When I first started doing standups, mine were longer than necessary. But as I got more comfortable and the team's workflow jelled, I've gotten better at being concise.
Standups are Not Poisonous
41–50 of 125 posts
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#42I'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 this is the key difference, and I think the root of one of the problems: many workplaces that implement standup meetings have a manager or PM present at the meeting, even though this is discouraged by many agile evangelists. Sometimes the PM even acts as the scrum-master, despite the scrum process as officially conceived really discouraging that. And then it turns into daily short reports to the boss.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#43Aside from standups becoming status meetings (which it a mechanism of superficial management used by terrible managers), one of my gripes with them is that they're often redundant -- everyone should know what everyone else is working on, and what everyone else finished, and any blocking issues, via your agile tool (e.g. Rally). Redundancy in information is a terrible, terrible thing, and it leads to a situation where…
To me, it seems like a waste of time to have everybody constantly monitoring the status of every card being worked on when you can just have everybody stand in one place for 10 or 15 minutes, then maybe another 15 minutes of subgroups talking about potential solutions to issues that were brought up.
On top of that if you really want the tool to show everything everyone is blocked on at any time, you wind up spending a lot more time than strictly necessary just typing status updates.
In my team's standups, people frequently wind up shifting plans to cover issues that are brought up or offering work arounds to mitigate blocking issues and kick them down the road a bit to give the scrum master(who is also our VP) time to clear them. We also wind up frequently offering to pair with different people based on what they're working on(i.e. one dev is working on something that touches part of our system that's particularly fragile, another dev more familiar with that area will offer to pair for the morning).
Since we started doing morning standups I've seen our team get more productive.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#44Regarding the usefulness of standup-meetings I've written a blog post on how we do them at Blossom:
https://www.blossom.io/blog/2012/09/17/3-tips-for-quick-effe...
If done well they can be a great facilitator. Just make sure it fits your culture.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
That's pretty common. "Maker's schedule" http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html rings true to every technical person I know.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#46At my current job at turntable.fm, we only have standups twice a week (Tuesday and Thursday), and I honestly was surprised at how effective that is. I've always operated under the assumption that a standup needs to happen daily to be valuable, but trying them 2x weekly has changed my mind.
I think the real problem is when a standup is the only way that a team actually communicates status. At turntable we rely heavily on chat, which also contains messages indicating when new things are being pushed, and we also make it a point to have a lot of face-to-face communication. Our twice-weekly standups are a good way to fill in the gaps, if there are any, but they are by no means the only way that people find out what's going on.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#47Standups work really well when there are dependencies between different functional groups.
Consider a team working on a live browser/Facebook-based free to play game (social game as a service). There are many releases a week.
- Engineering typically requires art assets to begin/complete work. Ie. building models, unit models, 2D unit images, item images, etc.
- Releases don't end when they are pushed up to prod -- most releases have some kind of "go to market" plan that must be executed. For example, if a new Dragon Armor is released, we need to message all players to inform them of the new functionality and educate them on how it works, there would typically be a simultaneous tournament or contest that awards the new Armor as a prize, and possibly some other sale or promotion on a related item.
- It's a time for product to provide updates on where different specs are and on key game metrics.
- Customer Support/Community Management also provide updates on any emerging issues in the game, which improves everyone's situational awareness.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#48I'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…
The difference is the audience. I usually think of a status meeting as a one-way infodump from worker to manager. In a well-run standup, your audience is the whole team, because you're accountable to the team rather than any one person, and as a team member you're an active listener. If everyone's talking at the boss while the standup is going around then you're doing it wrong.
Edit: wrong, not right.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#49IMO Standups are very useful for a team that works remotely. Placing them in the middle of the day ensures that nobody's going to have to bend his or her schedule unreasonably.
Would you rather get at least one extra IM or phone call(?) from each member of the team randomly throughout the day as you're quietly and productively working in your own zone?
I'm all for anything that tends to eliminate mental context switching during the day. Needless to say, not a fan of any office environment for coders.
Re: Standups are Not Poisonous
#50I'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…
This is exactly it, and I can't help but wonder if the people who vehemently dislike standups actually work in such environments (I know I have).
I also feel like the original "Standups are Poisonous" author may work in such an environment also.
I once worked for a company (who shall remain nameless) where the development process could be generously described as a perversion of agile. They wanted the cool buzzwordy notion of agile, but didn't want to actually subscribe to an egalitarian, hands-off environment where the engineering process is largely self-managed.
So, manager as scrum-master (noooooooooo), manager present at standup (noooooooo), and worst of all, story points becoming a measure of productivity (noooooooooo!). Standups would routinely last half an hour, even though our team was literally 4 people large, because the scrum master/manager would stop someone and drill down constantly.
Oh, and the manager ran estimation too, and with pressure from above would blatantly try to influence estimates downwards. The rest of the team compensated by inflating small tasks. Yay.
Tasks would also get assigned to specific team members from the get-go, because the team was horrifyingly silo'ed and we were constantly "too busy" to cross-train by spreading tasks around. I find that silo'ing is by far the biggest thing that makes standups seems irrelevant - why listen to what that guy is doing if that task has no bearing whatsoever on anything you're working on, or will be working on?