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Daily standups should be async

cadencework.com

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Re: Daily standups should be async

#101

Post by the-pigeon »

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..

I love standups.

Been doing them for over a decade as a developer and lead developer.

But a lot of people make the mistake of following someone's specific "agile" or whatever system for them. Every team is different and should evolve their processes around what works for that particular team.

For me standup accomplishes a lot of great things.

- Let's everyone know what everyone else is doing. Which let's us identify if two of us are working in the same area of code and address how to do so without creating painful merges.

- Let's you know if someone is struggling to complete their work so you can figure out how to address (pair program, training, eliminating distractions for them, etc.)

- Parking lot gives everyone on a team a daily time that everyone else will listen to them and think about their problem or idea.

And my current team does our retros, planning, and any other meeting we can fit in immediately after standup. This compresses our meeting time down since having a bunch of scattered meetings is too disruptive for programmers as they need uninterrupted blocks of time to code during.

This is entirely against the traditional spirit of standup but it works great for my team.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#102

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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'…

> What the hell? Have you actually seen this happen?

Yes, this is from personal experience.

> 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.

Look at it from a different angle: If you tell people you're thinking about replacing standups with something more efficient, you've tipped your hand that the current situation might be inefficient. Suddenly, people lose interest in participating in the status quo because even management doesn't believe it works, so the quality of preparation and engagement goes down. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where the standups become more and more useless over time.

On a similar topic: I worked in a department that tried to adopt a version of Elon Musk's famous "If you're not adding value, walk out of a meeting" rule. The people who hated meetings made it a point to not add any value in meetings, so they could get up and leave as soon as possible. This forced everyone else to have followup 1:1s with the people who walked out so they could be essentially re-capture their required meeting participation.

> Again, this makes no sense unless from their perspective it already is bad and they just need to convince you it is, too.

Two different topics. People can still dislike standups even if they're helpful.

A lot employees are drawn to work concepts that reduce their workload at the expense of their manager's. It's less efficient to make a manager play a game of telephone to spread information around than it is to get everyone together for a 15-minute standup, but if someone thinks they can reclaim those 15 minutes and force their manager to bring them any relevant info, it's a net win. In the real world, this becomes an inefficient and lossy system, but it sounds good if all you see is an extra 15 minutes saved in your day.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#105

Post by PragmaticPulp »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #45
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…

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

Exactly. Once you've reduced standups to async individual reports, you lose the team communication benefits.

In my experience: Once you lose the team communication benefits, people give it even less thought and energy, so the value continues to decline until the concept is abandoned altogether.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#106

Post by hogu »

We’re a team of 10 and we’ve also found that Cadence replaces our need for stand up meetings. In general, I’ve found that trusting my team to get their work done and unblock themselves has resulted in fewer synchronous meetings

Re: Daily standups should be async

#107

Post by temac »

protonimitate wrote: post #24
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…

Agreed. Async stand ups are an agile smell. If you can successfully get unblocked async over slack/email/whatever, there isn't a need a for standups. That just means you have a functioning line of communication for your team. Stand ups should solve the problem of "I need to get unblocked and I can't get my teams attention effectively". If async "standups" solve that, great. But it's not a one size fits all solution,…

> Stand ups should solve the problem of "I need to get unblocked and I can't get my teams attention effectively".

That's an interesting claim, but has it be proven or even seriously studied? I have an extremely hard time with open meetings talking without any depth about various subjects which I don't care about 90% of them; it might make me space out and at risk of missing the parts that I could actually be interested in or contribute. Plus this cultivate the importance of oral transmission, with informations easily lost and inaccessible for people unable to participate for various reasons. Maybe a good structured IM (e.g. dedicating a chatroom exclusively for that) could make it work better? I think it is important that the medium be the same for synchronous and asynchronous people.

Daily meetings can be extremely useful in context of routine transmission of info, mostly on always the same well-defined topics + a small amount of random very important things. The important infos must be hierarchized, you can not just drop them in the middle of a stream of boring "I continued to develop X yesterday and will continue to do it tomorrow". So on open engineering subjects, some people may like it and that may be effective for them, but I really want to know if this is the majority of people / for the majority of projects / ...

Re: Daily standups should be async

#108

Post by overgard »

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 don't think the issue is team cohesion, but rather level of detail. I'm generally interested in what my coworkers are making, but in the sense of "I want to see a demo of it when it's ready". I really don't care about "Y: wrote DB migration script, T: waiting on design." That kind of thing is neither useful nor interesting if I'm not their manager.

I think people check out in synchronous standups just as much as in async ones. The only difference is if later I'm interested, I can go look it up if it's async.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#110

Post by eblanshey »

remmargorp64 wrote: post #20

Our team does our stand-ups in Slack, in a separate channel called "#daily-status". Every morning, each team member posts a short bullet list of the items they are planning on working on that day, along with details about any things they are blocked by. This happens asynchronously as people start working every day, so one person might post their message at 7 am, while another person posts at 10 am. Any conversation t…

I personally like seeing everybody else on the call and talking face to face. As a manager I get a feel for how the others are doing. I feel chats-only will get rid of that aspect and make things more impersonal. Do you not have face to face calls at all?
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