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Standups are Not Poisonous

dshimy.github.com

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Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#111

Post by bmm6o »

bmm6o wrote: post #110
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…

I should probably say "scrum" where I say "agile" above. I would edit but I'm on my phone.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#112

Post by ender7 »

This just seems to boil down to well-run meetings vs. poorly-run meetings. Standups are meant to be light-weight meetings where everyone gets back on the same page. If that's not happening, then someone isn't running the meeting correctly.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#113

Post by gdulli »

johnrob wrote: post #8

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?).

This is why I don't allow them on my teams. You have a block or issue and you're going to passively wait until the next morning or whenever the next meeting is? No. Deal with it when it comes up, don't lose half a day.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#114

Post by InclinedPlane »

bmm6o wrote: post #110
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…

That was just the worst example. Most of the other examples ranged from more or less useless to actively harmful.

As I said, the problem is that the reasoning and goals become too easily separated from the activity. And then before you know it you've got cargo cult behavior on your hand.

Wouldn't you know it, the instances where standups were used effectively was when the team had a lot of experienced people who knew how to work well. A methodology that is only effective for people who already know how to work well is not a good methodology in my book.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#115

Post by FourthProtocol »

bguthrie wrote: post #48
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 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.

Easy enough to say, not always easy in practice. If "the boss" has political sway then it's never going to happen. I worked in an environment that considers itself "very agile", because it "does standups". Any suggestion that it's being done wrong makes you look confrontational.

I was there because the money was good. Motivationally it was about as effective as being micro-managed on a waterfall project.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#116

Post by vpeters25 »

seivan wrote: post #93
vpeters25 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually in a well ran agile team, you should not need that as you should be focused working on only one user story. 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"

But there are a lot of things on the tracker that is in the icebox but assigned to me. Doesn't mean I am doing all at once :P

First, in agile teams, there is no assigning of tasks, each member takes the ones they feel like tackling.

Agile in not optimal for maintenance or emergency production issues. These are dealt immediately and only mention in the daily stand up as a blocker stopping you from finish the task you actually intended to complete. They are not even added to the product/sprint backlogs.

As a rule of thumb all user stories added to a sprint should take between half and 2 days to complete. If you have a whole bunch of small bug fixes, group them together so they fit in that time-frame (i.e. all UI bugs in page foo). Otherwise you end up polluting the backlog with hundredths of little things and turning your planning meetings into overwhelming nightmares.

Just think about it: if everybody in the team is working on only one or two tasks every day, the daily stand up will take each member about 30 seconds and the whole meeting less than 5.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#117

Post by kabdib »

My old group started "doing agile." We had daily scrums. They quickly turned into status meetings for the PMs to bubble up micro-progress reports.

This, on a team with four engineers and three QA types. We sat next to each other. We didn't need standups, we needed to be left alone to do work.

Finally, on one project the PM (who had appointed himself scrumlord) finally let us meet only twice a week, and had the common decency to call the meetings "status".

Call things what they are.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#118

Post by ardit33 »

I personally hate standups. They are the 21st century version of Chinese Communist style Daily Morning Exercises. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_2C3bvh6ms

Usually they either are void of real information (as they are supposed to be quick) and nothing is discussed in depth, or if things do end up discussed they end up taking too long.

Unfortunately they have propagated in most work places/engineering cultures.

Information should flow naturally between engineers. If you have a jelling team, people should communicate with each other naturally, without having to be forced to stand up and listen to status reports (that's exactly what standups are).

I prefer once or twice a week engineering 30mins sync ups. Short meeting, that get to the point on whats going on, and you have some time to discuss things in depth if needed. For any small things, the expectations would be that engineers should communicate with each other directly.

Instead of having 5 interruptions a week, you have one or two (slightly larger ones). At the end of the day accountability should be on the delivery of projects (end results), and not efforts (which standups are more about showing efforts, rather than results).

From personal experience, experienced engineers tend to highly dislike them, and the over-reliance on standups is an indication of a weak engineering culture.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#119

Post by sultezdukes »

Who's doing standups with a 6 member team for 30 minutes? That's nuts.

We're a 6 member team and our standups are typically 5 minutes or less.

We stopped that "what you did yesterday, what you're going to accomplish today, do you have any roadblocks" rigor nonsense.

We just turnaround to see what's going on. In the beginning, I was pretty turned off by the rules we were using for standup, but once we stopped all that, they're pretty helpful, just so we know where we all stand.

My first job out of school, we had a developer that claimed that he couldn't get any work done around the office because he was constantly being interruped. Well, his boss let him work from home on this very important project with a hard deadline. Well, he wasn't checking in and he was being vague about where he stood. Lo-and-behold, 3 months later he has nothing to show for, and he's history.

As a previous poster put it, standup can be a canary in the coalmine.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#120

Post by sultezdukes »

pyre wrote: post #37
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…

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).

One thing we had for an action item of our retrospective is to start consolidating meetings.

We had a huge problem with non-delivery people scheduling meetings willy-nilly, just because people's calendar's were free.

I've put the kibosh on that, as much as possible, especially in the afternoon.

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