Standups are Not Poisonous
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Standups are Not Poisonous
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Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#2"Remember, they are not status meetings."
Additionally, I think it is important to remember that standup is not a "justify my existence on the team" meeting. Having nothing to report is fine.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#3I have tried to get this point across at every place I have worked. Management covets micromanagement, so stands turn into status meetings.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#4Honestly, I can't understand all of the vitriol around "agile" methods that arises here occasionally. If you're doing something that works for your team, do it, if it doesn't work, do something else. Isn't that the whole idea behind "agile" stuff? Do people get stuck in situations where they have to do X because "we're doing agile, and agile says we must do X"? If so, can't the offenders be gently pointed to http://agilemanifesto.org ?
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#5Standups can however very easily become very uncomfortable in a dysfunctional environment. (As the original article unwittingly demonstrated.)
Consider the standup to be the canary in the coalmine. Most of the time people can ignore the dysfunction, work around it and pretend it isn't happening by just getting on with the job as much as possible.
But the standup will then become increasingly uncomfortable. Every single day.
In a healthy organisation, you can have perfectly pleasant standups, even without Scrum or Agile. I mean, what does a healthy team have to fear from standing around for a few minutes bringing each other up to speed?
It's a process that is very close to what often happens quite naturally around the time everyone on the team has arrived at the office (or online).
A standup can only become poisonous if the poison is injected from elsewhere. In Gareth's case abusing it for management status reports. In other cases it might be tension between team members, not having a clear goal, whatever.
The point is, you cannot have pleasant standup if there is that kind of stuff going on. Which is all the more reason to have a standup, unless it's your policy to ignore problems rather than dealing with them.
Standups aren't just not poisonous either: they are a very good poison detector.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#6I have tried to get this point across at every place I have worked. Management covets micromanagement, so stands turn into status meetings.
My team just went through more agile training, and one piece of advice I found interesting was to consider keeping the managers out of the standup if it's not working. The meeting is to help others on the team, so that's the only people who need to be there.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#7I am wondering where you guys draw the line between a standup and a status reporting meeting ?
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#8Standups would make more sense if the team did not communicate during the day. The reason I think they are pointless is that when a blocking issue arises, you drop what you're doing and walk straight over to the person who can help you. I've never seen or heard of someone waiting until the following day's standup to bring up the issue (which is supposedly what the standup is for, right?).
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#9What's a standup? I didn't see it defined in either post.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#10Standups can however very easily become very uncomfortable in a dysfunctional environment. (As the original article unwittingly demonstrated.) Consider the standup to be the canary in the coalmine. Most of the time people can ignore the dysfunction, work around it and pretend it isn't happening by just getting on with the job as much as possible. But the standup will then become increasingly uncomfortable. Every sing…
It's a process that is very close to what often happens quite naturally around the time everyone on the team has arrived at the office (or online).
This is exactly the behavior I have seen of well functioning teams. Usually there is a period when the person comes in, maybe after coming up to speed on their email where they get informed and up to speed on what is happening with everyone, if anyone needs anything, what people are working on, and then get to work!
Standups are just a formalized approach to what can be a drawn out process for an individual, and in some cases may not be "normal" for your standard introvert dev types who sit at a computer all day and perceive meetings as multi-hour long chores that are inflicted on their participants instead of quick high quality bursts of information distributed in an efficient fashion (face to face).