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Standups are Not Poisonous

dshimy.github.com

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Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#101

Post by mindcrime »

Evbn wrote: post #94
tcharron wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow that is entirely wrong. You don't figure out how you are going to get things done in a 10 minute meeting. You quickly call out where you are and if you are stuck, so people know who to needs help, or who can give help, or what needs to be done that no one is doing yet. Good luck with your course.

You don't figure out how you are going to get things done in a 10 minute meeting.

Sure you do, at a very high level. "Milo is doing the SYNAPSE adapters, Stinky is working on the compression drivers, Lisa is doing the UI stuff and Teddy is fixing the build system."

That can be covered in 10 minutes, and then the individuals involved can (and should) go off and hold whatever independent meetings - if any - are required for their specific tasks.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#102

Post by mindcrime »

dmoney wrote: post #99
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.

> Having nothing to report is fine. In a meeting where you're supposed to say what you've been working on, at a job where you're paid to be working on it, in what way is it fine to have nothing to report?

You were blocked by some externality. If all you have to report is "I'm still waiting for Larry in XYZ group to send over the new protocol specs", then that's all you can really say. Vis-a-vis the daily scrum/standup, that's all you have to say. Issues like "what else could you be doing with your time, what are we paying you to do" blah, are a topic for a different audience and a different time.

That said, in a quality team staffed with quality people, you don't worry about people goofing off during the time they're blocked... you assume they are doing some kind of self-development, or tweaking some small detail somewhere, etc. It's when somebody is blocked for long enough that it puts their tasks in jeopardy that the scrummaster needs to start escalating things and working to get the roadblocks removed, and/or manage expectations vis-a-vis the tasks for the iteration.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#103

Post by grimgrin »

jaredsohn wrote: post #98
manojlds wrote: post #35

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?

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/show-full-domain-o... Bookmarklet: https://github.com/johngibb/Hacker-News--Show-Subdomains Edit: Haven't tried them myself; just did an hnsearch. It would be great if Hacker News would always show the subdomain if not www.

For the record, tried the Chrome extension and it is only marginally better, showing you "dshimy.github.com", but not the domain added via CNAME.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#104

Post by wpietri »

absconditus wrote: post #81
wpietri wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, have standups to have an easier way to share information than a tool.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#105

Post by nahname »

seivan wrote: post #66
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 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…

Enjoy!

standup = log --graph --decorate --oneline --author="YOURNAMEHERE" --since="yesterday"

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#106

Post by wpietri »

Evbn wrote: post #96
wpietri wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, the vitriol is entirely earned. I learned one of the Agile methods before the term Agile was even invented. Adopting it made a giant difference in the quality and sanity of my work. But so many people today have have pseudo-Agile methods inflicted on them in large corporate contexts. There, the point isn't to make things saner and more effective. It's to please some executive who has a bee in their bonnet. And of…

So if I start calling myself wpietri and go out committing atrocities, when people start spitting on you, that vitriol is entirely earned?

The analogy doesn't quite hold.

I believe the bulk of what people call "Agile" these days is terrible. You could say that most of that isn't the true Agile. But at some point I think that isn't a battle worth fighting. Personally, I just say that Agile started out as X and has become Y.

I would rather they didn't throw the baby out with their bathwater, but in the stories I have heard, the vitriol is entirely valid. I don't think it should be all directed at "Agile", in that managers deserve a lot, as do the hierarchical power structures in which the managers work. But the Agile people also made choices that led to this outcome, so I think it's fair that there's some spleen-venting directly at the Agile movement.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#107

Post by YokoZar »

Evbn wrote: post #97
YokoZar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Email this thread to your team, if you are too shy to say "let's take that conversation offline" whenever someone drifts off topic.

What if we have a product manager who's asking for a status report on every single open bug every meeting?

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#108

Post by InclinedPlane »

Standups are like communism, great in theory, often horrible in practice.

Of all the standups I've participated in going back 5 years I'd say only one was any good. It was every other day, it was forcibly limited to 15 minutes or less, it was always on time, it was never allowed to go off on a tangent, it only had about 3 or 4 people in it, and it was actively pushed away from being a status meeting. This contrasts with every other standup I've been a part of which almost always cut into productivity, and worse. For a while there was a daily standup with 12+ members that often went for 45 minutes and sometimes went for an hour and a half.

The problem with a formalized methodology like standups (or agile in general) is that if you don't have very well defined and explicit reasons and goals and you don't make that a part of the system then people will just drift into doing what seems to make sense to them, which is status reports and aimless meetings.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#110

Post by bmm6o »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #108

Standups are like communism, great in theory, often horrible in practice. Of all the standups I've participated in going back 5 years I'd say only one was any good. It was every other day, it was forcibly limited to 15 minutes or less, it was always on time, it was never allowed to go off on a tangent, it only had about 3 or 4 people in it, and it was actively pushed away from being a status meeting. This contrasts w…

A 45-90 minute meeting with 12 people doesn't even sound good in theory. I know defenses of agile can run into "no true scotsman" territory, but that is pretty objectively not agile.

Your last paragraph explains why you have to be committed to doing it right. It's easy to do it wrong, and it becomes worse than doing nothing. But if your complaint is that doing it right is hard or that you need management buy-in, that's different than it doesn't work in practice.

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