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You don’t need standups

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Re: You don’t need standups

#241

Post by closeparen »

tnolet wrote: post #171
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…

If you don’t want to explain or share, I don’t want you on my team.

I’m confident I can identify some interval at which you don’t want to explain or share, either. For example, every 30 seconds.

Explaining and sharing are important. The difference between micromanagement and management is, IMO, somewhere between daily and quarterly.

Re: You don’t need standups

#242

Post by taeric »

majormajor wrote: post #173
taeric wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the desire is more to have goals and work towards those. If you don't have daily goals, then having a daily standup is going to be pointless. That is, if I am working for weeks or months without making visible progress, but I have successfully delivered the last X things on time, why are you worried about what I look like? So, yes, people should grow into longer timelines that they can appear to be slacking o…

> That is, if I am working for weeks or months without making visible progress, but I have successfully delivered the last X things on time, why are you worried about what I look like? I'm not worried what the OP looks like, or generally what I look like for that matter, but they were worried what they look like . I just dispute the claim that standups are the root of their anxiety about that.

I think it is fair to think you will be measured with the same general yardsticks that your peers are measured by. So, if you are in a standup where others are giving daily task reports, it is natural to expect you should. And that if you are not, it is natural to feel something is amiss.

Re: You don’t need standups

#243

Post by closeparen »

brown9-2 wrote: post #201
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…

are you really on a team then?

A manager usually has several distinct projects in the air, with ICs working on them in groups of 1-3. Someone's work isn't relevant to you just because you report to the same manager. The "team" for standup, sprint planing, etc. is really several teams, each tuning out while the others speak. And because small groups can communicate fine informally, the relevant-seeming part of the team-level ritual is always a rehash of what the project staff already know.

Re: You don’t need standups

#244

Post by noddingham »

chomp wrote: post #63
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…

"working on bugs" is not a great update, it's opaque and doesn't help your team or your leader get a picture of what you're struggling with. "I tried this and this and measured this latency from the application and suspect it's a race condition, I checked this code and feel like I'm on the right track, and if someone wants to take a second set of eyes on my bug I would appreciate it" is a much much better update. Sta…

I agree with you. But I think the problem is that most people don't approach a problem like you explained in your first sentence. It's more, "I'll be googling and reading Stack Overflow for the answer and guessing until I find it". I think it's partially due to a lack of rigor that has crept into coding.

Re: You don’t need standups

#245

Post by somethingsimple »

losteric wrote: post #77
kolinko wrote: post #33

Earlier 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.

My team just does "asynchronous stand-ups" - share your status once day in a dedicated Slack channel, whenever you want. We do this on top of a good culture of asking for help and posting regular updates on our internal Sprint tracker, it works quite well.

Been advocating this for months at my company with no success. Our standup is of the worst kind: conference call.

Re: You don’t need standups

#246

Post by somethingsimple »

speby wrote: post #209
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…

"still workin' on those bugs" is really pretty useless. I'm not suggesting you're not a disciplined person but at some point, debugging something for days on end is a sign you may need some help, a fresh set of eyes, or come up for air and re-group. Same goes for feature development. If a single user story representing a whole feature (or part of a larger one) goes on and on and on, that's either a sign you perhaps r…

I wish everything was so simple.

At a past job a very technically strong coworker spent months on a problem and eventually threw the towel and handed it to me. It took me another couple months to find a reasonable solution to it.

Some problems are _really_ hard and no amount of help will get a dev to solve it faster.

Re: You don’t need standups

#247

Post by closeparen »

ben509 wrote: post #98
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…

I'm not sure how much that micro-managing aspect is peculiar to agile and how much is just inherent to working on a team. > It forces developers to share every mistake they make, it makes them share if they are thinking incorrectly about something, it makes them easily replaceable. That's absolutely the point of a team. Contrary to popular belief, a team is not a meritocracy[1], it's a mediocracy . The beautiful thin…

That sounds like hell. The sense of ownership, achievement, and subject matter expertise when driving projects from ideation to completion is everything I like about my job. Working on scattershot, atomized tickets from an assembly line would be awful.

Re: You don’t need standups

#248

Post by crispinb »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #214
crispinb wrote: post #89

I understand many writers are desperate for views, but I'm looking forward to this nasty spreading imperative title infection to die out (which it will, but not soon enough). "What you need to know about ..." ( you have no idea what my knowledge requirements are ) "You don't need ..." ( you won't know what I need until you find out something about me, dolt ). "Why you should ..." ( until you've at a minimum skimmed '…

Yes, but Kant was not incentivized to write in a certain way by some performance graph in Google Analytics.

Indeed. Our intellectual history definitely dodged a bullet there.

Re: You don’t need standups

#249

Post by duxup »

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…

As a n00b just getting into software development this might be a dumb question but does saying "Yup, still workin' on those bugs" really create a sense of blockage or such?

I gotta think that's kinda a common thing to be said and other devs would understand that that happens...

Re: You don’t need standups

#250

Post by merlincorey »

duxup wrote: post #249
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…

As a n00b just getting into software development this might be a dumb question but does saying "Yup, still workin' on those bugs" really create a sense of blockage or such? I gotta think that's kinda a common thing to be said and other devs would understand that that happens...

The problem is that product managers and management in general want features and don't care about technical debt.

So if you are working on a bug (fixing technical debt) then you are not working on a feature.

Also, working on features is often (but not always) more predictable in time estimation than working on bugs, which can be a completely exploratory task with the only endpoint being "it works now"...

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