I did, it worked beautifully but got Shot down by the Scrum Master :/.
They have to justify their employment somehow!
Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?
#12Working with a team that does this right now. Kinda hate it. It's too easy to spend a ton of time rewriting your response. There's a bot to help out - Asks you a set of questions and compiles and formats it nicely, and that only makes it worse.
Re: Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?
#13Works fine. People sometimes don't read what's in the slack channel, but it's not as if they always pay attention in the standup either.
Re: Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?
#14Yes. I introduced this with great success at my company. Every day a member of the dev team would post their standup to a dedicated slack channel.
It accomplished a number of things: people could make their own hours as long as they post sometime within 24 hours it didn't matter, it was persistent so people can search history (what was everyone doing on Friday), and commentable so those who need to get involved can start a thread on the post and schedule a meeting if need be for sync communication to follow up. It accomplishes everything of an in person standup, but is more efficient and respects people's time.
Re: Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?
#15Yes. Both times there was zero value in them. People won't read them.
Daily stand-ups provide zero value in my opinion, asynchronous or not. If one has a blocker then it should be raised to the team in slack/email as soon as you realize you need help from the team. Waiting until daily stand-up doesn't seem sensible to me.
Paying attention to conversations the team is having in slack, the ticket tracker and pull requests gives a much better sense of progress than stand-up in my experience.
So I have mixed feelings. For people who don't want to invest in paying attention to PRs and slack, synchronous stand-up seems to provide more value because they are forced to listen. Personally I'd rather not have stand-up, but if it's required then I'd rather do it asynchronously so it minimizes my time wasted.
Re: Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?
#16Working with a team that does this right now. Kinda hate it. It's too easy to spend a ton of time rewriting your response. There's a bot to help out - Asks you a set of questions and compiles and formats it nicely, and that only makes it worse.
I guess it depends on the person. I tend to waste time “rehearsing” what I will say in standup. (Yes, I know, you aren’t “supposed” to do this, but the alternative is that I might blank out on what I did the day before entirely.) Writing for me is faster and clearer.
Re: Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?
#17I have done that a few times and I feel the value drops to almost zero, or in some instances even negative, by doing this. Standups should be short hence do them standing with no digital screens around and team-size is optimally ~5. 30-60 secs per person probably. Writing a line on Slack spreads them out and takes away more focus IMHO. Many people will just ignore what is written in the Slack channel and you lose the…
Worked on a contract where we did async standups, and implemented that in our small company for a bit. Stakeholder (owner/president) really liked it.
I haven't worked at a company that did physical standups, but what I've heard over and over is that they tend to devolve into longer meetings, and even worse, into blame game sessions.
Re: Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?
#18I personally prefer it. I'm fairly detailed oriented, and honestly if I had to talk, I'm probably the guy who ends up taking more than my share of time (sorry folks).
With a text-based standup, I organize my thoughts, ping people who might find the update relevant (to bump it to their attention), and can follow up with a reply-in-thread option (for blockers and such).
Re: Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?
#19I personally prefer async, though as people here have pointed out it dissolves the sense of team cohesion.
Standups have taken a life of their own as each company adopted the agile paradigm. - Replaced weekly status reports - purely individual status oriented instead of taking the form of a team huddle to remove obstacles - Blockers are usually outside of the team doing the standup so it usually goes something like this “I have a blocker with certain microservice, I will/ have reached out to the other team and waiting to hear back”. This doesn’t solve any problem nor the team can do anything to unblock. So a rep from the team has to attend a meta standup to blurt out the blocker
Re: Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?
#20My team does async standups in a slack channel and it’s much better than the synchronous meeting for certain.