your manager will likely find ownership for you), and then move onto another task until the blocker is resolved. You gain nothing by waiting until the next day, and possibly exacerbate the problem if you do wait.
Standups hurt more than help. As someone who managed fully remote teams in the past, what worked very well for us is a set of rules around in-house built task management system (something like Jira could work too).
1) Aim to take 2-3 tasks, do not take more, take 1 if the task is large, but usually, it's a sign of an overblown story.
2) Every day at the end of the day, write a "current status" comment. These comments are visible in the master panel, and I could take action the next day to help developers resolve roadblocks, if the resolution is taking longer, they can work on other tasks they claimed.
This effectively eliminated the need for standups, the whole team could sync using task "current status" updates, and chime in with help or advice. I was able to see the progress and issues without forcing people into a mess of a video call, and everybody could still stick to their preferred schedules and have personal lives.
This is my preferred method as well when leading a team.
Standups as intended are too brief to discuss the important details. This is why they end up ballooning to 30+ minutes at most companies, because anything shorter is of little value.
They also end up as a catch-all meeting for any topics that require the team's input; I dislike this because people are expected to provide input on the spot without really making any thoughtful considerations. If we want to have a discussion on a UI component, that should be done in a dedicated, prepared meeting, not at 8:30 in the morning when people are unprepared and said developer can take advantage of unpreparedness to obtain the consensus they want.
When I provide up-stream status reports, I like to have the developer's notes in front of me for a quick refresher. Plus, they serve as a good reminder on topics that need followup.
I've worked in many teams that used standups, the general feeling was that they were utterly useless.
Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them.
I even saw once a developer on his last day throwing the speaker's token (a teddy bear) to the trash can LOL!
Everyone on the teams I worked on seemed to think that standups where useless, this showed clearly through the team body language and tone in those meetings.
Its an interruption on your work just when you just got started in the morning, now you have to stop and go to a meeting.
What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other, and if you need help you ask it anyway on the spot, there is no need to wait for the next standup for that.
It's hard to come up with different things to say on the meetings, as there aren't many things that have changed since yesterday.
> What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other
I think this is the key difference between teams that like stand-ups and teams that don't. In the teams I've worked in, our work was highly relevant to one another, so knowing daily where everyone was with their tasks is usually interesting to everyone.
I second that. I've founf that when the work of other people is relevant, you might have some inputs having worked on a related thing earlier that might help them.
But as the article points out, knowing daily where everyone was with their tasks isn't something that needs a formal meeting. I've worked in highly integrated teams, too, and easily got by with one team meeting a week.
Depends on the size of your team. Once you get to 10+ people in a team, it's hard to spread information effectively with 1:1 communication. What I've liked about standups in teams of that size is the opportunity to kick of unexpected brainstorming because you mention what you're working on and someone mentions they have expertise/ideas in the area that you didn't know about.
There are of course many ways to run a productive team.
On the other hand, the Scrum Guide[1] recommends that teams have 3-9 people in them, and that more leads to poor coordination. Seems like an inverse "Goldilocks problem", Scrum standups are best when there are more than 10 people and less than 10 people in the team.
I am absolutely not a believer in anyone who talks about agile techniques as having 'Rules'. That is a trademark of agile gone wrong to me.
Small teams are better, but not always possible. Agile is about having team mechanics that make your specific team more productive and changing them as your team changes.
That aligns with my experiences, we aimed for 6, with a max of 8, with a min of 4.
I will say, Scrum was really helpful for us, but only because we took "iterate on your process" seriously, and had a culture where teams could experiment with their process.
In the end we outgrew it, but Scrum helped us reach the point where we could do so.
What’s the point of knowing what the rest of 10 people are working on? You won’t remember all of it anyway. There is no need to add so much cognitive load to your brain every single morning. Engineers should imho start their day with clear mind.
To give ideas based on your experience. To raise questions that might not have been considered. To build a team instead of a collection of independent cogs. To know what expertise your teammates have so you know who to go to with a question in the future.
It really shouldn't be much cognitive load to listen to what other people are working on for 10 minutes. If it is, it might mean the standup is running at the wrong level of abstraction or perhaps you aren't really a team that has a shared goal.
Bingo - the whole idea of any meetings before lunch is absurd. Your brain does 90% of its best thinking between wake up and lunch... why waste that on meetings? Sorry for the sidebar... I’m loving this thread. I’ve been telling my wife for years that daily huddles are a scam that manipulative management types do “to maintain momentum” or the appearance of it at least.
In our experience, scrum teams couldn't scale past 8 members without becoming less effective. The effective communication required for a high performing team suffered, people would tune out in stand-ups etc.
I've done standups (not scrum, just standups) with up to 16 people and it was quite effective. It just required a concerted effort to keep it short.
The nature of the work probably also helped because tasks took a long time so on any given day only a handful of the people would have substantive updates.
In my experience, 10 is way too many for daily standups! Thats when they start getting dragged out from 5 minutes to a 45 minute snore-fest, hearing every little needless detail from someone elses problem that I have no need for!
I find the team needs to be at most 6 people, otherwise you probably need to split the team for daily standups to work.
That wasn't my experience, but it definitely takes an emphasis on brevity to prevent that. We found two techniques that helped with bigger teams:
1. Everyone explicitly has the responsibility to say "this is going too deep, let's continue it outside of standup" when needed.
2. Having a timer visible that resets after each person's update. This makes it clear when one person's update is taking too long. We were able to get rid of the timer once we had the flow down.
Also, it's crucial that everyone on the team feels comfortable saying: "these standups aren't a good use of our time, let's make a change". That's how those techniques were introduced.
I consult and I've been at places where a 4 person standup take a half hour. Usually then I start telling people "We don't solve problems in stand up."
I've also worked at places where a 20 person standup took < 10 minutes and helpful b/c sometimes someone not on your team will know how to fix your blocker and just help you out afterwards.
I think as long as you have a standup czar or just post your updates to slack, then it's a super useful meeting. If it ever goes over 10 minutes then whoever is running it is just making everyone late for work.
Why does it depend on the size of your team? Teams involved in agile development (where they do the whole daily standup kerfuffle) are supposed to not get to 10+ people. That's like the third thing on the agile coach's slide.
Besides, why does it take a full-team standup to find out someone has expertise and ideas in an area that you didn't know about? Are the lead developers/managers sleeping at their desks? Guiding and bringing people together is one of the things they're paid for. They should know who's good at what, and steer the right people (or the right tasks) towards them. If they aren't doing their job, what the team needs is people who do, not one more thing that developers have to figure out on their own time.
As for brainstorming -- it shouldn't be unexpected in the first place. Not on a regular basis, anyway. If a developer needs that brainstorming session, they should have the means to make it happen, with only the interested people attending. If they need it, but don't know they need it -- especially common, and especially excusable for junior developers -- that's why we have lead developers and managers.
And meetings are not the only way to spread information! If a team has 10, 15 members or more and it's spreading information by word of mouth alone, whether 1:1 or in meetings, that's already a problem. At that point you should have things documented. New members should have an M that they can RTF and ask experienced team members about. If a team got to that size and the only way to spread information is in person, that's something they should remedy, not keep doing!
Lead developers and managers can't keep track of all the minutae that people have worked on in their careers.
For a concrete example: if I track a performance problem down to a small part of an open-source piece of software, it isn't realistic for managers/lead developers to know if anyone on the team has experience with that piece of the software. But if I mention that in standup, it will immediately be clear if anyone has expertise that is valuable.
I've never seen a high performing team that didn't regularly have ad-hoc brainstorming sessions (i.e. you say what you are planning to do and someone says "have you considered this"). Like I said, there are many runs to run a productive team, but standup can be a good place to start that discussion.
> Lead developers and managers can't keep track of all the minutae that people have worked on in their careers.
Keeping track of people's skills and expertise is part of their job description. If they don't, how are they going to help them develop and steer their careers? Not knowing every single thing they've worked on is one thing, but knowing (as in your example) who is likely to have used that piece of software, or who has experience troubleshooting performance problems involving that piece of software's functionality, is definitely their responsibility.
> For a concrete example: if I track a performance problem down to a small part of an open-source piece of software, it isn't realistic for managers/lead developers to know if anyone on the team has experience with that piece of the software.
Certainly -- but that doesn't justify having a stand-up meeting every day. It's not realistic for managers/lead devs to know if anyone on the team experience with a particular piece of software, but it is realistic for them -- or for any developer, for that matter -- to be able to find that out without dragging everyone from their desks for half an hour or more.
It's a matter of effort for reward. I get the sense from you that you find standups to be miserable so any way to get rid of them is worthwhile, even if it's less efficient (and having managers/lead developers track who is working on what specific piece of software and organize conversations to make sure the right people are talking to each other is not efficient).
In my experience, standup has almost no cost and is generally enjoyable - people typically like talking about what they are doing and getting thoughts/advice. But if your standups are "half an hour or more", they clearly don't have much in common with the standups I've done. I would propose that maybe the problem is your standups are poorly run, not that the concept itself is bad.
I find stand-ups pretty fun, too, but that's all -- and it's definitely not an experience that everyone finds enjoyable. We all like to talk about what we're doing. Some of us, myself included, gladly jump at every chance to do it, including stand-ups. Others, though, see the whole standup thing in terms that are closer to herding people into a meeting room and prodding them until they start talking.
As for timing: if you have a 10- or 15-people team, allowing for even just two minutes per person -- which is barely enough to cover a non-trivial problem -- easily gets you to 20-30 minutes. It gets shorter if all updates are in the form of "no news is good news", but then the meeting could have just as easily been an email. It also gets shorter if the problems really are so trivial that fifteen people can describe all of them, and their solutions, in a couple of sentences, so that no one talks for more than 30 seconds -- but then are these problems really so big that you need to hold a meeting that everyone attends, every single day?
I don't think the concept itself is bad -- just that the arguments for efficiency aren't convincing when it comes to large teams. I doubt that you can really disseminate useful information in this format, and even if you could, there are way more efficient ways to do that.
Edit: If these meetings are held just to make sure all updates are given regularly, often, and in the open, with all the consequences this has (good ones, like everyone being on the same page, and bad ones, like opportunistic managers taking the chance to use this as a way to pressure their team), that's great, but let's be frank and admit it.
With the amount of churn that there is in a lot of companies, it's unreasonable to expect anyone to do much of anything except bail water and try to keep things going within a handful of compass points of the correct direction.
My company is blessedly stable, but for instance at my wife's employer, there are teams that have had 300% turnover in the two years she has been there.
I think this kind of endless short-term firefighting is part and parcel with the micromanagement that daily standups embody. When nobody actually has any experience, or built any trust over time, the whip lays on heavier to keep people in line and pulling in the same direction.
This was all in the context of large teams, larger than the Agile methodology recommends.
How much useful stuff do you think a developer can fit in 20 seconds of speech -- which is about all they get if you want to fit a 15-people meeting in a ten-minute timeslot?
Once a team grows past a certain size, either you keep the discourse substantial -- and end up with 30-minute meetings -- or you cut everyone short, and end up with ten minutes of smiling and saying the right buzzwords.
I second the above comment, this is indeed the difference between a team and what shouldn't be a team. If people at a standup are talking about unrelated things then they indeed shouldn't be having standups, much less be considered a team in the first place. What's happening in standups and probably other meetings are symptoms of a structural issue people are either not seeing or failing address.
My rule of thumb for assessing a team is based on two simple questions: 1. Do people in the team work towards the same goal? 2. Do people in the team depend on each other? If the response to both questions is positive then by all means, have standups. In other cases, have a good look at whether it makes sense to call them a team in the first place.
unrelated is relative. If I'm working on bug A and bob id working on bug B, I don't give a shit that bob is having to go talk to cathy in accounting about something.
They're unrelated tasks because there are no dependencies between them, and there is absolutely no reason why I should have to sit through bob talking about his day.
But the point of these, at least to me, is that someone on the team may know a way to get the problem solved without talking to Cathy in accounting. Sure, sometimes you listen to unrelated tasks, but many times (in my experience), somebody on the team can offer a bit of advice that helps everyone move faster.
right, Bob and Betty can have that discussion elsewhere. all of it. We don't need a standup for Bob and Betty to figure out they need to have that discussion.
> "It's hard to come up with different things to say on the meetings, as there aren't many things that have changed since yesterday."
If you're still working on the same issue, then just say that. Keep the standup short. Of course this can also be a good time to notice a lack of progress; if you're spending days on an issue with little progress, are you stuck? Was the story badly defined? There could be very good reasons why it's taking longer, but again, the standup is a great time to notice these things and check if there's a way to help the issue along.
> Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them.
I haven't ever felt this kind of pressure from management in my stand ups. We very rarely have anyone from management present anyway. The stand up exists for the benefit of the team, not management. It is not a status report for management.
A lot of HN commenters have a tendency to project what ever experience they have with poor management onto all management in general. Poorly run teams have problems, poorly run projects have problems, poorly designed apps have problems... But well runs teams exist, and they use a lot of the same management tools as the bad ones. I’ve had both great and terrible experiences with standups. In a well run team, I love them. But in a poorly run team, getting frustrated with the idea of standup is about is misguided as getting upset with Jira for your managers shortcomings.
It is a status report in companies doing "Scrum" - usually after CTO paid an Agile-with-a-capital-A consultant.
I've been a bit of volunteer agile coaching in my area, and yeah, one example that always stuck with me was that the product managers and BAs just got renamed product owners, and they sat in every retro and attended every stand-up.
Funnily enough they were never available to the team during planning. They had important meetings on a Monday...
I tried to empathise to them that "stand-up and retro are solely for the team", but no dice. They still wanted that command and control.
For some people, the manager-employee relationship is a strictly adversarial one, to the point that they make it a self-fulfilling prophecy by viewing every act of their manager (or employees) as malicious if not a perceived slight.
I’ve seen standups with 20 people where 2 or 3 talked for more than 10 minutes. That’s not what it’s meant to be.
While I would also like to do the daily status email, I see value in doing a synchronized standup. It helps planning for the day.
Not all people are great communicators and I’ve seen lots of developers spend days on tasks which should take 1 or 2 hours max. Standups highlight these issues, but you need to listen and go to these people in private to understand their problems. And you should absolutely take up people if they offer to help you.
I tend to bring pen and paper to remember what I wanted to say and to note when I here something that’s relevant to me.
Standups with more than 6 people will already create a meeting of at least an hour. I mean, standups help is small teams to keep everyone excited (if you all agree on it!), and nobody likes meetings, so if it looks like a meeting and people need a 'token' to speak, then the point of the get-together is already far gone.
Why not join the meetup with afterwork drinks? That way you can really say what blocked you ánd talk about the things that you'd do in a standup...
That excludes certain segments of your workforce in ways that make HR sweat. Parents, alcoholics, people of faith... you've made attending the meetup more difficult.
So the way to fix dysfunctional meetings is not to split them into manageable sizes, but rather shift them into some sort of impromptu unpaid overtime, and bribe your staff with alcohol in hopes that they won't notice?
Agreed. Scrum master is the mostly useless role yet. I have had two in a row now that were just a waste of time to even have to deal with. I am constantly having to explain what we're doing so that he feels he's included, but yet he has zero clue technically.
At one job, the scrum master was an angry lesbian who used her minor role to browbeat me at every opportunity possibly because I'm part of the white, cis power structure or whatever. Talk about delusional! I'm no more privileged than anyone else, quite frankly. It was her and her "wife" (yeah, downvote away you stupid idiots--I have traditional beliefs about marriage, so sue me). Anyways, here SO was the HR director and so nobody could say a damn thing. Hope they go out of business, they deserve it.
Anyways, yeah, I haven't had a good experience with anyone titled "scrum master" at any point in the last decade and the latest few have been real gems.
I hope agile goes away completely. It has become nothing but another top down control mechanism to squeeze more work out of people who are already overworked. I fucking hate what it has become. There was a brief time when agile and agile practices were like a breath of fresh air. Now the slave drivers have taken it back for themselves.
Its highly dependent on personality of course, but Ive also seen this. A person that REALLY likes to talk for 10 minutes about details... which nobody really cares about. He even understood that it was not what anyone else wanted, but he thought "the standup is useless unless I get to say something elaborate and long-winded!"
He could not understand that "I had not trouble yesterday, and today I will keep going on my task" could be a useful update to the team. I mean, in general it isn't but when something unexpexcted happens you are supposed to say it, not something unique for every day. 90% of my dailies are basically: "I am still working on X, and its moving forward, continuing today".
I feel that end of day is more variable than start of day, especially if end of day means "Go Home!". Some people have kids to pick up from school/day care and leave at 3, while others like to come in later and/or take a long lunch and work until 6-7. Saying everybody must be in by 9.30 is probably easier to coordinate that saying everybody must stay until 5 and then go home at 5.15.
I've done both and I personally prefer beginning of day. Standups are usually (in my experience) the beginning of a conversation or a brainstorm and that works better when there is time left to continue after standup. If they are just reporting what you did then end of day might be better, but that sounds like a bad standup.
I worked in a Boston based team from Budapest. I did EOD standups all the time. It was nice I did not have a hard time remembering what I did during a day. I usually had one hour to short out any blockers before I finished working.
There are just as many issues with that as the beginning of the day, IMO. What constitutes the end of the day, for example? It isn't unusual for teams to have someone who comes in really early and leaves early. Or someone else who comes in late and leaves late.
Early enough for the 6-3 worker might be well before the end of the day for a lot of others.
>> Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them.
So true. At the last company I worked, the daily standups became absurd. We were forced to use a physical board which was always out of synch with GitHub and we were just repeating the same stuff that we already knew everything about.
Also, we had scrum retrospectives in which the new scrum master was throwing a yellow ball at someone when it was their turn to talk. WTF?! Does management think our brains stopped growing after the age of 5? You have a room filled with potentially brilliant engineers and you're treating them like toddlers. Do they seriously think that this is the right way to build a company which will make an impact on society?
What the hell is wrong with managers these days? Is there some kind of virus going around which is turning them into idiots or is there a global conspiracy to only promote idiots into positions of power?
This just sounds like a bad/inappropriate use of a tool. I wouldn't think that a team of people working on unconnected items should have any meetings at all, let alone a daily stand-up.
As others have said, when you're working on a team where there is significant interplay or varied, related experience, they're really useful. We work on an OS and have members of the team who happen to have experience using infra and tooling. There's no way you would necessarily know this without saying "Oh, I was struggling with this bit of stats collection infra" and somebody else says "Yeah, I worked on that on x project, y years ago. Let's chat after stand-up."
There are obviously other ways to seed this kind of thing, but brief stand-ups seem a good way of doing it.
The other thing that we tend to do is just say "Oh, I did x that doesn't really relate to the project yesterday, but that's not very interesting" and leave it at that.
Back when I first started doing daily standups at jobs almost 20 years ago -- when agile/xp was first starting to buzz -- it honestly felt like a breath of fresh air and explicitly something that management would _not_ want. Quick, informal, brief checkpoint with your coworkers, then back to work. We had a group of almost 20 engineers & QA people in a circle, but it went quickly and inobtrusively... nobody spoke for more than a few seconds. We all knew what everyone else was doing, and could go offline and have a discussion afterwards if necessary.
It was a meeting for ourselves, not for management. There were no status reports to management, no gantt charts, no percentage estimates of completion, etc. Just: here's what I'm doing/not doing.
Fast forward a decade or two and I've seen good and bad use of this meeting form. But I still think it's a good idea, it just requires discipline to stop people from hogging air space or veering off into tangents.
"It was a meeting for ourselves, not for management. There were no status reports to management, no gantt charts, no percentage estimates of completion, etc. Just: here's what I'm doing/not doing."
That's my understanding of what a standup is supposed to be, and it's what my experience of them has been. THIS is useful. It's in particular useful if you have devs on the team who tend to get kinda "wound around the axle" on problems rather than speak up or seek help.
There will always be devs who think any meeting is by definition a waste of time, and you can't make those people happy, but a true brief standup meeting as described here is SUPER useful.
Like many things, if it works for you and doesn't turn negative, then that's great and more power too you.
Personally, when I lead a team, I keep abreast of what people are working on and ask them if they need help, or tell one of the more suited senior guys to offer a hand if it's an area I can't easily help in.
I imagine the standup helps more when you're lead is a non-technical scrum master guy who doesn't have much of a personal relationship with the team.
On the latter point I typically buy my team members fancy coffees and the occasional lunch, and it's easy to get on with them if you care about their careers, so I've never needed a standup.
That's a difficult argument? Is the manager not part of the team? Depends on the org, I guess.
Either way, I'm not so sure the statement means much. The point of agile is to do what's helps, so if a standup is useful for the above reasons, it's entirly possible that another approach solves the same problem, negating the need for the standup.
Your tone is slightly rude considering you're essentially agreeing with me.
You'll need to note the entire thread for the context of my discussion. I was specifically saying a good tech lead and other senior engineers can help engineers get unstuck without actually necessitating a standup.
For me, standups are fine if the team actually want to do them and find them useful, but 9 times out of 10 they're enforced by someone non-technical and require the entire team listen to people drone on justifying what they did yesterday.
Personally, I find the assumption that I can't communicate with fellow engineers without such a thing pretty insulting, but do understand that some of us do struggle with this thing, so it's different strokes for different folks.
It definitely depends on the structure of the org. But I do make a distinction between management and team lead. On some teams the management is technical and involved in daily tasks. In others, less so.
But the key thing is that the daily standup is NOT a status report for management! That should not be its purpose! It is for the team members to sync with each other, not a daily report for task management.
I seem to remember a time when standups did not necessarily involve the product owner. I feel like a lot of things have changed in Scrum that have progressively brought more of management into its ceremonies in ways that have actually disrupted a lot of the early goals of the process.
Interesting, yeah, we were doing something closer XP, not Scrum. I've never done Scrum. Haven't done "agile" in the last 10 years, as it's not really a thing where I work now.
But yes, in XP, the 'customer' or 'product owner' would not attend a daily standup. The purpose of the meeting was for developers to sync and maintain velocity and social and work cohesion.
Meeting with customer/PM was something that happened at the end or start of iteration.
What use is knowing what 20 other people are doing today? Are you interacting with all of them? Interesting to know what projects they're working on, but I can be told that once a month if I haven't already got that while chatting to them at the coffee machine. A 20 person meeting for each to speak for a few seconds is to me very theatrical - drop a sentence in a chatroom. If I'm not working directly with you I'm not going to read it, nor listen to you in a stand-up.
In an 'agile' process people should only be working on any particular 'story' for 3-5 day period. Everyone on the team should be interested in what they other people are doing, because they may in turn be pulled into work on some part of it next. In a healthy team everyone should be invested in the success of the product, and have some knowledge of most aspects.
Frankly, once things scale beyond that, where you have large teams of people disinterested in what's happening beyond their choice of specialization -- "agile" starts to not be a good match anymore.
> Its an interruption on your work just when you just got started in the morning, now you have to stop and go to a meeting.
> if you need help you ask it anyway on the spot, there is no need to wait for the next standup for that.
I thought part of the reasoning for standups was to synchronize your interruptions, so instead of breaking people's flow throughout the day, you can line up all the cross-cutting concerns at the beginning of the day.
"What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other, and if you need help you ask it anyway on the spot, there is no need to wait for the next standup for that."
Exactly this... I couldn't care less what dev-no-3 is working on since its not impacting me and I could bet no one cared much what I said except the scrum-master.
> I even saw once a developer on his last day throwing the speaker's token (a teddy bear) to the trash can LOL!
Are we talking adult employees here? :D Anyway, if I ever become employed, and will have to work on-site, I want the comfort token to be a stuffed baby gnu.
> Everyone on the teams I worked on seemed to think that standups where useless
It sounds like a bigger a problem then standups; if everyone feels they are useless why is there no forum in which this meeting is being discussed and removed or recalibrated? It sounds like the team doesn't own their own process or doesn't talk to each other about process
We started just doing our daily "standups" via slack. The whole point (imo) of the meeting is to identify blockers and/or slowdowns for what you're working on, and getting help if necessary. Reporting this status async over slack is great because it fulfills these needs without wasting anyone's time.
If you need help or are block, you report that. Otherwise, no need for a "status update". It also helps that we do this in our eng-only channel, where no product/upper management are in, so only our team is privy to the information.
The one downside is that it can be a bit more difficult to get help on something highly important if everyone is tunnel-visioned. Luckily, we have a great engineering manager who helps orchestrate help in those situations or steps in personally if someone is blocked.
> Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them.
When I was a manager, I always found it to be far more effective to have team members apply psychological pressure to their peers, rather than apply pressure from the top down.
Standups are best avoided by managers. I never felt the need for yet another meeting. In fact, an excessive number meetings are one of the main reasons I got out of the management business.
"What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other,"
It sounds like you are not a team in the sense of a coherent body creating added value, but a line organization mandated agglomeration of talent under a specific manager.
When actually working together quick stand ups make sense, but for individual contributors they add very little added value.
However, the only way to know if the dailys are unnecessary or not, is not how they feel like, but what happens when you remove them.
All coordination work feels unproductive. But after a specific complexity is reached coordinated efforts of communication are the only way in which a large body of talent can function in a sensible way together.
I commented on another post a while ago that the simplest way to "do Agile right" is to give the developers more power. There's just no other way. Whether that means: ownership, reporting direction, I don't know, but people can feel it, power is power.
I don't mean to imply this is a panacea. "Doing Agile right" is one thing, but business is about more than software development, and an engineering-led organization can of course ignore financial or marketing realities.
But there's an expertise-for-the-job phenom going here. Managing software development is a skill. It requires "navigating ambiguity," that favorite phrase of managers. It requires being able to expect and roll with punches, and chart a new course---every few minutes to every few months, depending on the context.
I suspect the best thing would be for boards to take a more active interest in their company's SD activities. Bring the CTO in, figure out the tech landscape the company is confronting. "Giving devs more power" is probably a no-sell, but "boards taking software seriously" might fly. And when you do that, you unavoidably become the devs who already have power.
I know, a digression, sorry. But it's just night-and-day, the diff between technical and non-technical management.
I completely agree with this. Standups are pointless, you have just communicate anything that you need to communicate via chat. Standups in general are simply a pressuring mechanism.
The questions as presented strike me as something that is more suited in a 1-on-1:
> What did I work on yesterday?
> What am I working on today?
> What issues are blocking me?
At my job we have tickets on a physical board and we discuss them from right-to-left. There are magnets on the tickets with people's names on it and when you get to 'your' tickets you talk about what is happening with that ticket. This is a lot more concrete and relevant to the rest of the team.
At a previous company we went from person to person and they'd discuss what they were working on. This always struck me as a strictly personal accounting of their previous work day and I had a feeling that people felt like they had to boast or exaggerate what they were working on. It never felt relevant or interesting.
The infantilisation of all workers seems to be common.
The stupidity of terms like "tribes" and "squads", the endless gamification, the "open office to encourage communication", the discussion of "learnings" and other verbed nouns.
The only people that it suits are HR types that love that everyone can be seen to be working together and the management that save lots of money on real estate and infrastructure costs.
Sure, breaking down company silos is a Good Thing. Orienting people to work across disciplines and be focused on the customer is a Good Thing.
Inventing crap like standups (the Queen does them for Privy Council meetings, works for her), and titles like "scrum master" is just as bad as the "black belt 6 sigma" of the early 2000s and the other management fads.
I don't know if they daily standup is necessary, but there is some value in frequent synchronous meetings. Some people just feel more comfortable bringing things up during a meeting, despite the myriad ways they could otherwise communicate.
I am a consultant working in a distributed team, often remote from our client. I find the standup format to be very useful, often delivered via a daily email.
While we use a formal issue tracker like Jira which handles approvals and estimates, from a project management perspective it's useful to have a summary email that is short enough for people to read and focused on business level issues.
"Today I worked on this" / "Next I plan to work on that."
This helps clients to see exactly what we are working on. It avoids miscommunication where we think they told us to prioritize something different, or they thought they told us to stop work on something, or they think we are finished with something and we are not. Having an email every day lets them tell us to stop work immediately if we are doing the wrong thing, avoiding surprise invoices the next month. It avoids them claiming that they didn't know that we were working on something.
"Here are the problems I am having / things I need from you".
This is very useful to keep track of delays caused by the client. This might be them needing to review and accept work, review specs, or pay their invoices. Issues stay on the report until they are resolved. It documents that we didn't get what we needed, so we can't be blamed for things being late.
One way of doing stand-ups that I found least annoying was we went through the Kanban board and basically asked if you had any problems with your assigned item. If there was no problem then you were done. If no one had any issues it was done in a few minutes and there was no chance for it to descend into pointlessness or irrelevant tangets.
I've had no issues with standups. Even in a small team I find them useful as a way to step back and see the bigger picture, plus they rarely take more than 5-10 minutes of my morning.
On the other hand, I've had friends who have endured 30 minute standups every day for the past few months. I think they started sitting after the first few sessions.
What information does a standup monologue convey that couldn't be expressed more clearly and with persistent links to context than a comment on a Trello card?
My team don't do daily standups. They're pointless ceremony.
Yesterday I worked on… Yes we know. We can see the Trello card you worked on.
Today I am working on… Yes we know. We can see what you've currently assigned yourself on Trello.
I am blocked by… Why the hell are you waiting until now to bring this up?!
I am blocked by… Why the hell are you waiting until now to bring this up?!
...because, as the author of the article notes, developers don't like interruptions.
You can't have it both ways - either you can have distraction-free work time so issues like blockers have to wait until the next scheduled communication time or you get distractions when important things happen. You can't reasonably state that people shouldn't interrupt you and they shouldn't wait until the next meeting to tell you stuff. Those things are opposed to each other.
> You can't reasonably state that people shouldn't interrupt you and they shouldn't wait until the next meeting to tell you stuff
You absolutely can, and we do it all the time.
You didn't interrupt me by replying to my comment here. If I was busy working on something, I wouldn't have read/replied to this right now.
If I am working on something, it's highly likely that I'll be finished and take a break to check what else is happening in the team well before a morning meeting the following day.
If something is truly time-critical and deserving of interruption, then its a moot point.
For me to interrupt you has a lower cost than for me to be stuck all day. But we need to fix something if it happens to me every day, or I can't figure out who to interrupt without affecting every member of the team.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadI have seen so many dysfunctional standup cultures: Places where you had to showcase and exaggerate how much stuff you had to do and people were looking at you funnily when you said what you are doing in under a minute, places where discussion that only interested a third of the team were started and standups took half an hour, places where the managers interrupted and asked why stories took so long...
When we were working to disambiguate deliverables or working on design or implementation, stand ups were useful. They held everyone accountable, when folks weren’t making progress because of some issue, it was super obvious - it gave management a really good insight into where things are and what blockers are.
Your characterization certainly doesn’t represent my experience. We went through phases of launching a products or services and focusing on them and then going back to pay off some of the tech debt until product management, engineers, and leadership arrived on the next set of big features.
"The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century...[It] allows all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched."
Learned a new word and concept today. Thanks!
They also tend to be longer than five minutes in terms of herding people to them etc.
If anything, by being at a fixed time, either at the start, or the end of a team’s day, it’s far easier to prevent a standup from disrupting deep work than a Slack message would be.
A slack message won't disrupt my deep work because I'll have notifications turned off, unless it's extremely urgent in which case it would be too urgent to leave until a standup anyway.
Some standups go off track, and if you count everything you are looking at close to a third of a morning per week or so.
They are useful for knowledge spreading and understanding what everyone is working on - we switch projects quite regularly so it’s quite nice to have a birds eye view of where each project is.
Next time you have a standup, look at the clock once you get up to the standup, or that you stop working normally and start looking around to see when people are leaving to the meeting. And then look at the clock when you are back at your seat working again.
People start getting ready to the standup 5 to 10 minutes before, chatting while waiting, etc. Count the time that you have stopped working normally, where you can't do any large task because you know there is a meeting in 10 minutes.
Don't just count the time literally from the moment a person starts giving their status to when the last person finishes, as the real overhead of the meeting is not that.
I guarantee you if you do that systematically and count the complete overhead and not just the literal overhead, that at best it will be typically 15 minutes and for longer sessions half an hour.
As for going off track, you will need to learn to tell people (including yourself) to take a time out and discuss matters after the standup. If anyone says more than a sentence or two, and if there is more than a single counterquestion and a short answer, then that should be taken after the meeting.
I have never been on a team of any more than 3 people where the standups have been as short as 5 minutes.
In an ideal world everyone would be perfectly professional and not need any supervision at all. In the real world some times you might be in a rough period or have some other problem that makes concentrating hard. In an ideal world the thought of getting a paycheck would be enough motivation. Sometimes it isn't.
A daily standup, if done well and short, helps one to focus on what's important, sets the tone for the day, and unites the team as a tribe.
When one is not motivated enough by looking a big fat dashboard with tickets pending, or the though of getting another paycheck at the end of the period, one can be motivated by the thought of not failing to their tribe, their peers, their coworkers.
You gave them your word, face to face, that you would work on something, so you better do, they are your people.
That's the rub, though. Despite best intentions, sometimes things just go off into the weeds. It happens more often than I'd like, and it's happened on every team I've ever been on, at every company I've ever worked at. Sure, you can say, "well you're doing it wrong", but that's not helpful. Process should support how the team works, not define how the team works.
> helps one to focus on what's important
If you need to refocus someone every day, you've made a bad hire.
> sets the tone for the day
That's my job. I know what I'm supposed to be working on, and set my own tone.
> and unites the team as a tribe
Ugh, gross. We're not a "tribe", "family", whatever.
We're a team of co-workers working on a variety of tasks, who are not children and can be trusted to communicate adequately with the rest of the team, and honor our commitments. If you have someone on the team for whom that's not the case, again: you made a bad hire. Don't punish the rest of the team because you have someone who can't do their job.
I get that some people get off track sometimes. It happens, even to the most senior of people. The solution to that is called management. Regular 1:1s, making sure your team keeps their tickets updated, and getting regular (individual, asynchronous, as-needed) status updates. If someone is having an off day, or an off week, that should be addressed individually, not by preemptively assuming the worst of everyone on the team and instituting a daily standup.
> Ugh, gross. We're not a "tribe", "family", whatever.
To each his or her own
And, at it's face, it's simply false. Companies (and the teams within) are factually not families, or tribes, or anything of the sort. They are a group of people working together for economic gain. They share very little resemblance to families or tribes in real life, and I can't see making that comparison as anything but a plea for loyalty... loyalty that will never be returned by the company when it's not convenient.
If I were interviewing at a company and they tried to justify having a standup using this rationale, I would stop considering them, as would many (most?) developers I know.
If one is right, stand up do not matter. If one is wrong, they help greatly.
You say : why should I suffer for unprofessional and weak team member who is wrong?
But you forget to note that the same person could be right sometimes and doing great things and be utterly wrong and solving wrong problems some other times.
Edit: a also wanted to add, that input from peers and peer pressure is not to be underestimated. Management is be wrong as often as any of us.
No, I don't forget that, and in fact specifically addressed people having an off day, week, whatever.
True. Happens in every meeting. In which case anyone present can (and in my view) should get the meeting back on track.
“This is off topic”, “can you/we discuss this later”, “this has nothing to do with why we’re here for”.
Having strict time limits, a clear intent, and of course people enforcing it does make it possible.
>> and unites the team as a tribe > Ugh, gross. We're not a "tribe", "family", whatever.
Agreed. This stuff makes me gag.
I absolutely agree that people can and should do that, but in practice, I often find that people don't. And I personally get tired of it; isn't it reasonable to take a dim view of a meeting where literally every time we have it, I (as an IC, whose job this should not be) have to prod people to stay on track?
We'll just have to disagree on that. In my ideal world, getting a paycheck would be a natural byproduct of doing something interesting, that matters, and about which one would care.
> We'll just have to disagree on that. In my ideal world, getting a paycheck would be a natural byproduct of doing something interesting, that matters, and about which one would care.
I agree with you. It was mostly to curtail the capitalist view of "a paycheck should be motivation enough."
The problem doesn't come from standups, but rather from dysfunctional startup culture.
If I were to compile a list of workspace annoyances, even the most pointless standup would be way after serious business like "people standing behind my back while talking to someone".
I do agree that badly managed stand-ups are a waste of time.
But that's a management fail. Every time I've managed a person that did this, I took them aside and had a short but firm word with them. You can't tolerate that type of behavior in a team if you plan to operate effectively. I seldom need more than one warning; I never needed more than two.
some of those are not necessarily "bad" or require intervention, just awareness.
some of those can change over time (and on daily basis).
(and in the case of bad behavior, in order to prevent "management fail", I want to take them aside for that short talk before things get spiraling)
(that being said, it's not the only reason for standups)
(if in my team everybody is in the same place, actually interacting in-person does give some added value)
If I was an employee, I would prefer you to let me self-manage my work however I feel comfortable using whatever tool suits me and my team, instead of constantly interrupting on Jira, Trello, etc. And I'll keep you updated at a frequency we agreed on (daily or weekly).
It's also great to read daily updates of others on the team, and even other teams, to learn about what they're working on without having to check at multiple places or interrupt their work. It's usually a great way to discuss, give and receive feedback, asynchronously.
Also, it's strange that you're suggesting "reach out on Slack" as an alternative. Doesn't that promote the "incessant messaging that Slack allows" you're decrying at the start of the article?
Disclaimer: I'm cofounder of the team communication tool https://www.happierco.com
And the author says make it async, I agree! That’s not against the spirit of standups, I’ve worked on remote teams with an asynchronous standup slack channel.
The most common problem I’ve seen with standups is they can become more than status updates and end up a time during the day to brag about your accomplishments or justify your status within a team/project. Usually to keep management happy or angle for an agenda other than keeping the team together.
Overal I don't think it's disruptive at all to do a short stand-up, constant nagging however is very disruptive. That person that just walks in or starts spamming you on slack takes more time altogether per instance than a single stand-up does. It takes you out of your process, you then have to pick that up again. If you're working on something complex that can mean it takes an additional 10 minutes before you're back on track. That's the kind of disruption stand-ups can help prevent.
This of course only works if you actually stick to what the stand-up is meant for.
Walks in? Yes. That should be discouraged always.
Spamming on Slack? If that is a problem, you're doing Slack wrong. It's an asynchronous method of communication. Don't be buried in it or feel the need to respond to every message as it comes in. Check it during natural breaks or stopping points.
If something actually is urgent and requires your immediate attention, then they can break the above rule and walk up to your desk (or call you if you're remote).
It seems most developers aren't even comfortable with the first bit, let alone escalating things. Instead, most people just seethe and complain privately to other colleagues, and nothing changes. At the very least, the team's manager should be brought in to do a better job of protecting the everyone's time, and you'd think that would be easy for a developer to do, because it outsources any sort of confrontation. But it still often doesn't happen, for whatever reason. (Of course, if it's the manager who is the offender here, you're probably screwed if the diplomatic method fails.)
A few elements that I think contribute to long standups:
* A very large team (I've been in a marged team of 14 people once...)
* Getting too much into technical details: don't do that; have your technical discussions after the standup with only the relevant people
* People sharing their opinion (frustration) about blocking issues and that developing into a discussion. Again, leave it until after the standup.
When standups drag on for too long, it's time for the scrum master to step in and get people to keep it short.
IMHO that would be okay, if not beneficial.
>and that developing into a discussion.
That not so much.
The PRs cover the “what did you do?” questions while getting eyeballs reviewing the work and for larger PRs we will schedule something. Keeps things moving well.
The inbound requests reviews keep us from having to have backlog estimating meetings as often since we are keeping up with it as they arrive.
If the time isn’t useful, find a way to make it useful.
If any issues come up, you can discuss them immediately after the standup.
Long meetings are terrible, but short meetings are great. That's the whole idea behind the standup. If a couple of minutes per day kills your velocity, as the article claims, I wonder what else you're doing during the rest of the day. It only has a measurable impact on your velocity if you're only a working an hour per day. And even then I'd guess it's useful to have a quick refresher about what you're working on.
This is obviously stressful, and psychologically pressures you to try to finish the task ASAP the day before, so that you can come up to the meeting and just say its done.
Which is the real actual benefit of the standup, and why managers keep doing it, despite they are obviously not needed and in most cases a waste of time.
The standup keeps everyone on their heels and feeling like their every breath is monitored and accounted for.
Its the perception of yourself and your work from the eyes of the group that is at stake here, it's important and most people usually don't just improvise it.
Many times people have notes of what they want to say, which involves preparation, attention and energy put into it that would better be directed elsewhere.
I've prepared for standup when I was new to a team, but it should pretty quickly get to the point where you don't need that. At least for my experiences, it's not like standup is a major factor in how teammates think of you - that comes from working together with people.
It requires very little thought.
If your teams have so little trust in each other that you have to do all this preparation for a standup, then there are already much larger issues.
There's just no deep work that can be done during that time, and that's every day.
Count the whole overhead time, from the moment people stop working normally waiting for the meeting, till the moment people come back to their seats, add up the extra coffee pause that people take afterwards that people would not usually take.
You are looking on average, at easily 15 to 20 minutes per person minimum a day, probably more.
It's not just the time itself though, it's the interruption that prevents you from starting longer tasks effectively.
Can't really account for that, work is not only about summing up minutes on a time tracking tool. There is rythm, there is acceleration, there is a productive state and there is deceleration.
Standups disrupt all that without any real benefit, other than serving as a daily reminder that you better hurry up with what you are doing - which most people don't need.
That's disruptive!
> Standups are in my experience much more effective at signalling blocking issues than slack.
If you are using Slack, you have already lost the battle for productivity.
> If a couple of minutes per day kills your velocity, as the article claims, I wonder what else you're doing during the rest of the day.
Literally any interruption destroys your focus. A pending appointment destroys your focus. If you use Slack or E-Mail notifications, people never even attain focus, so in that sense it's not a loss.
> And even then I'd guess it's useful to have a quick refresher about what you're working on.
To a first approximation, nobody cares what you're working on. Nobody should care what you're working on. If your developers need to constantly communicate with each other, something is likely very wrong with the way you split up your work.
Daily standups pre-suppose that there's always stuff to communicate and that everyone is always involved, but only once a day and only briefly. This is complete nonsense. You need to be able to adapt to the situation. You need a meeting? Have a meeting with whoever is concerned. Have a follow-up meeting. Take your time and focus on the issue, then nobody will even feel like time is being wasted.
> "To a first approximation, nobody cares what you're working on. Nobody should care what you're working on."
I care quite a lot what the people in my team are working on. Otherwise why are we even a team?
If you're not in a team, obviously things are different.
> "If your developers need to constantly communicate with each other, something is likely very wrong with the way you split up your work."
It's the opposite: if developers are not communicating, they're probably not cooperating with each other, which means something is very wrong.
It's an argument for having meetings when you need them, with whoever you need them with, with no particular schedule or routine attached.
> I care quite a lot what the people in my team are working on.
Do you really? Or do you just want to signal that?
> Otherwise why are we even a team?
You are on a team because that's the unit of organization above the individual.
> It's the opposite: if developers are not communicating, they're probably not cooperating with each other, which means something is very wrong.
If developers need to cooperate, you have a problem that you should avoid at great cost. Of course, sometimes cooperation is unavoidable, but it's not a good thing in and of itself. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Aim to split up your work to require minimal cooperation. This may sound like unconventional advice, but anyone with enough experience managing developers will likely agree.
Phone calls and texts? Don't let your developers do them.
> To single out 'standup' as a particularly disruptive interruption may be exaggeration.
It isn't an exaggeration, because a standup is also a pending appointment and a mini-presentation. A lot of developer types actually get stressed out about this, no matter how small.
Similar thing with responding to an e-mail. It's insane how much time some people spend on just a one line reply.
Just minimize these things, don't make them part of your routine for routine's sake.
>Standups are in my experience much more effective at signalling blocking issues than slack.
Your messaging tool is not good enough to communicate urgency? You cannot send a message and say "this is urgent" and have somebody read it and respond in a timely manner? You would have better luck waiting until the next standup meeting?
>Nobody is going to spend their day checking what other people are doing on Jira
Your primary work tracking tool is not good enough to allow people to see who is working on what, and what the status of that work is? You can't get an overview of what is being worked on? You can't check on a specific issue to see how far along it is?
Here's how it works when you use your tools:
1. You have an urgent issue. You message the involved parties. Your message should communicate the urgency of the issue. They read it and respond / take action within an appropriate amount of time.
2. You want to know what your team is working on. You look at your issue tracker to see what everyone is working on. If you are curious about the status of any work in particular, you look at the details for that work. If there is insufficient information about its progress, you send the assignee a message (see #1).
In my experience most people don’t regularly post summaries of their progress on their ticket. Even getting certain people to update their ticket descriptions at all (to add test instructions or to reflect that they decided to do something other than originally described) usually requires reminders.
This may depend on team culture but in my experience a lot of people just aren’t written communicators.
I don't like the sentiment that developers doing things out of their comfort zone (like using JIRA) is unreasonable. Just get over it and be a professional.
That said, it's on others to motivate the use of such tools. It's easier to get buy-in when everyone understands the value.
A five minute meeting is not five minutes out of your day. Any scheduled interruption takes at least thirty minutes, probably more like sixty, out of productive time, as a flat cost, over and above the actual time of the meeting. It's all the time that you don't start biting into something worth doing because you look at the clock, and say "Oh fuck, I've got this fucking standup meeting in 20 minutes - I can't even get started on this before that rolls around and interrupts me." And it it all the time afterwards where you have had a bunch of shit laid in your lap that you have to spend some time following up on and frigging around with before you can get back to the work you already had planned to do.
I do agree with it, because everywhere I've worked that does a daily standup does it wrong, and I think OA is more about those organisations.
For many old-fashioned companies, "doing agile" means waterfall + standups. Apparently that's all you need to reap that sweet agile-y goodness. The guy running the meeting doesn't enforce any structure, doesn't stop people rambling on for 10 minutes, doesn't try in any way to note or act on the points people raise. It's just about micro-management and cargo-cult development.
I'm sure with the right company a standup is a very useful tool. But wherever I've worked, it's been all about micro-management and a fundamental misunderstanding of what I actually need to do dev work (usually: a quiet office, no interruptions and time).
If you add up the time people have stopped working while waiting for the meeting, the time you take to gather people to a room, wait for the last one to arrive, start, go back, it's been 20 minutes total, and when standups derail and people start talking a lot it goes over half an hour.
You need to count the total overhead time. I mean come on, 10 minutes before the standup you are not really working full steam, right? You know you are about to have a meeting, so you are chatting with colleagues and checking email instead of working on your main tasks. That time should count too.
The comparison isn't between the benefits of a good standup and nothing, it's between a good standup and whatever productivity you lost by interrupting the entire team (same as any meeting). You need to make sure it's worth it.
Some colleagues don't 'work' at all between getting to work and standup (opting for soft tasks like email).
Wasting 15 minutes for 5 people a day costs the company almost 6 man-weeks a year, or really a week per person. Providing that week as PTO/leave would probably result in tangible productivity improvements.
But your job as a developer is to not have this happen. It’s nothing something that would be a nice to have, you’re supposed to always keep your team informed about potential gaps. The standup is designed to catch gaps but really that should be something you should already be doing.
This is my big problem with agile, scrum, and friends. It's like communism; it only works if you "do it correctly." Russia? China? Cuba? Yea, they didn't do it right, but if it's done right, it's really really great.
I have only ever read about agile and scrum being done correctly. Obviously, I'm just one person, and my experience is limited, but at every company have I ever worked at or consulted for, the practice of agile and scrum is very different than what I read about.
I have experienced the less than 10 minute standup maybe a dozen times ever. Not that there is usually much to talk about. "Yesterday I worked on on X. Today I will keep working on X."
But somehow enough people in one place just seems to create so much friction. There's always a tangent. A: "By the way, how long do you think until we finish X?" B: "I don't know. Kind of depends on Y and Z. I never did Y before." C: "Oh, I did Y before, it's easy, you'll have no difficulties" and on and on.
I can see two possibilities:
1) My experiences have been not been representative of the industry as a whole. On the whole, agile and scrum work well and are executed properly at most companies, but I've just had some bad luck.
2) My experiences are representative. In this case, agile/scrum is so difficult for the average company to pull off, that it's kind of a rare occurrence.
The fact that angst-ridden articles like this one are such a regular occurrence on HN kind of makes me suspect that it's #2, not #1.
I'm just an engineer, so project management is not my area of expertise, but my layman's opinion is that an actually good project management system should "fail gracefully," as it were. You shouldn't need a 1 in 1000 level PM to pull this stuff off.
Not a chance -- your experience mirrors mine over the course of the six or so companies that I've worked for. It's definitely #2.
They all fail in very similar ways: story points become hours/days; stand-ups devolve from status updates to daily team discussions; the backlog becomes irrelevant because new stories are created for each sprint; and, in companies which report velocity to senior management, story-point inflation.
Also, I've noticed that Agile transformations always create Agile zealots within the organization which seem to act to quell dissent. I'm not sure why this is, maybe the transformations are tied to bonuses or something, but it's a universal thing. There's always somebody running around telling you that you're team is Doing It Wrong when you bring up any legitimate criticisms of the process.
See:
> It's like communism; it only works if you "do it correctly."
Sometimes things go a bit too far, with people delving too deeply into whatever topic, with a sort of side-conversation starting. Yes, these people should "take it offline", and often after a minute or so of back and forth, they will, but it still happens often enough that it turns into a waste of most of the team's time. "Be more disciplined!", you say? Sure, ok, wave your magic wand and make that happen, please.
The counter-argument I usually hear to anyone who wants to get rid of standup goes something along the lines of: "but it's great to get everyone together once a day, and sometimes people will spontaneously learn of something that they have useful input for, and save someone some time". Ok, so you want to waste 10-20 minutes of my time on the off chance that someone might randomly have a useful contribution that wouldn't otherwise come up? No, pass.
And regardless, this sort of attitude is actively hostile toward remote members of the team, who may be in different time zones and can't reasonably participate.
If your team really needs daily status updates, create a "standup" channel for your team on Slack (or whatever you use), and have people do a once-a-day post in there. No deadline, just when they get to it. But even that just feels like micro-management.
that does not make sense. Just because you have a short sync meeting once a day, it does mean should should delay all work until then.
"Just because you have a short sync meeting once a day, it doesn't mean you should delay all work until then."
And yes, I totally agree! If you're blocked on something, you should raise it immediately, so you're not delaying all work until your next standup! If you do have other work to do, you should still raise the issue immediately, figure out who should own the blocker (if it's non-trivial, your manager will likely find ownership for you), and then move onto another task until the blocker is resolved. You gain nothing by waiting until the next day, and possibly exacerbate the problem if you do wait.
1) Aim to take 2-3 tasks, do not take more, take 1 if the task is large, but usually, it's a sign of an overblown story.
2) Every day at the end of the day, write a "current status" comment. These comments are visible in the master panel, and I could take action the next day to help developers resolve roadblocks, if the resolution is taking longer, they can work on other tasks they claimed.
This effectively eliminated the need for standups, the whole team could sync using task "current status" updates, and chime in with help or advice. I was able to see the progress and issues without forcing people into a mess of a video call, and everybody could still stick to their preferred schedules and have personal lives.
Standups as intended are too brief to discuss the important details. This is why they end up ballooning to 30+ minutes at most companies, because anything shorter is of little value.
They also end up as a catch-all meeting for any topics that require the team's input; I dislike this because people are expected to provide input on the spot without really making any thoughtful considerations. If we want to have a discussion on a UI component, that should be done in a dedicated, prepared meeting, not at 8:30 in the morning when people are unprepared and said developer can take advantage of unpreparedness to obtain the consensus they want.
When I provide up-stream status reports, I like to have the developer's notes in front of me for a quick refresher. Plus, they serve as a good reminder on topics that need followup.
Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them.
I even saw once a developer on his last day throwing the speaker's token (a teddy bear) to the trash can LOL!
Everyone on the teams I worked on seemed to think that standups where useless, this showed clearly through the team body language and tone in those meetings.
Its an interruption on your work just when you just got started in the morning, now you have to stop and go to a meeting.
What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other, and if you need help you ask it anyway on the spot, there is no need to wait for the next standup for that.
It's hard to come up with different things to say on the meetings, as there aren't many things that have changed since yesterday.
I think this is the key difference between teams that like stand-ups and teams that don't. In the teams I've worked in, our work was highly relevant to one another, so knowing daily where everyone was with their tasks is usually interesting to everyone.
There are of course many ways to run a productive team.
[1] https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum... - page 7
Small teams are better, but not always possible. Agile is about having team mechanics that make your specific team more productive and changing them as your team changes.
I will say, Scrum was really helpful for us, but only because we took "iterate on your process" seriously, and had a culture where teams could experiment with their process.
In the end we outgrew it, but Scrum helped us reach the point where we could do so.
It really shouldn't be much cognitive load to listen to what other people are working on for 10 minutes. If it is, it might mean the standup is running at the wrong level of abstraction or perhaps you aren't really a team that has a shared goal.
> If it is, it might mean the standup is running at the wrong level of abstraction or perhaps you aren't really a team that has a shared goal.
Or maybe the problems other people are working on will take more than 10 minutes for any reasonable input.
The nature of the work probably also helped because tasks took a long time so on any given day only a handful of the people would have substantive updates.
I find the team needs to be at most 6 people, otherwise you probably need to split the team for daily standups to work.
1. Everyone explicitly has the responsibility to say "this is going too deep, let's continue it outside of standup" when needed.
2. Having a timer visible that resets after each person's update. This makes it clear when one person's update is taking too long. We were able to get rid of the timer once we had the flow down.
Also, it's crucial that everyone on the team feels comfortable saying: "these standups aren't a good use of our time, let's make a change". That's how those techniques were introduced.
I've also worked at places where a 20 person standup took < 10 minutes and helpful b/c sometimes someone not on your team will know how to fix your blocker and just help you out afterwards.
I think as long as you have a standup czar or just post your updates to slack, then it's a super useful meeting. If it ever goes over 10 minutes then whoever is running it is just making everyone late for work.
Why does it depend on the size of your team? Teams involved in agile development (where they do the whole daily standup kerfuffle) are supposed to not get to 10+ people. That's like the third thing on the agile coach's slide.
Besides, why does it take a full-team standup to find out someone has expertise and ideas in an area that you didn't know about? Are the lead developers/managers sleeping at their desks? Guiding and bringing people together is one of the things they're paid for. They should know who's good at what, and steer the right people (or the right tasks) towards them. If they aren't doing their job, what the team needs is people who do, not one more thing that developers have to figure out on their own time.
As for brainstorming -- it shouldn't be unexpected in the first place. Not on a regular basis, anyway. If a developer needs that brainstorming session, they should have the means to make it happen, with only the interested people attending. If they need it, but don't know they need it -- especially common, and especially excusable for junior developers -- that's why we have lead developers and managers.
And meetings are not the only way to spread information! If a team has 10, 15 members or more and it's spreading information by word of mouth alone, whether 1:1 or in meetings, that's already a problem. At that point you should have things documented. New members should have an M that they can RTF and ask experienced team members about. If a team got to that size and the only way to spread information is in person, that's something they should remedy, not keep doing!
For a concrete example: if I track a performance problem down to a small part of an open-source piece of software, it isn't realistic for managers/lead developers to know if anyone on the team has experience with that piece of the software. But if I mention that in standup, it will immediately be clear if anyone has expertise that is valuable.
I've never seen a high performing team that didn't regularly have ad-hoc brainstorming sessions (i.e. you say what you are planning to do and someone says "have you considered this"). Like I said, there are many runs to run a productive team, but standup can be a good place to start that discussion.
Keeping track of people's skills and expertise is part of their job description. If they don't, how are they going to help them develop and steer their careers? Not knowing every single thing they've worked on is one thing, but knowing (as in your example) who is likely to have used that piece of software, or who has experience troubleshooting performance problems involving that piece of software's functionality, is definitely their responsibility.
> For a concrete example: if I track a performance problem down to a small part of an open-source piece of software, it isn't realistic for managers/lead developers to know if anyone on the team has experience with that piece of the software.
Certainly -- but that doesn't justify having a stand-up meeting every day. It's not realistic for managers/lead devs to know if anyone on the team experience with a particular piece of software, but it is realistic for them -- or for any developer, for that matter -- to be able to find that out without dragging everyone from their desks for half an hour or more.
In my experience, standup has almost no cost and is generally enjoyable - people typically like talking about what they are doing and getting thoughts/advice. But if your standups are "half an hour or more", they clearly don't have much in common with the standups I've done. I would propose that maybe the problem is your standups are poorly run, not that the concept itself is bad.
As for timing: if you have a 10- or 15-people team, allowing for even just two minutes per person -- which is barely enough to cover a non-trivial problem -- easily gets you to 20-30 minutes. It gets shorter if all updates are in the form of "no news is good news", but then the meeting could have just as easily been an email. It also gets shorter if the problems really are so trivial that fifteen people can describe all of them, and their solutions, in a couple of sentences, so that no one talks for more than 30 seconds -- but then are these problems really so big that you need to hold a meeting that everyone attends, every single day?
I don't think the concept itself is bad -- just that the arguments for efficiency aren't convincing when it comes to large teams. I doubt that you can really disseminate useful information in this format, and even if you could, there are way more efficient ways to do that.
Edit: If these meetings are held just to make sure all updates are given regularly, often, and in the open, with all the consequences this has (good ones, like everyone being on the same page, and bad ones, like opportunistic managers taking the chance to use this as a way to pressure their team), that's great, but let's be frank and admit it.
My company is blessedly stable, but for instance at my wife's employer, there are teams that have had 300% turnover in the two years she has been there.
I think this kind of endless short-term firefighting is part and parcel with the micromanagement that daily standups embody. When nobody actually has any experience, or built any trust over time, the whip lays on heavier to keep people in line and pulling in the same direction.
A real scottish standup is a few minutes -- 5 or 10 minutes. 15 max if there are lots of people and lots of things to cover.
How much useful stuff do you think a developer can fit in 20 seconds of speech -- which is about all they get if you want to fit a 15-people meeting in a ten-minute timeslot?
Once a team grows past a certain size, either you keep the discourse substantial -- and end up with 30-minute meetings -- or you cut everyone short, and end up with ten minutes of smiling and saying the right buzzwords.
1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What are you doing today?
3. Any blockers?
My rule of thumb for assessing a team is based on two simple questions: 1. Do people in the team work towards the same goal? 2. Do people in the team depend on each other? If the response to both questions is positive then by all means, have standups. In other cases, have a good look at whether it makes sense to call them a team in the first place.
They're unrelated tasks because there are no dependencies between them, and there is absolutely no reason why I should have to sit through bob talking about his day.
EDIT: Spelling.
And to clarify, I also find daily standups to be tedious and generally unhelpful. Once or twice a week seems to be the sweet spot (for me/my team).
Take ownership of the standup, don't just passively sit there and then complain afterwards what a waste of time it is.
If that is the case, then why are you even in the same scrum team? What you have there is not a team by the sounds of it.
If you're still working on the same issue, then just say that. Keep the standup short. Of course this can also be a good time to notice a lack of progress; if you're spending days on an issue with little progress, are you stuck? Was the story badly defined? There could be very good reasons why it's taking longer, but again, the standup is a great time to notice these things and check if there's a way to help the issue along.
I haven't ever felt this kind of pressure from management in my stand ups. We very rarely have anyone from management present anyway. The stand up exists for the benefit of the team, not management. It is not a status report for management.
I've been a bit of volunteer agile coaching in my area, and yeah, one example that always stuck with me was that the product managers and BAs just got renamed product owners, and they sat in every retro and attended every stand-up.
Funnily enough they were never available to the team during planning. They had important meetings on a Monday...
I tried to empathise to them that "stand-up and retro are solely for the team", but no dice. They still wanted that command and control.
While I would also like to do the daily status email, I see value in doing a synchronized standup. It helps planning for the day.
Not all people are great communicators and I’ve seen lots of developers spend days on tasks which should take 1 or 2 hours max. Standups highlight these issues, but you need to listen and go to these people in private to understand their problems. And you should absolutely take up people if they offer to help you.
I tend to bring pen and paper to remember what I wanted to say and to note when I here something that’s relevant to me.
Why not join the meetup with afterwork drinks? That way you can really say what blocked you ánd talk about the things that you'd do in a standup...
Mandatory after work 'fun' can be highly controversial.
That excludes certain segments of your workforce in ways that make HR sweat. Parents, alcoholics, people of faith... you've made attending the meetup more difficult.
Not my experience, teams of that size I’ve been on do standup in 10-15 minutes.
Did the scrum master not feel able to intercede? Protect the process etc.
At one job, the scrum master was an angry lesbian who used her minor role to browbeat me at every opportunity possibly because I'm part of the white, cis power structure or whatever. Talk about delusional! I'm no more privileged than anyone else, quite frankly. It was her and her "wife" (yeah, downvote away you stupid idiots--I have traditional beliefs about marriage, so sue me). Anyways, here SO was the HR director and so nobody could say a damn thing. Hope they go out of business, they deserve it.
Anyways, yeah, I haven't had a good experience with anyone titled "scrum master" at any point in the last decade and the latest few have been real gems.
I hope agile goes away completely. It has become nothing but another top down control mechanism to squeeze more work out of people who are already overworked. I fucking hate what it has become. There was a brief time when agile and agile practices were like a breath of fresh air. Now the slave drivers have taken it back for themselves.
He could not understand that "I had not trouble yesterday, and today I will keep going on my task" could be a useful update to the team. I mean, in general it isn't but when something unexpexcted happens you are supposed to say it, not something unique for every day. 90% of my dailies are basically: "I am still working on X, and its moving forward, continuing today".
Spot on. In many companies standup are used to put people on the spot and pressuring them to show progress and so on.
It's amazing how many people on HN don't realize that.
A chance to briefly set out any blockers you anticipate for tomorrow/stuff you will need from other people.
But just as important; an end of day marker 'we're done - piss off home now - no working late'.
Early enough for the 6-3 worker might be well before the end of the day for a lot of others.
So true. At the last company I worked, the daily standups became absurd. We were forced to use a physical board which was always out of synch with GitHub and we were just repeating the same stuff that we already knew everything about.
Also, we had scrum retrospectives in which the new scrum master was throwing a yellow ball at someone when it was their turn to talk. WTF?! Does management think our brains stopped growing after the age of 5? You have a room filled with potentially brilliant engineers and you're treating them like toddlers. Do they seriously think that this is the right way to build a company which will make an impact on society?
What the hell is wrong with managers these days? Is there some kind of virus going around which is turning them into idiots or is there a global conspiracy to only promote idiots into positions of power?
As others have said, when you're working on a team where there is significant interplay or varied, related experience, they're really useful. We work on an OS and have members of the team who happen to have experience using infra and tooling. There's no way you would necessarily know this without saying "Oh, I was struggling with this bit of stats collection infra" and somebody else says "Yeah, I worked on that on x project, y years ago. Let's chat after stand-up."
There are obviously other ways to seed this kind of thing, but brief stand-ups seem a good way of doing it.
The other thing that we tend to do is just say "Oh, I did x that doesn't really relate to the project yesterday, but that's not very interesting" and leave it at that.
If you can't find something to say for a minute about a day's worth of work then you probably need to be rethinking how you're spending your days.
It was a meeting for ourselves, not for management. There were no status reports to management, no gantt charts, no percentage estimates of completion, etc. Just: here's what I'm doing/not doing.
Fast forward a decade or two and I've seen good and bad use of this meeting form. But I still think it's a good idea, it just requires discipline to stop people from hogging air space or veering off into tangents.
That's my understanding of what a standup is supposed to be, and it's what my experience of them has been. THIS is useful. It's in particular useful if you have devs on the team who tend to get kinda "wound around the axle" on problems rather than speak up or seek help.
There will always be devs who think any meeting is by definition a waste of time, and you can't make those people happy, but a true brief standup meeting as described here is SUPER useful.
(Daily's probably too much though.)
Personally, when I lead a team, I keep abreast of what people are working on and ask them if they need help, or tell one of the more suited senior guys to offer a hand if it's an area I can't easily help in.
I imagine the standup helps more when you're lead is a non-technical scrum master guy who doesn't have much of a personal relationship with the team.
On the latter point I typically buy my team members fancy coffees and the occasional lunch, and it's easy to get on with them if you care about their careers, so I've never needed a standup.
Either way, I'm not so sure the statement means much. The point of agile is to do what's helps, so if a standup is useful for the above reasons, it's entirly possible that another approach solves the same problem, negating the need for the standup.
The manager has plenty of other ways to gather status updates and feedback as you note.
Your tone is slightly rude considering you're essentially agreeing with me.
You'll need to note the entire thread for the context of my discussion. I was specifically saying a good tech lead and other senior engineers can help engineers get unstuck without actually necessitating a standup.
For me, standups are fine if the team actually want to do them and find them useful, but 9 times out of 10 they're enforced by someone non-technical and require the entire team listen to people drone on justifying what they did yesterday.
Personally, I find the assumption that I can't communicate with fellow engineers without such a thing pretty insulting, but do understand that some of us do struggle with this thing, so it's different strokes for different folks.
But the key thing is that the daily standup is NOT a status report for management! That should not be its purpose! It is for the team members to sync with each other, not a daily report for task management.
But yes, in XP, the 'customer' or 'product owner' would not attend a daily standup. The purpose of the meeting was for developers to sync and maintain velocity and social and work cohesion.
Meeting with customer/PM was something that happened at the end or start of iteration.
Frankly, once things scale beyond that, where you have large teams of people disinterested in what's happening beyond their choice of specialization -- "agile" starts to not be a good match anymore.
> if you need help you ask it anyway on the spot, there is no need to wait for the next standup for that.
I thought part of the reasoning for standups was to synchronize your interruptions, so instead of breaking people's flow throughout the day, you can line up all the cross-cutting concerns at the beginning of the day.
Exactly this... I couldn't care less what dev-no-3 is working on since its not impacting me and I could bet no one cared much what I said except the scrum-master.
Are we talking adult employees here? :D Anyway, if I ever become employed, and will have to work on-site, I want the comfort token to be a stuffed baby gnu.
https://shop.fsf.org/gear/stuffed-baby-gnu
It sounds like a bigger a problem then standups; if everyone feels they are useless why is there no forum in which this meeting is being discussed and removed or recalibrated? It sounds like the team doesn't own their own process or doesn't talk to each other about process
If you need help or are block, you report that. Otherwise, no need for a "status update". It also helps that we do this in our eng-only channel, where no product/upper management are in, so only our team is privy to the information.
The one downside is that it can be a bit more difficult to get help on something highly important if everyone is tunnel-visioned. Luckily, we have a great engineering manager who helps orchestrate help in those situations or steps in personally if someone is blocked.
When I was a manager, I always found it to be far more effective to have team members apply psychological pressure to their peers, rather than apply pressure from the top down.
Standups are best avoided by managers. I never felt the need for yet another meeting. In fact, an excessive number meetings are one of the main reasons I got out of the management business.
It sounds like you are not a team in the sense of a coherent body creating added value, but a line organization mandated agglomeration of talent under a specific manager.
When actually working together quick stand ups make sense, but for individual contributors they add very little added value.
However, the only way to know if the dailys are unnecessary or not, is not how they feel like, but what happens when you remove them.
All coordination work feels unproductive. But after a specific complexity is reached coordinated efforts of communication are the only way in which a large body of talent can function in a sensible way together.
I don't mean to imply this is a panacea. "Doing Agile right" is one thing, but business is about more than software development, and an engineering-led organization can of course ignore financial or marketing realities.
But there's an expertise-for-the-job phenom going here. Managing software development is a skill. It requires "navigating ambiguity," that favorite phrase of managers. It requires being able to expect and roll with punches, and chart a new course---every few minutes to every few months, depending on the context.
I suspect the best thing would be for boards to take a more active interest in their company's SD activities. Bring the CTO in, figure out the tech landscape the company is confronting. "Giving devs more power" is probably a no-sell, but "boards taking software seriously" might fly. And when you do that, you unavoidably become the devs who already have power.
I know, a digression, sorry. But it's just night-and-day, the diff between technical and non-technical management.
> What did I work on yesterday? > What am I working on today? > What issues are blocking me?
At my job we have tickets on a physical board and we discuss them from right-to-left. There are magnets on the tickets with people's names on it and when you get to 'your' tickets you talk about what is happening with that ticket. This is a lot more concrete and relevant to the rest of the team.
At a previous company we went from person to person and they'd discuss what they were working on. This always struck me as a strictly personal accounting of their previous work day and I had a feeling that people felt like they had to boast or exaggerate what they were working on. It never felt relevant or interesting.
The infantilisation of developers seems to be common in larger organisations. It's extremely tiring.
The stupidity of terms like "tribes" and "squads", the endless gamification, the "open office to encourage communication", the discussion of "learnings" and other verbed nouns.
The only people that it suits are HR types that love that everyone can be seen to be working together and the management that save lots of money on real estate and infrastructure costs.
Sure, breaking down company silos is a Good Thing. Orienting people to work across disciplines and be focused on the customer is a Good Thing.
Inventing crap like standups (the Queen does them for Privy Council meetings, works for her), and titles like "scrum master" is just as bad as the "black belt 6 sigma" of the early 2000s and the other management fads.
What task moved yesterday? (handover?) What task is going to move today?
and the most important one: What is blocked? (Who can help to unblock?)
I can recommend this format for everybody.
While we use a formal issue tracker like Jira which handles approvals and estimates, from a project management perspective it's useful to have a summary email that is short enough for people to read and focused on business level issues.
"Today I worked on this" / "Next I plan to work on that." This helps clients to see exactly what we are working on. It avoids miscommunication where we think they told us to prioritize something different, or they thought they told us to stop work on something, or they think we are finished with something and we are not. Having an email every day lets them tell us to stop work immediately if we are doing the wrong thing, avoiding surprise invoices the next month. It avoids them claiming that they didn't know that we were working on something.
"Here are the problems I am having / things I need from you". This is very useful to keep track of delays caused by the client. This might be them needing to review and accept work, review specs, or pay their invoices. Issues stay on the report until they are resolved. It documents that we didn't get what we needed, so we can't be blamed for things being late.
On the other hand, I've had friends who have endured 30 minute standups every day for the past few months. I think they started sitting after the first few sessions.
Do work as a team of humans. Talk directly to your fellow team members. Using daily standups is a face-to-face way of syncing.
Don't work by sitting 10 hours in front of your screen and communicate only via chat channels.
My team don't do daily standups. They're pointless ceremony.
Yesterday I worked on… Yes we know. We can see the Trello card you worked on.
Today I am working on… Yes we know. We can see what you've currently assigned yourself on Trello.
I am blocked by… Why the hell are you waiting until now to bring this up?!
...because, as the author of the article notes, developers don't like interruptions.
You can't have it both ways - either you can have distraction-free work time so issues like blockers have to wait until the next scheduled communication time or you get distractions when important things happen. You can't reasonably state that people shouldn't interrupt you and they shouldn't wait until the next meeting to tell you stuff. Those things are opposed to each other.
You absolutely can, and we do it all the time.
You didn't interrupt me by replying to my comment here. If I was busy working on something, I wouldn't have read/replied to this right now.
If I am working on something, it's highly likely that I'll be finished and take a break to check what else is happening in the team well before a morning meeting the following day.
If something is truly time-critical and deserving of interruption, then its a moot point.