I'm so in alignment with this. I've always hated standups. As a night owl, it's a morning meeting I have to make every single day and I hate it. I also don't understand how I can't just communicate in Slack to say "hey this is what I'm working on, this is what I worked on. Here are the questions I have." And move on. And if the PM prioritizes the backlog, always pick from the top just makes sense. And yes, retros feel like a place for extroverts to own the conversation (and I know, I'm an extrovert).
You don’t need standups
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Re: You don’t need standups
#52This article flies in the face of everything. I love articles that fly in the face of everything.
Re: You don’t need standups
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Could you please elaborate? 'Bull-fucking-shit' was literally the first word in your comment.
And? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=&query=bull-fucking-shit&sort=byPo...
If dang asks you to do something politely, there's a good reason for it.
You can find out more about him here: https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac...
Re: You don’t need standups
#54I always upvote these things, not because they're right. Because they show common misunderstandings about Agile. Agile is so simple and easy that the development community continues to screw it up. It's important to understand how. According to the author, standups are something companies require developers to do to report about what they're doing. Many times they can take more than a half hour. That may be true, but…
The only useful result of standups that I ever saw consistently was when people spoke up about tasks they were blocked on, and cross-team collaboration allowed a pathway towards a solution to be established more quickly and smoothly than if the exchange had occurred over email or Slack.
Aside from that, the only purpose of a stand up that I experienced was to posture ones self and otherwise waste company time.
Re: You don’t need standups
#55One thing I don't like about standups is that they can create a false sense of either blockage or someone being ineffective at their job. For instance, there have been many times where I've worked on a task or a set or related tasks for weeks or months, simply because the tasks required a lot of forethought and careful planning. There were times I somewhat dreaded standups because I knew that I'd say that I'm doing t…
For instance, there have been many times where I've worked on a task or a set or related tasks for weeks or months, simply because the tasks required a lot of forethought and careful planning.
That would raise immediate, massive, flashing red alarm bells in my teams!
I understand that different environments have different requirements, and different teams have different needs though.
Re: You don’t need standups
#56A team where the Engineering Lead(or any kind of manager) thinks that you don't need retros because there are no problems is exactly the kind of team that needs retros.
My experience is that most retros result in a list of things that should get addressed but never get addressed. Especially because they must be addressed by larger organizational changes once the low hanging fruit has been addressed, In teams where we actually addressed these issues we ran out of things to say in the retro after a few times.
Things being recognised and never/rarely acted on is better than them going unrecognised entirely. At least in the former scenario, there's a shared awareness of the problem.
Re: You don’t need standups
#57One thing I don't like about standups is that they can create a false sense of either blockage or someone being ineffective at their job. For instance, there have been many times where I've worked on a task or a set or related tasks for weeks or months, simply because the tasks required a lot of forethought and careful planning. There were times I somewhat dreaded standups because I knew that I'd say that I'm doing t…
>>In fact, all I like about standups is seeing my team mates once a day. Yeah, I think a better way to do standups is a couple minutes of social time, and "anybody finish anything? any blockers?" rather than going person-by-person.
rather than going person-by-person.
Better still for us has been going task-by-task rather than person-by-person. Look at everything which is in progress, get a quick update on it, move on. Five minutes tops, everybody is up-to-date, issues flagged.
Re: You don’t need standups
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides that, I hate that they took me out of rhytm of work. If a standup is at 10am, and I arrive at 9am to do dev work, there is very little I can do before being interrupted - I need at least 2-4h of interrupted time to do some good work.
Standup just before lunch might work better. That’s my experience.
In my team, we have it early in the morning, so we can overlap with India. Folks in US have rest of their day for work, whereas folks in India do the standup at the end of the day just before going home.
Re: You don’t need standups
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides that, I hate that they took me out of rhytm of work. If a standup is at 10am, and I arrive at 9am to do dev work, there is very little I can do before being interrupted - I need at least 2-4h of interrupted time to do some good work.
Standup just before lunch might work better. That’s my experience.
It works very poorly in practice, in my experience.
You interrupt people 2-4 hours into their work, which is highly disruptive for those who get the most done in the morning.
Often discussions run on past many peoples' lunch time, which can make people cranky and occasionally leads to tense exchanges which might have been more amicable if people weren't hangry.
You wind up with people melding the work they did during the previous day and the current day. It gets difficult to keep track of what you did between two days' midpoints compared to what you did during a day.
And things get worse as more items are inevitably added to the standup meetings (now we need to check on tests, now we need to add a review of open tickets, now we need to involve people from other teams, etc).
In my experience, pre-lunch scrums result in heavy disruption and a bunch of people who feel like they could be doing other things to much greater effect.
Re: You don’t need standups
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>In fact, all I like about standups is seeing my team mates once a day. Yeah, I think a better way to do standups is a couple minutes of social time, and "anybody finish anything? any blockers?" rather than going person-by-person.
I've run my team's stand-ups for several years now. I find without going person by person there is less communication. I still restrict each person's comments to blockers and their agenda for the time until the next standup (not daily). It's not uncommon for "no blockers, tickets X, Y, Z for next day or two" to be it for a report. It's not common but occasionally this will remind someone else of a blocker they have w…
Agreed with this. I'm actually curious what level of engineers Jason is leading. If it's a group of senior engineers, I'd imagine everyone already knows what's expected of them, but a group of junior engineers might be a different story.