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Standups are Not Poisonous

dshimy.github.com

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Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#81

Post by absconditus »

wpietri wrote: post #76
corresation wrote: post #20

Aside 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…

In which case, I'd say stop putting information in the tool. We ran my last company on index cards. You can see a picture here: https://www.quora.com/Startups/Which-is-the-best-To-Do-List-... The average card had maybe 4 words on it. We knew about issues because we talked about them. I love the written word, but it is so much slower and less efficient than face-to-face communication in so many circumstances. The high…

Stop putting information in the tool to create a reason to have stand-ups?

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#82

Post by absconditus »

TheSilentMan wrote: post #43
corresation wrote: post #20

Aside 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…

You are advocating a meeting once per day. Why not spend 2 minutes at that time to look over the agile board in the tool instead? I look at my team's board several times per day, as well as check-ins, and I spend very little time doing it. I am also aware of status throughout the day instead of once during the meeting.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#83

Post by datalus »

We run stanups at my place. Everyone keeps their time to talk brief as possible and we have a rotating leader to keep people out of the weeds. It works out quite well, so I agree strongly with the article that stand ups are not a waste.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#84

Post by Aaronontheweb »

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…

Speaking as an engineering manager - I've only had to use standups in environments where engineers were not good at checking in their code and closing out issues regularly. I HAVE to have that information, regardless of how I get it.

I would strongly prefer to have a stream of commits and JIRA issues in HipChat to review the following morning than have to do a standup. But not all engineers are as good as they like to believe they are at following development workflows and processes.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#85

Post by tcharron »

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…

The daily stand-up as a status meeting is a common anti-pattern and one I often have to coach teams out of.

While yes, you may be able to derive status from a daily stand-up meeting, that's not the point.

The point is for the team to co-ordinate their work and figure out how they're going to get things done. Done well, it has more in common with a planning meeting than a status meeting.

I actually have a whole course on how to have good stand-up meetings.

Here's the link: https://www.udemy.com/improv-your-agile-scrum-stand-up/?coup... I added a discount code for anyone who's interested.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#86

Post by tcharron »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #84
ams6110 wrote: post #29

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…

Speaking as an engineering manager - I've only had to use standups in environments where engineers were not good at checking in their code and closing out issues regularly. I HAVE to have that information, regardless of how I get it. I would strongly prefer to have a stream of commits and JIRA issues in HipChat to review the following morning than have to do a standup. But not all engineers are as good as they like t…

Since you are a manager, I might suggest that the Agile and Scrum the daily stand-up isn't for you. While I appreciate your need to know what's going on with the team, in Agile and Scrum, the daily stand-up isn't there to provide status to managers.

The purpose of the meeting is for the team to get together and co-ordinate the work that needs to be done in order to meet their Sprint goals. So while you may be able to get status information out of that, it's more important for team members to use that time to figure out how to meet their goals.

In addition, status should be obvious in Agile teams. This is why you usually see things like cards on walls and burn down charts. If status isn't obvious to everyone, you may want to see if there are other ways the team can make that information highly visible.

Check out: https://www.udemy.com/improv-your-agile-scrum-stand-up/?coup... for more.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#87

Post by tcharron »

ams6110 wrote: post #68
davidwoof1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Has anyone ever tried an end-of-the-day standup? Would not tend to disrupt flow, because you're going home afterwards. Also might help keep the gathering focused and on-topic. 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 h…

I have seem teams use end of day stand-ups. The problem with those is that they tend to devolve into status updates pretty quickly.

Team members report on what they did that day, but seldom think about the things they are going to get done next and the things that are preventing them from getting started on the next thing, which in my opinion, are the more important things to focus on.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#88

Post by msrpotus »

ams6110 wrote: post #68
davidwoof1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Has anyone ever tried an end-of-the-day standup? Would not tend to disrupt flow, because you're going home afterwards. Also might help keep the gathering focused and on-topic. 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 h…

A team I interned with did standups at the end of the day but honestly, at that point, you just want to go home; you don't want to stay to hear what's going on with everyone else.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#89

Post by tcharron »

potatolicious wrote: post #50
suppressingfire wrote: post #26

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…

Yeah, these are all common dysfunctions in teams getting started with Agile.

You see these a lot in cargo-cult style adoptions. They understand that they need to do these practices, but they don't understand why. The end result is that they try to pervert them to serve their own purposes (e.g. daily stand-up as a status meeting for managers) and lose the real value. Then they complain that "Agile doesn't work here".

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