An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings
weblog.alexgodin.com
An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings
#2Everything old is new again. Email status is a check-in method as old as, well, email.
This works great if you have a reasonable number of people working largely on independent areas, or if your pace is slow enough to drive consensus through email.
If you need to reach team consensus regularly and quickly, e.g. on architectural or design decisions, synchronous standups are still better, even virtual ones over IRC or FaceTime or whatever. (If you hear people saying "wait, why/when did we do that?" a lot, you may be in this situation even if you'd rather not be.)
I'm not a standup (or capital-a Agile, bleh) zealot by any means, but if you've got more than two people working closely on an area, and you're going quickly, regular and delineated synchronous communication still beats email threads for efficiency.
Re: An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings
#3I dunno... I feel like if I'm totally honest, there's a good chance I would wind up just ignoring 90% of those e-mails, or at least not reading them carefully enough.
For me, I feel like the benefit of a stand-up is exactly that it forces everyone to pay attention and meet for 5 min, not just so that everything important gets communicated, but that everyone knows everyone else heard it. And people can ask important questions and know everyone else heard the concern and answer as well.
Re: An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings
#4For a long time, Agilists recommended that teams colocate as an antidote to the kinds of tepid collaborations that happen at large software teams in large companies. But collaboration tech has gotten better, and modern, nimble teams should be "built to explode" - you should be able to work together in the office, or at Starbucks, or anywhere on Earth, if you have to. Start with distribution as a goal and few physical issues will disrupt you.
This sounds great as long as you keep the spirit of the standup alive - a standup is for the whole team, not management, and should be a quick read.
Re: An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings
#5sounds great if your team doesn't really work together
Re: An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings
#6> Stand-ups are great but they have some major flaws: they're synchronous, everyone needs to be in the room (or on the phone), and often after the meeting much of the content is lost
That pretty much nails it. I'll admit though I hate standups. Any value it has as a concept is completely lost in its practice.
Re: An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings
#7I dunno... I feel like if I'm totally honest, there's a good chance I would wind up just ignoring 90% of those e-mails, or at least not reading them carefully enough. For me, I feel like the benefit of a stand-up is exactly that it forces everyone to pay attention and meet for 5 min, not just so that everything important gets communicated, but that everyone knows everyone else heard it. And people can ask important q…
For me, the point of a standup meeting is to spark conversations; the status information everyone reports is really secondary and a convenient excuse to get everyone face-to-face and talking. And this type of interaction happens much more easily when everyone is in the same location at the same time.
Re: An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings
#8I dunno... I feel like if I'm totally honest, there's a good chance I would wind up just ignoring 90% of those e-mails, or at least not reading them carefully enough. For me, I feel like the benefit of a stand-up is exactly that it forces everyone to pay attention and meet for 5 min, not just so that everything important gets communicated, but that everyone knows everyone else heard it. And people can ask important q…
> but that everyone knows everyone else heard it.
How about simply having a company policy that everyone should MVCC their decisions based on received email "transactions"? I.e., if someone sends out an email, then everyone else MUST (in the RFC sense of MUST) read it and digest it before making any new decisions. It still operates asynchronously--you can finish whatever you were head-down working on before checking your email--but you have to check it before you move on to whatever comes after that.
Or, in more cynical terms: fire everyone who ignores these emails until the problem corrects itself.
Re: An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings
#9I dunno... I feel like if I'm totally honest, there's a good chance I would wind up just ignoring 90% of those e-mails, or at least not reading them carefully enough. For me, I feel like the benefit of a stand-up is exactly that it forces everyone to pay attention and meet for 5 min, not just so that everything important gets communicated, but that everyone knows everyone else heard it. And people can ask important q…
For me, the point of a standup meeting is to spark conversations; the status information everyone reports is really secondary and a convenient excuse to get everyone face-to-face and talking. And this type of interaction happens much more easily when everyone is in the same location at the same time.
Yes, and those are exactly the rambling 30 minute standups everyone hates.
Re: An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings
#10No, no, and no. A 15-minute standing meeting is much more efficient. Mandating daily email check-ins means developer time would be wasted writing these emails, and everyone's time is then wasted reading these emails and then participating in the ensuing off-topic discussion threads spawned from each email.
A scrum-master's job is remove impediments, and thereby allowing developers to concentrate on development. Mandating that developers generate and then participate in a lot of email noise is counterproductive.