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Daily standups should be async

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Re: Daily standups should be async

#91

Post by kostarelo »

I read a lot of comments say standups are for developers to discuss, for developers to raise blockers, etc.

In my experience, standups are not only for developers. In my current environment, there is always the product manager of the team who is usually updating us with the information he got from the upper levers of the company. There are also QA testers that discuss their progress. We keep it freakishly short. ~15mins for a team of 10.

While I do find my self looking at the void sometimes, other times I'm forcing my self to pay attention to everyone and to be as helpful as possible. What everyone does that, is what makes a team get it right.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#92

Post by tspike »

the_other wrote: post #83
jeffbee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

That’s not how you do stand-up. It should more like: I’m struggling to imagine how so-and-so particle gets the energy to reach the next quantum state. Anyone want to share a blackboard? This is gonna take us about six pots of coffee to solve I reckon.

Next day: well, I drank too much coffee, and I'm burned out on socializing from brainstorming all day. I still don't know how so-and-so particle gets the energy to reach the next quantum state, and honestly I just want my coworkers to shut the fuck up for a few days so I can focus.

Boss: Mr. Feynman, can I see you in my office?

Re: Daily standups should be async

#93

Post by schoolornot »

high_derivative wrote: post #56

You know who likes standups? Program managers, project managers, and useless middle-managers. What do they have in common? They get to exercise power and justify their existence through calling extra meetings like new project-specific standups. Who hates standups? Everyone else, basically. Really makes you think..

Yes, in my 10 year career I've so far encountered 0 competent "agile coaches" and two solid project managers. What made them solid? Their ability to put forth a minimal amount of effort to understand the work and actively remove political BS that prevented projects from being completed. Besides them two, I find the Technical PM field to be a colossal waste. During most meetings I often think, "Why do we pay this guy 100k to manage a Jira board and play planning poker? Where is he when I need him?"

A wise colleague reminded me of this quote: "There's two kinds of people in this world when you boil it all down. You got your talkers and you got your doers. Most people are just talkers, all they do is talk. But when it is all said and done, it's the doers that change this world." Unfortunately, in this COVID age where Zoom after Zoom is accepted and everyone wants to "show their face" as to not get laid off, it's now prime time for the talkers.

Every time I'm involved in a stand-up I feel everyone is pressured to blurt out randomness. Why not allow people to collect their thoughts for the week ahead and put it on paper/Slack/IRC?

Re: Daily standups should be async

#94

Post by mdtusz »

the_other wrote: post #83
jeffbee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

That’s not how you do stand-up. It should more like: I’m struggling to imagine how so-and-so particle gets the energy to reach the next quantum state. Anyone want to share a blackboard? This is gonna take us about six pots of coffee to solve I reckon.

I agree with what you've written, but this isn't an argument for stand-ups.

What you're advocating for is regular communication, and people being involved in each other's work. Stand-ups c_an_ help with this, but they aren't the only solution, and in my view, are one of the less effective solutions.

Open, unstructured conversion has always been a better way to solve problems and move things forwards in my experience, and stand-ups entirely kill that by having an orthogonal purpose in the eyes of the manager (unless they're in the trenches doing the same work everyone else is, which is rarely the case).

Let your developers have their own standups however they want to do them. Make sure they do meet and discuss, but stay out of it if you're not right there with them helping to solve the problems.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#95

Post by tspike »

jayd16 wrote: post #78
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.…

>That can't be async, because I need the other members of the team to answer. Why can't the answer be async?

yeah, I don't get it. If you need someone's attention, make it your task to get their attention. In my experience, I'm rarely blocked by someone else on my team, so saying I'm blocked in standup is like complaining about work at the bar- maybe it feels good but it's kinda useless.

So maybe there's a scrum master who then takes my "I'm blocked" thing to whomever is blocking me. But... why can't I just ping the person blocking me and escalate as needed?

The whole thing just feels like corporate babysitting to me.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#96

Post by dragonwriter »

jeffbee wrote: post #41
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".

> Standups ensure your team cannot achieve anything meaningful

Stand-ups done as status meetings rather than as meetings to plan collaboration to resolve issues do that. Unfortunately, Cargo Cult Agile, focussing on ritualistic implementation of the ceremonies of methodologies like Scrum rather than Agile principles, tends very strongly to that kind of standup.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#97

Post by [deleted] »

karatestomp wrote: post #61
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. What the hell? Have you actually seen this happen? I can't imagine someone jettisoning something that makes their work-life easier and is an extremely low time commitment, just because you tell them they can. I can imagine them changing it to something else if that'…

[deleted]

Re: Daily standups should be async

#98

Post by the-pigeon »

What?

> In reality, there's actually no space in the standup to dive deeper into actual issues.

I've never heard of a standup without a parking lot. The entire point of parking lot (and the main value of standup) is to discuss issues with the entire team engaged.

> In fact, the best teams actually unblock problems as they come up, instead of waiting for a regularly scheduled standup to report on a blocker.

So, instead of having a scheduled time when everyone is available. You want to make decisions disrupting everyone in the middle of their day and not having their full focus?

Re: Daily standups should be async

#99

Post by overgard »

I always think the argument that it should be used to resolve "blockers" is weird. As a professional, you need to be able to resolve "blockers" on your own -- you have to track down people and work with them, it's not always the PMs job. In all my years of experience if I was dealing with a "blocker", then either everyone involved already knew about it way ahead of the standup, or I didn't think the standup was a good way to resolve it.

So really the daily standup is about progress reports. Which is totally fine, but, yeah, async is just as effective.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#100

Post by [deleted] »

_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.

[deleted]
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