61–70 of 125 posts
Standups 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?).
If it lasts too long, the person running it has lost control
If it ends up berating a coder twice a day, every day, regarding a multi-day implementation task, the person running the standup is an incompetent project manager
If, as others have given examples of, people zone out, or become unconfortable, the project has become toxic and the standups can't fix that
If standups adhere to dogma more than they solve problems, the person running them lacks critical thinking skills and knowledge of project management techniques
Earlier 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).
I like morning stand-ups, but a big problem is that if the stand-up is at 9, I start winding down whatever I'm doing around 8:30, and I don't start new tasks after 8-8:30. Multiply the loss by the entire team every day and that's potentially a big loss of time. And because everyone's schedule is different, there's really no place to put the meeting that avoids the problem.
The benefits of a well-run standup can outweight this productivity cost, but it's a real cost that needs to be considered.
Meetings are one tool among many for team communication, it's just that very few people are able to run a meeting effectively. I used to believe that all meetings, in any form, were a waste of time. Right up until I worked for someone who actually knew how to run a meeting. It was amazing - in a 12-15 person meeting, everyone person contributed, tangents were quickly cut-off, and they rarely lasted more than 30mins. Sadly, she was promoted (i mean, good for her, bad for my group at the time) and without her guidance our group meetings quickly reverted back to a multi-hour mostly useless waste of time.
The lesson I learned is not to dismiss meetings outright. Spend some effort learning how to run them effectively, and it's still a useful communication tool.
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.
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…
"Wednesday, 24 April Fixed bug #434, added protocols between user and tasks. "
And if they _really_ want to know what I am going to work on or what issues I have. Please check my tracker. There are bugs, features and chores. And each of them has comments that describe any issues I might have run into or will.
Problem solved.
That works for our team of 4-5, but I understand that it can't scale. Of course, if management started calling it a stand-up meeting and took away the coffee, I'm fairly certain we'd get less out of it.
tl-dr; why is a stand-up meeting better than just grabbing a coffee with your colleagues?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
You're looking at the wrong side of the meeting. It's the time before the meeting, not the time after. I like morning stand-ups, but a big problem is that if the stand-up is at 9, I start winding down whatever I'm doing around 8:30, and I don't start new tasks after 8-8:30. Multiply the loss by the entire team every day and that's potentially a big loss of time. And because everyone's schedule is different, there's r…
I guess this does presume that everyone wraps up at about the same time every day, which I've generally found to be the case, but may not work well with widely distributed workers or places where people actually practice a wider range of work hours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
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 been thinking of writing a script that pulls down commits from , formats it "properly" and pipe them to SAY. "Wednesday, 24 April Fixed bug #434, added protocols between user and tasks. " And if they _really_ want to know what I am going to work on or what issues I have. Please check my tracker. There are bugs, features and chores. And each of them has comments that describe any issues I might have run into or w…
If you are fixing bugs then the story should be "x bugs related to foo feature" and your daily standup report should be "I fixed x bugs on foo, I have y to go, should be done today, no blockers"