Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

Maybe I'm getting old and cranky, but lately 7 is becoming my limit for people on a team, with team size as low as 3 looking pretty damned good.

But, between the fact that a lot of these meetings devolve into something that is not short, fast or lightweight, and my observation over the years that daily is probably overly frequent for these meetings, I tend to mostly agree with the author of TFA.

Every team has it's unique needs, but for a lot of teams I'd go for a compromise with one, maybe two meatspace meetings per week (maybe Monday and Thursday) and then a technical solution using email or blogs or an enterprise social network or whatever, for a daily "standup".

It's not just "scrum" type meetings that could be replaced with a "no physical presence required" techie solution either... some companies have a culture of accountability (which is a good thing) taken to an extreme degree where half the company spends most of their time tied up in "status update" and "checkpoint" meetings. I've talked to people who say they can never schedule a real meeting (that is, a one off for attacking a specific problem) in their companies, because all of the participants are too over-committed with these status meetings! For these, I absolutely advocate finding a way to communicate most of thi status information electronically, and cut the frequency (and length) of the meatspace meetings back dramatically.

In meetings, the time lost is obvious. Which is why people focus on doing them well. By moving it to email, you're not saving time; you're just hiding it. And, I'm sure, increasing it.

I'm a fast writer. I practice pretty much every day. But there is no way I could write my standup contributions as quickly as just saying them. I'd guess writing is 5-10x as long. In a stand-up, I can point at the board and say, "I'm done with this; it was easy. I'm still working on that; it got hairy." If somebody needs more, I can see it on their face and raise an eyebrow; they'll ask me what they need to know.

To write a decent status update, I have to guess at all the reasonable questions and head most of them off. It is much more work. And then to keep up, I have to check my email. And integrate each person's comments with everybody else's to try to form a coherent picture. And then to follow up on the mysterious bits. A giant waste. I try to keep email off my coding machines entirely; distraction is a productivity-killer.

This also ignores so much of what I get out of stand-ups. I can see who's happy and who's dragging. I get an easy opportunity to grab somebody for a quick discussion. I get information through tone of voice, posture, and expression. Information about relationships, about features, about code. I get charged up at the beginning of the day knowing that we are all diving in on the same thing.

I don't know... for most "here's what I did yesterday, here's what I'm doing today, here are my blockers" type meetings, I don't see that "look 'em in the eye" is that critical and certainly not on a daily basis. At least that's been my experience. Maybe if you're trying to read body language to see if somebody is more afraid than they're letting on, or to try and pick up if somebody is sandbagging or something. But that's why I advocate for a compromise of cutting the meatspace meetings back a little in frequency (but not necessarily eliminating them) and replacing some of the meetings with a technology solution.

The standups do have a cost, even the ones that stick to the short and sweet "nobody talks more than 2 minutes and we're out of here in 15" ones. For example, they still force a context switch, and depending on when in the day they are scheduled, they can really f%!# with somebody's ability to get into - and stay in - "flow state".

Standups get lots of bright minds in the same place at the same time.

Standups let you know what else is going on, which is indeed useful. I've never understood this thing about silos and belittling out-of-band communication. The only way to get the Big Picture is to hear what other people are working on, preferably in an unfiltered manner. Then again, a lot of developers seem to prefer their little heads-down silo, worrying that their little room is uncomfortably warm without knowing the house is on fire.