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Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

blog.valuemotive.com

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Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#111

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

andy_boot wrote: post #36
alfonsodev wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this, I found that if you go for the Round Robin format, often, people are just thinking about what are they going to say next, and how to make it sound like actual valuable work rather than listen to the colleagues. It gets akward when some people get a lot done (apparently) and others not, also not everyone knows how to "sell" their work, and IMO it can create weird dynamics. Walking the board is much…

I also noticed this. We came up with a variant to fix this. You have to say what the next person in the circle said they'd do yesterday before your talk. This forced everyone to pay more attention as you don't know who would be standing next to you tomorrow. It wasn't easy to do but I think it did make people more aware of what was going on.

This is a terrible approach for the fact that instead of addressing the problem of people not listening because of stuff not relevant to them said from others, it ensures you must listen to that irrelevant stuff.

So instead of wasting some people time, you are now wasting 2x that time.

Make the meeting relevant to everyone, make it tight (time-wise). Hiding the problem under a tarp ensures it doesn't get any improvements.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#112

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

chimprich wrote: post #46
kozhevnikov wrote: post #7

Daily stand-ups have two formats, one is Round Robin that has origins in Scrum, other is Walk the Board that is more Kanban. I highly recommend you switching from "did yesterday/do today" to "walking the board" as it is less about checking what each employee delivered in a day but rather what the team can do to move tickets through the board. It is also more inclusive allowing quiet/introverted/non-native English spe…

I agree with this. By far the least useful of the standard standup questions is "what did you do yesterday". Focussing on the work to be done puts the emphasis on teamwork and skips the pressure on people to justify themselves or play politics by showing off. That's assuming everyone is doing the work and they're being trusted to do the work. If that's not the case, then you have bigger problems than the format of yo…

We have been trying to show what we did code-wise (or explain if it was something that didn't end up with code). The goal however, is to show some coding practices or new functions created that other team members might find useful, as well as working as a brief "review" of the code itself.

The goal is not to explain what you did. Happy with the approach because knowledge is actually spreading across the team currently. Meeting do get much longer though (1 hour usually), but time is recovered mostly on code reviews which become shorter. Usually lot of discussions sprouts out of this, leading to better code overall.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#113

Post by Antoninus »

kozhevnikov wrote: post #7

Daily stand-ups have two formats, one is Round Robin that has origins in Scrum, other is Walk the Board that is more Kanban. I highly recommend you switching from "did yesterday/do today" to "walking the board" as it is less about checking what each employee delivered in a day but rather what the team can do to move tickets through the board. It is also more inclusive allowing quiet/introverted/non-native English spe…

The last few teams I've worked on moved the daily Round Robin into slack. You would have to fill it out an hour after signing in and before you left for the day. Accountability was key and having it in the dev-chat saved a lot of time.

Our 'walk the board' process was saved for tuesdays and thursdays and involved product and project managers. We set a 45-minute max so noone would rabbit hole on any one ticket.

This has been my favourite process so far because this was the highest level of team accountability I've experienced and you would only spend 1.5 hours a week in meetings.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#114

Post by mnm1 »

lbriner wrote: post #79
distantaidenn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a past life as a Product Manager, one of my top devs rarely attended standups. One day, she rolled into the office mid standup, went over to the coffee machine, and prepared a cup. Never looked in our direction, and proceeded to begin her work. Later during our 1-1, I asked her what the issue was, and she bluntly told me that she thought standups were useless. I never brought it up again, as she was an amazing dev…

That isn't the point at all. The standup isn't to make her a better developer, it is to make the team work more effectively. What happens when someone is taking a long time to do something that she knows a shortcut for but they won't know because "she doesn't need to come". It's a sad culture when a developer thinks they don't need the team or when, for some reason, they don't have to come to standups.

I think she said standups are useless, not that the team is useless. I completely agree. I've never found any use for them in years of being forced to do standups. They are 100% for managers. If someone has an issue I can help out with, they message me directly or post in a channel and we work on it. That's what happens. Very simple. They don't have to wait until the next day and they don't have to bother everyone else with their likely-irrelevant issue.

Also, how can standups be designed to make the team work more effectively? They essentially steal some of the best development time in the day by insisting on being the first thing done in the morning, when most people are fresh and ready to go. There's no way in hell this was designed to be anything but a manager's control tool designed to slow down the team in bureaucracy and bullshit. And it does a great job at that.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#115

Post by mnm1 »

twic wrote: post #71
mmsimanga wrote: post #30

> This will interrupt programming flow. This for me is the biggest drawback. When you are in the zone and interrupted it takes long to get back in the flow again. Another point is I don't solve problems in a linear fashion. When I am stuck I sometimes jump to another part of the application that I know I will have to tackle later on. That's just me. This is hard to explain in Agile with a PM/scrum master present. Edi…

> This will interrupt programming flow. This is why you do the standup first thing, before people have started working. There is no flow to interrupt. > Another point is I don't solve problems in a linear fashion. When I am stuck I sometimes jump to another part of the application that I know I will have to tackle later on. That's just me. If you're doing XP, or any kanban-flavoured variety of agile, you pick up one…

Having it be the first thing in the morning seems to be the least efficient option possible, way worse than being interrupted in flow. This is the peak working time for most people, peak alert time for the majority of the population, and therefore the most productive time for many people, even many of those who are not prone to waking up early. Starting with something that's mostly useless to the developer and taking focus away from what really needs to get done that morning sometimes kills the entire morning. I'd rather be interrupted mid-flow and I'm certain I'm not alone considering the majority of the population actually is most alert in the morning (along with the other peaks of energy throughout the day). The optimal time for such a meeting would probably be either right before or after lunch, with lunch being variable and taken based on the workload of that day.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#116

Post by a_ranom_dev »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #109
mattmanser wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very article linked shows the 3 questions. "What did you do yesterday". How is that not a loaded question? JUSTIFY YOUR EXISTENCE. Every day. Anyone encouraging standups is just contributing to the poor mental health of programmers.

That can become "justify your existence", but it doesn't have to. What you did yesterday can actually be relevant information to your coworkers. It sounds like either your work culture is somewhat toxic, or else you are rather defensive.

Actually, the dev has exactly 0 input on how the standup goes. The middle manager sets the true goals and the dev is either in or out of step. Whether anyone else in the meeting gets anything out of it is strictly a side effect, and not relevant to the manager. I've never been able to make a stand up into what it's supposed to be when the manager makes it about meeting deadline and not hearing about problems, regardless of whether you have any problems. Maybe you have worked in great places where this sort of dynamic doesn't happen, but I've worked exclusively for cold capitalists and it's always been about justifying what you are doing and feeling the pressure to get done faster.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#117

Post by distantaidenn »

lbriner wrote: post #79
distantaidenn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a past life as a Product Manager, one of my top devs rarely attended standups. One day, she rolled into the office mid standup, went over to the coffee machine, and prepared a cup. Never looked in our direction, and proceeded to begin her work. Later during our 1-1, I asked her what the issue was, and she bluntly told me that she thought standups were useless. I never brought it up again, as she was an amazing dev…

That isn't the point at all. The standup isn't to make her a better developer, it is to make the team work more effectively. What happens when someone is taking a long time to do something that she knows a shortcut for but they won't know because "she doesn't need to come". It's a sad culture when a developer thinks they don't need the team or when, for some reason, they don't have to come to standups.

Wow, I didn't think my comment would be so contentious. Just to clarify, I did not say that she felt she didn't need the team, nor am I sure where you got that impression.

She was quite communicative in other ways -- just didn't see the need for standups. Due her effectiveness, I had no reason to try to change that behavior. She got shit done, and everyone knew it -- with our without a standup.

Edit: And please note that I said "universal" standups. I feel we often want to apply a one size fits all to developer mindsets. Maybe she was shy. Maybe she felt pressure from the ceremony. Maybe she did just feel it was a complete waste of time. Either way, my job as PM was to get products built, and a big part of that was understanding the individual mindsets and capabilities of the engineers on my team.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#118

Post by sime2009 »

mnm1 wrote: post #114
lbriner wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't the point at all. The standup isn't to make her a better developer, it is to make the team work more effectively. What happens when someone is taking a long time to do something that she knows a shortcut for but they won't know because "she doesn't need to come". It's a sad culture when a developer thinks they don't need the team or when, for some reason, they don't have to come to standups.

I think she said standups are useless, not that the team is useless. I completely agree. I've never found any use for them in years of being forced to do standups. They are 100% for managers. If someone has an issue I can help out with, they message me directly or post in a channel and we work on it. That's what happens. Very simple. They don't have to wait until the next day and they don't have to bother everyone el…

> Also, how can standups be designed to make the team work more effectively?

Tips:

* NO MANAGERS. The standup is for the scrum team to organise and help itself. It is not there give a status update for the manager. The manager isn't in the team, and people have trouble talking freely when the manager is around.

* Do an issue based standup. Discuss the status of each issue on the board from the right to left. The primary question is "What can we do to keep these issues moving along through the process?".

* At the end you can ask "Does anyone have anything else important to add?". Maybe people have to leave early today etc etc.

That's it.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#119

Post by nakodari »

ljf wrote: post #82
nakodari wrote: post #34

For a small remote company like ours, it would be exhausting to do daily scrum meetings. Instead, we have an hour-long weekly scrum meeting on Monday and it's more effective.

Can you give a little more context about why it would become exhausting for remote workers? I'd seen terrible stand ups and good ones, but the location of those taking part has rarely been a deciding factor.

It is a waste of time. Whatever you need to discuss regarding the tasks can be discussed once a week and then once the tasks have been assigned and discussed, trust the team to work at their own pace and time and deliver it by next Monday instead of micromanaging the team every day.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#120

Post by ljf »

nakodari wrote: post #119
ljf wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a little more context about why it would become exhausting for remote workers? I'd seen terrible stand ups and good ones, but the location of those taking part has rarely been a deciding factor.

It is a waste of time. Whatever you need to discuss regarding the tasks can be discussed once a week and then once the tasks have been assigned and discussed, trust the team to work at their own pace and time and deliver it by next Monday instead of micromanaging the team every day.

But why is that especially exhausting for remote workers? Why not local ones too?

You also foucs on assigned tasks rather than a team working together to get stuff done. Sounds like Software engineers, not product engineers. If you are pre assigning tasks and working separately then yes a daily scrum has no value.

But that isn't the point of a daily scrum, or scrum/agile at all. The focus needs to be on getting value to a customer together as fast as possible - not individuals doing a task each to build to a pre-defined whole. Iteration not increments.

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