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Standups are Not Poisonous

dshimy.github.com

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Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#31

Post by johnbellone »

suppressingfire wrote: post #26
dos1 wrote: post #14

I'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 everyo…

I agree with this. Most of the time status meeting is usually something I associate with bringing my manager up to date on what my team is doing. Typically this is a 1-on-1 situation. Sometimes it involves other managers outside of my hierarchy but still under product ownership.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#32

Post by kposehn »

I'm inclined to agree that Standups can be quite good.

Every morning we have our meeting which maxes out at 15 minutes. The designated note-taker rotates daily and takes the list of current action items to be added to RedMine.

The biggest difficulty was fairly simple actually - removing digression from the mix and also removing things we've completed from the meeting.

There are no side conversations while stuff is being covered, and every day we sum up what we did in a company-wide email. Other subjects happen offline between relevant parties. This has been remarkably effective for us :)

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#33

Post by suppressingfire »

skrebbel wrote: post #18
phamilton wrote: post #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.

I agree, but i notice that i find it difficult to act on it, and many with me. Any tips for how to get the "look, i did work" urge out of the way?

If I haven't made any progress since the last day, I just talk about what I plan to do for the upcoming day. I also might say "I'm still working on (the thing I was working on yesterday)". With a well functioning, trusting team that should be a perfectly reasonable thing to say every so often.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#34

Post by jt2190 »

Both articles lack context, which we're all just filling in with our personal experiences with standup meetings, hence the pointless "debate" in the comments here.

I've noticed that developers can be divided into two groups based on whether they prefer to work with others or by themselves.

Those that prefer to work by themselves take chunks of work that can be done without input (formal or informal) from their fellow developers, (who they may refer to as "teammates" despite the fact that they don't work as a team in any real sense.) For this group, having a daily standup is a waste of time, because there is no work to coordinate.

Those that prefer to work with others take chunks of work that can't be considered complete until their fellow developers have also completed their portions. They seek continual input from their teammates in order to keep everyone on the same page. For this group the daily standup is just a more formal version of what they already do informally.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#35

Post by manojlds »

Offtopic - Hate these "github.com" posts that are actually from some blog hosted by some random dude on Github. Makes the domain bit meaningless. Wasn't there some fix for this to show more of the domain in certain cases?

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#37

Post by pyre »

ams6110 wrote: post #29
dos1 wrote: post #14

I'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…

The common thread I see in your complaints about stand-ups are the "I can't break my work into pieces, I need several hours of intense focus to work on anything."

E.g., Your stand-up is from 9-930a. After which you can't start anything substantial because 'lunch is coming,' but that's 2.5 hours away (assuming you lunch at noon).

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#38

Post by brazzy »

projectileboy wrote: post #4

Honestly, 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://a…

I believe ist's a combination of never having experienced the monstrosities agile was invented to replace, having experienced agile done wrong, and natural cowboy coder hybris.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#39

Post by mmatants »

ams6110 wrote: post #29
dos1 wrote: post #14

I'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…

30 minutes? That's definitely a long time. I've only been in an environment that does standups for a few months now, but for 5-8 people (team + PM/etc) it has rarely gone beyond 5-7 minutes (everyone rhymes things off in 40-60 seconds each, and any spin-off conversations are aggressively deferred).

It actually has worked really well in preventing of siloing/cliquing of work effort. Another thing that has helped greatly is using a physical task board and organizing conversation by task instead of by person. This puts less emphasis on "looking useful" as individuals and more on championing tasks to see their completion.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#40

Post by YokoZar »

phamilton wrote: post #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.

How do I communicate this when I'm in such a team and daily meetings are regularly going 30 minutes?
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