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You don’t need standups

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Re: You don’t need standups

#231

Post by KZeillmann »

dudeofea wrote: post #227
some_account wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I don't want a team mate to look at something I'm working on? What if I just want to focus on building, not explaining and sharing? The current trend of "agile" is just another form of micro management. It's not good for the programmers at all, it's only good for product owners and team leads who are coordinating resources. Because it's micro management. We just call it something else now. It forces developer…

Screw these other commenters saying you're a stubborn introvert. If I had a company, I would hire you. I have the same view. Micro management erodes trust, which deskills programmers. If you know the exact bounds of what a programmer that you hired can do, then they can never do anything exceptional. I understand large companies need reliable workers because they are working on cornering their market, but for startup…

It's not micromanagement. It's working as a team. I don't really understand what you're saying. Sometimes programmers are proud and don't want to seek out help. They'd rather spin their wheels trying to debug something than stoop to asking someone else for help. It's dumb but it happens.

Re: You don’t need standups

#232

Post by badminton1 »

Let's say you have 2 developers:

- developer A wants to get promoted as quickly as possible. developer A will try to "ship" as many features as possible.

- developer B wants features to actually work, not just be "shipped". developer B volunteers to fix the problems developer A created by rushing to close as many tickets as possible.

Now, guess which developer contributes more to the team "velocity"? developer A. But in reality, developer A is just gaming the system and making everyone else slower. This is how agile distorts development.

Using velocity as KPI is the same as evaluating leaflet distributors by amount of leaflets distributed. Some will just throw them away in the garbage and claim their money.

Re: You don’t need standups

#233

Post by refoundglory »

scribu wrote: post #186
jrs235 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If a clear majority of the audience isn't interested in your status then you're just burning hours. From my understanding stand ups are not supposed to be status reports. They tend to turn into them though as it seems the most common format is 1) what did you work on yesterday, 2) what are you working on today, 3) what's blocking you? I prefer daily stand ups (near the onset of the day) for small teams to be 1) what…

> what's our goal for today? The same as it was yesterday or whenever the last planning session happened. Like TFA said, the team, as a whole, shouldn’t be changing priorities like socks.

If your goal for the sprint is "build widget" then your goal for the day should be "build part 3". You don't change priorities each day, you change how far along you are and where you expect to get to.

Re: You don’t need standups

#234

Post by KZeillmann »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

I 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…

It's so true. So many people think "Agile is bad because my company does ineffective standups". That's not what Agile is! Agile is about continuous improvement.

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

It's pretty simple but somehow people confuse this and Scrum (with bad scrummasters) and blame Agile for what's actually ineffective leadership

Re: You don’t need standups

#235

Post by KZeillmann »

mattmanser wrote: post #210
tejaswiy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just bullshit though. I don't find value in anything that agile offers, can I just throw it out entirely by your argument? Standups - You can simply claim that, hey you don't want to do standups, don't do standups but if you take a concrete implementation of Agile, say scrum for instance, it specifically asks each person in the team to answer: "What did I do yesterday that helped the development team meet the…

If you read the agile manifesto and then you look at scrum, it feels as if scrum has nothing to do with agile. It seems to breaks every rule. Scrum is processes and tools over individuals and interactions, by its very nature. Scrum is comprehensive documentation over working software, because you have to map everything out. Scrum is contract negotiation over customer collaboration, by allowing management to effective…

Scrum is all about implementing a system and then adapting it over time to fit your needs. It's all about having the team figure out for itself how to organize. It's not a rigid set of requirements. It's a set of suggestions about how to begin implementing the system, and then trusting the team to figure out what to adapt and what to cut.

Re: You don’t need standups

#236

Post by cyrux004 »

kolinko wrote: post #33
ravenstine wrote: post #28

One 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…

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.

We have it right before lunch

Re: You don’t need standups

#237

Post by adrianmonk »

> I wanted the team to know I trusted them.

This can be very powerful. People will often rise (or sink) to the level corresponding to how much you show you believe in them.

Imagine you hand someone the reigns and say, "Here, take over this for me. I know you're going to do a good job." And you sincerely mean it because you've bothered to understand them well enough to know that they can. In a lot of cases, you'll be amazed at what they will accomplish. They may even be amazed too.

Often, forming good, healthy relationships and building people up is what's really effective at getting people to get stuff done. So many of the other things people do (endless status reports, procedures and methodologies du jour, applying pressure or creating fear, etc.) are really just bandaids to attempt to force productivity to happen when it's really not happening because the basics haven't been covered.

Re: You don’t need standups

#238

Post by ulkesh »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

I 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…

In my experience, at least at bigger companies, standups are there to justify the project manager’s job. It’s for them to tally that everyone is doing their work. Simply, they see that the team wishes to meet for development purposes and it gets co-opted into a status meeting.

I find that small business gets it right more often because there is simply less bureaucracy and developers are much more trusted.

Re: You don’t need standups

#239

Post by closeparen »

majormajor wrote: post #175
some_account wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I don't want a team mate to look at something I'm working on? What if I just want to focus on building, not explaining and sharing? The current trend of "agile" is just another form of micro management. It's not good for the programmers at all, it's only good for product owners and team leads who are coordinating resources. Because it's micro management. We just call it something else now. It forces developer…

Do you care how useful the thing you're building is for the people you're building it for? How well it fits in with what other people on the team are building? If any of your teammates have ideas that could be helpful, or have learned things that might be of interest to you? I've often been the guy who comes in to help untangle a messy code base, and an entrenched "just let me build shit" attitude appears to be a chi…

If daily standup has any role whatsoever in those questions, your process is horrifically broken.

Re: You don’t need standups

#240

Post by badminton1 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #5

Bull-fucking-shit; you know why Spotify's engineering team does well? Stripe's? Netflix's? Because they have money , they have money so they can buy the best engineers. You ever see a small business development team compete on their level that isn't a bespoke design firm? In my world, my team isn't an olympic-performing high-end software engineering pack. They don't lead in particular subfields in FOSS in their spare…

If you think this, their only actual plan will be to leave the company as soon as the opportunity arises.
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