"Gareth Rees’ article titled, Standups are Poinonous hit HN" ... I stopped there.
"Stopping at the First Sentence Considered Harmful"
Standups are Not Poisonous
21–30 of 125 posts
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#22I'm genuinely curious, how are standups not status meetings? From the article: - Make sure everyone is working on the right thing - Help out other team members by taking work off their plate or helping them by sharing domain-specific knowledge - Keeping everyone informed How is that different from a status meeting? I've heard "standups are not status meetings" over and over from the agile community, but I don't get i…
Disclaimer: I'm not an "agile guru". I've worked for years in an old-school corporate environment and just recently switched job and joined a small agile team. My views on agile don't come from reading or theory, they come from my one month experience so far.
The only difference between standups and status meeting is that you're not there to fill a report card. You're not there to show your manager you did something. You're just there because it's the only 10 minutes in the whole day where the whole team comes together to discuss. It's (at least in my place of work) highly informal, very chilled and very genuine. What we do is say what we're working on and ask for help and/or ideas.
We have a private IRC channel for this, but the fact that we meet face to face for 10 mins a day really does bring up interesting fast conversations.
The whole point of standups is not to take notes, not to keep track and just have a quick break to talk (not type) about work.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, he is saying that a 6 person, 30 minute stand up takes 3 hours.
I read that but it sailed right over my head until your comment because that is an utterly banal observation. Yeah, Microsoft spends 12 man months on bathroom breaks every single day too; I guess that's why they are going down the shitter.
I agree that it is not a very deep point but I think the point is a different one from the point your analogy make. People go to toilets, slack off and do all kinds of things during work that are not actually work. Those things are unavoidable. However, meetings that take too long are avoidable, have a low value by definition and thus require management action.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#24Every daily standup I have been a part of or organized has turned into a status meeting. The biggest "tell" of a status meeting masquerading as a standup? When people address the boss, not each other.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#25I'm genuinely curious, how are standups not status meetings? From the article: - Make sure everyone is working on the right thing - Help out other team members by taking work off their plate or helping them by sharing domain-specific knowledge - Keeping everyone informed How is that different from a status meeting? I've heard "standups are not status meetings" over and over from the agile community, but I don't get i…
Standups are useful to the team. They are for making sure everybody knows what's being done and impediments that can't be fixed inside the team get kicked to someone who can focus on them. Anything in a standup that isn't useful to the whole team should fall by the wayside. They are standups to encourage them to be short.
Status meetings are for the benefit of a manager. They allow everybody to report to the manager so the manager can feel comfortably informed. These are typically useless to everybody else because they drag on for far longer and nobody pays attention whilst each individual briefs that manager. These sorts of meetings are detrimental to getting a team to self organise.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#26I'm genuinely curious, how are standups not status meetings? From the article: - Make sure everyone is working on the right thing - Help out other team members by taking work off their plate or helping them by sharing domain-specific knowledge - Keeping everyone informed How is that different from a status meeting? I've heard "standups are not status meetings" over and over from the agile community, but I don't get i…
I think there's a stigma attached to the notion of the status meeting. Beyond that, at least to me, a status meeting is a kind of assymetric situation where one person with some kind of authority (manager, PM, ...) is trying to keep tabs on everyone else's work, where each attendee has to prove that they've been doing their job. In a standup, it's a kind of egalitarian environment where everyone is speaking to everyone else, and nobody is taking notes to report up the food chain.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#27I'm genuinely curious, how are standups not status meetings? From the article: - Make sure everyone is working on the right thing - Help out other team members by taking work off their plate or helping them by sharing domain-specific knowledge - Keeping everyone informed How is that different from a status meeting? I've heard "standups are not status meetings" over and over from the agile community, but I don't get i…
When I think status meeting its usually beyond roadblocks that were brought up during standup or several standups. Some of our stakeholders aren't present.
To me a standup is a tool to keep the team fully gelled and jump on any issues which will cause a sprint to spiral out of control. They should only last a few minutes per person (we have about ten people) and we schedule coffee immediately following to tackle any issues that were tabled due to a timebox.
Note: We have a 'coffee club' where everyone brings in coffee and we french press it every morning. So its scheduled only so that nobody pulls us into meetings ;). We love our coffee.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#28I'm on my fourth team now since 2005 where I have helped successfully employ scrum, and stand ups are a great part of it. A couple of the biggest mistakes I see being made are:
1) not correctly identifying "chickens" and "pigs"[1]. Pigs get to talk in a standup, chickens do not. In fact any interaction with the pigs and chickens should go entirely through the scrum master (and not during the standup). If chickens want to come to the standup it is to observe only.
2) conversations. The standup is not the time for conversation. The best method I've employed is to have each person specifically answer three questions: what did you do since the last standup? What are you going to do between now and the next one? Are you impeded in any way? The last one is where conversations often start. Scrum master needs to stop those, identify the people who need to talk after the stand up, and move things along.
When you follow those as hard fast rules, standups shouldn't take more than N*3 minutes where N is the number of pigs.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#29I'm genuinely curious, how are standups not status meetings? From the article: - Make sure everyone is working on the right thing - Help out other team members by taking work off their plate or helping them by sharing domain-specific knowledge - Keeping everyone informed How is that different from a status meeting? I've heard "standups are not status meetings" over and over from the agile community, but I don't get i…
I've never experienced standups that weren't status meetings, and weren't serious flow disrupters. You get to the office, but don't really want to get too deeply into your work because you know standup time is 9:00. The team gets together, each person summarizes what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, what blockers they have. Everyone else mostly zones out. Next thing you know 30 minutes have passed, and by the time you get back to your desk and start to get ready to work you are already thinking "well lunch is coming up, no point in getting into anything substantial until the afternoon..."
I think standups could work, but they should only focus on things that impact the project (breaking change to an interface, or significant new things that are available) or things that are blocking work. And honestly I think email does a better job at that with a lot less impact on flow.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#30IMO the usefulness of standup meetings depends entirely on the project and the team. It's impossible to categorically say they're good or bad.
For a while I worked on a team with a small codebase, which we all knew pretty well, and it was very likely that if somebody made a change today, I'd be working in the same area of code in the next day or two.
In that situation I thought standups were really helpful.
My current team/project is a bit larger and it's maintenance on a much, much larger code base. The project is large enough that nobody really knows the whole thing very well, and everybody works on a different section and there's not much overlap. If I were to switch places with somebody I'd have a lot more to learn than just what they've worked on recently.
On this project we're still required to do standups, but they're useless. The information wouldn't be very useful to me even if people kept to one or two sentences of what they were doing. Of course, few people do that, and they usually go into obscure details that maybe two people in the whole group really understand. And that's when I tune out...