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Ask HN: What percentage of teams do daily standups, do you think?

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Re: Ask HN: What percentage of teams do daily standups, do you think?

#11

Post by rmeertens »

I led several (non-daily) standups in various formats in a research environment. What you might want to do is:

- each 2 weeks determine a set of tasks/goals for the next 2 weeks -> write down in a tool like Trello what this task is and assign a set of people to it.

- each standup, instead of discussing each person, discuss each task with the group. People don't have to be competent individually (leading to what you are seeing), but have to be competent as a group.

You might also be interested in this paper about SCORE (Scrum for Research): https://www.cs.umd.edu/~mwh/papers/score.pdf

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me!

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of teams do daily standups, do you think?

#12

Post by dchuk »

flukus wrote: post #10
dchuk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you have a ten person standup, and 8 of those people say "everything's going fine", and they're being honest (key), then you had a good standup. It's good because those other two people are saying "I'm blocked by XYZ". It takes 5 seconds to say "I'm good, no blockers".

But why can't those two just tell the team they're blocked via email/IM?

They can, and if that works for your team then go for it. Generally, forcing people to talk to each other as human beings tends to get things resolved much more quickly than easily dismissible messages/emails.

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of teams do daily standups, do you think?

#14

Post by seanwilson »

I find them fairly pointless.

- What you did yesterday, what you're doing today and what you're blocked on is all information that should be on a planning board.

- It creates pressure to come up with something productive to report instead of letting you just get on with things.

- Most of the time the information isn't relevant to everyone.

- It creates unwanted breaks when you're trying to work.

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of teams do daily standups, do you think?

#15

Post by seanwilson »

flukus wrote: post #10
dchuk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you have a ten person standup, and 8 of those people say "everything's going fine", and they're being honest (key), then you had a good standup. It's good because those other two people are saying "I'm blocked by XYZ". It takes 5 seconds to say "I'm good, no blockers".

But why can't those two just tell the team they're blocked via email/IM?

> But why can't those two just tell the team they're blocked via email/IM?

I agree with you. You're better having this kind of stuff on a planning board so you can easily see the status of every task with all the information in one place. Why do I need to know the reason for a task being blocked when I'm not working on it and can't do anything to help?

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