Yes, I agree. We just post our stand up to a slack channel. I think it's worthwhile process. It doesn't take very much effort, and it keeps everyone loosely in the loop.
Daily standups should be async
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Re: Daily standups should be async
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think it's more frequently a bailout for bad management. Either because a manager sucks, or a team can't self manage.
Maybe I'm taking "Bad management" to literally mean "Bad managers", when people mean "the process of management"? Is a team that cannot self manage not (for software teams) a dev problem?
Re: Daily standups should be async
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. Obviously if they're async we should please stop calling them "standups" but they can still fulfill some of the goals of a standup. You want a way to voice your status, hear other's statuses, hear blockers, and reduce duplicated effort. You can do all this with short, daily, async updates. The synchronous fashion of the standup is mostly a factor of verbal communication, not a feature. Standups are usuall…
> Forcing the team to pay attention is probably harder in an async conversation chain than a meeting but I don't think ineffective is correct. I think this is a feature. If people aren't paying attention to asynchronous information, there's a problem. Either the information isn't useful or the team isn't functional.
It might fall under "non-functional team" but active listening/reading of usually banal but sometimes critical information is simply not an easy thing to do in a routine format. The information in a standup is team-wide because you do not know what will be important to who. It takes some amount of skill and discipline from the team.
Re: Daily standups should be async
#74async is not great for productive teams.
Re: Daily standups should be async
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Forcing the team to pay attention is probably harder in an async conversation chain than a meeting but I don't think ineffective is correct. I think this is a feature. If people aren't paying attention to asynchronous information, there's a problem. Either the information isn't useful or the team isn't functional.
It might fall under "non-functional team" but active listening/reading of usually banal but sometimes critical information is simply not an easy thing to do in a routine format. The information in a standup is team-wide because you do not know what will be important to who. It takes some amount of skill and discipline from the team.
We 1000% agree on this, but it's still fun to talk about.
I think that's just low signal to noise. It definitely takes skill and discipline, but it's also a matter of improving habits. Standups were originally a "better habit". There's a cost, though, especially as teams are more distributed (and diverse).
Re: Daily standups should be async
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's more frequently a bailout for bad management. Either because a manager sucks, or a team can't self manage.
Maybe I'm taking "Bad management" to literally mean "Bad managers", when people mean "the process of management"? Is a team that cannot self manage not (for software teams) a dev problem?
I definitely mean "the process of management". A team that can't self manage is just a bad team. You can have a lot of great people on a bad team, so I don't think it's exactly a dev problem. It's a "whoever puts teams together" problem.
There are lots of people who benefit from a named manager. Expecting people to self manage who don't really want to is as bad as micro managing people. I know because I f'd this up at least 3 times building my last company. ;)
Re: Daily standups should be async
#77In 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.
>Waiting until the next standup to resolve blockers is clearly not efficient.
Yeah, don't do that. Standups are for teamwide information exchange to surface unknown unknowns. If you have a blocker and you can start unblocking it, don't wait.
Re: Daily standups should be async
#78The 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.…
>That can't be async, because I need the other members of the team to answer.
Why can't the answer be async?
Re: Daily standups should be async
#79My team has been testing out a hybrid of the two-- we use a slackbot to gather our answers to the three questions before standup begins. Then we use the meeting time to discuss anything that might have come up as a result of the slack posts.
We've really liked it so far. It cuts out a lot of the bad parts of synchronous standup like trying to remember what you did yesterday on the spot, but still leaves us with the opportunity to share ideas in depth when it makes sense.
I think completely going to an async standup right now wouldn't be good at all for our team dynamic. With the whole team remote, standup is the one time a day we're all on a call together. There's a lot of value that comes out of that even if it's inefficient at times.
Re: Daily standups should be async
#80I 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…
it depends. mostly on team size and workstreams. when the team is working at different unrelated things the standup is near to useless and it's used only to micromanage people. if you are a close-knit team working on the same workstream/feature then yes is beneficial even then in my experience daily standups are overkill. most of the time bi-weekly is more than enough