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Daily standups should be async

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Re: Daily standups should be async

#41

Post by jeffbee »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #31

In my opinion, standups are useless - asynchronous or not. Waiting until the next standup to resolve blockers is clearly not efficient. What I've observed during standups is mostly people staring at the void waiting their turn and a few obnoxious nerds trying to bullshit their way up the hierarchy by talking way too much for their own good. The best communication I've seen was during brainstorm meetings.

Standups ensure your team cannot achieve anything meaningful. Imagine having a standup at the caltech physics department with Feynman et al. "What did you do since yesterday, Dick?" "Well I sat at my desk and pondered the nature of matter." "Anything blocking you?" "We don't understand the nature of matter." "What are you going to do today?" "Go down to the titty bar and ponder the nature of matter".

Re: Daily standups should be async

#42

Post by city41 »

Our stand up is a daily thread in slack. Totally painless and useful. Very often they lead to better collaboration and cutting off duplicate work before it really starts. FWIW I work on a small team at a very large company. Possibly that’s the sweet spot for stand ups like this. As typically someone on our team will make someone else aware of work another team has done we can leverage.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#43

Post by BeetleB »

jmondi wrote: post #33
ohduran wrote: post #5

The whole purpose of daily standups is to be short, to the point, and force developers to discuss blockers. That can't be async, because I need the other members of the team to answer. The issue the author is addressing is that for some, this is wasted time. But a) that's why these meetings are short, thus the standing up part, and b) Usually it isn't but an opportunity for more seniors to chime in with suggestions.…

Am I the only one who raises a flag immediately when there is a blocker? Why would I wait until the next day?

> Am I the only one who raises a flag immediately when there is a blocker? Why would I wait until the next day?

You can.

Saying it in the standup is a formal way of putting the burden on the team. Like "I'm blocked by this. I sent out an email yesterday but no one helped." is useful.

And when you have a scrum master external to the team, it's his responsibility to ask on the next day "X was blocked by this yesterday. Did anyone help?" If no one did, there will be a discussion on why not.

As others have mentioned, it only really works if people are motivated to listen during the standup. If they're not, the team is dysfunctional anyway (regardless of whether you have a standup or not).

Also, it's fairly useless if people are working on fairly different things.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#44

Post by mdu96 »

ohduran wrote: post #5

The whole purpose of daily standups is to be short, to the point, and force developers to discuss blockers. That can't be async, because I need the other members of the team to answer. The issue the author is addressing is that for some, this is wasted time. But a) that's why these meetings are short, thus the standing up part, and b) Usually it isn't but an opportunity for more seniors to chime in with suggestions.…

Blockers usually take longer than ~15 minutes to discuss & resolve, though, and because those discussions are definitely not relevant for the rest of the group, they're not meant to be had in the standup. Instead, we think blockers should be discussed and resolved as they happen, instead of waiting for the standup the next day to report on them.

and point taken on the "here's why"!

Re: Daily standups should be async

#45

Post by nogabebop23 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #37
hyperpape wrote: post #6

I think if your standup can be async, then it's ineffective, and you should get rid of it. And to be clear, that's fine! Not every team needs standups. The only value in a standup is when team members actually share ideas about what they're working on. The detailed conversation happens outside the standup, but the purpose of the standup is just to get that moment of "I know about that, let's talk". In that case, havi…

> I think if your standup can be async, then it's ineffective, and you should get rid of it. I agree, with one caveat: If you tell engineers that standups can go async or be cancelled if they're ineffective, they will find creative ways to make the standups ineffective. Poorly run standups are bad. Standups where the engineers are half-engaged are bad. But having a well-run standup that synchronizes the team, spreads…

>> having a well-run standup that synchronizes the team

and this is (I believe) the point of stand-ups. Doing this "async" seems at best weird/hard and at worst impossible.

The original post is for a prduct selling async status reporting, which is realy not what stand-ups should be about.

If you want to have a daily status report, by all means do it remotely or async or whatever works best. If you want to synchronize the team, well the most obvious and effective way is to actually bring them together in the same temporal space (remote or otherwise). You don't need to do this for problem unblocking or status updates, but don't tell me you're doing a distributed async status update as a method of team synchronization.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#46

Post by alexbanks »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #40
_t0du wrote: post #7

In my experience, async standups mean everyone posts their status and does not read any other status. Counterpoint: In my experience, at synchronous standups, people totally ignore everyone until its their time to speak, and then share an update, and then go back to not listening.

> In my experience, async standups mean everyone posts their status and does not read any other status. That has been my experience, too. Going async sends a message that people don't need to care about what their team members are working on. That's a dream come true for the people who just want to pull Jira tickets out of the queue, finish them in isolation, and then collect a paycheck. However, it doesn't make for…

I'm _very_ disillusioned by blaming lots of software process as a bailout for bad devs. I dislike most software process (agile), but I think some of the processes defined by agile are mostly just branded common sense.

Talk to your team. Give a shit about what they're doing. Care about your work. Care about your project.

Sometimes heavily scrutinized, reasonable process doesn't need to be modified. Sometimes the devs do.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#47

Post by mdu96 »

lukey_q wrote: post #12

I totally agree with the idea that teams should remove blockers as they come up. If someone on my team runs into a blocker 10 minutes after the standup, I hope for everyone's sake that they don't wait until tomorrow's standup to say something, if only because being blocked for a whole day is not really what you'd call "morale boosting". I'm not a huge fan of in-person standups, but if you're going to do them really m…

yeah that's a really great point -- how standups are most useful when the people in them are working closely together, and especially not useful when the people aren't working closely together (e.g. like you and the salesperson).

Re: Daily standups should be async

#49

Post by nogabebop23 »

JJMcJ wrote: post #35

I have yet to be in a standup where I felt safe admitting I was blocked. The manager and project manager are there to glare at anyone who isn't "maintaining velocity".

People will jump down your throat: "well, you're not doing it right!" but what you're stating is a true and hard problem that's deeper than any process can address.

About the only actionable advice I can offer is (a) admit to being blocked async in real time and then (b) use your standup to escalate and highlight where you are still blocked: "as I indicated in my chat/email yesterday I'm having trouble with xyz..."

If even this is unacceptable you're essentially on a team where you are not comfortable or not allowed to ask for help. I'd evaluate the former to make sure it's not your fear of asking for help, and if it's the later, run.

You either need to affect the change you desire or go somewhere this sort of behaviour is not tolerated. If you can't or won't push for allowing people to ask for help, either live with this disfunction or quit.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#50

Post by zachware »

One thing I always find frustrating about posts like this is that they identify a problem but make no attempt to help articulate a path to a solution.

It's reasonable to suggest standups and other meetings be async. What would be better is to take the time to design a proposed solution for solving the problem standups solve, even if it ends up being a messy or bad one.

That's a much more effective way to complain about a problem than simply spending words trying to convince people that something is bad.

Offer an alternative. Create debate. Put in the work to solve it.

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