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Standups are Not Poisonous

dshimy.github.com

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Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#121

Post by JoeAltmaier »

drewmclellan wrote: post #59

I used to hate standups when I was at Yahoo. Maybe it's more a sign of how broken Yahoo is than how broken standups are, but the daily process was roughly: 0. 9am, catch up on email, then coast for a while knowing you'll have to stop work at 10am. 1. Find out which meeting room the 10am standup is in 2. Figure out where in the building that room is 3. Travel to the rough part of the building, hunt around for the room…

We use on-line standup meetings. Notice people are meeting in the Teamspace standup room, click in, chat briefly until all are there (about 30 seconds). Then call out your issues and blockers round-robin for a few minutes. Then click backto your home office.

12 minutes, a team of 8. Every time.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#122

Post by garagemc2 »

We don't do standups.

Trello does all the communicating.

1) It tells me whats done and what is not, through the checkboxes

2) On larger projects, the guys leave updates in the activity section every couple of hours or when they hit a milestone or a are stuck with a problem or are unsure of something. Think of these as like facebook style updates but for large projects.

These updates are delivered to me in real time. We can then discuss any problems etc at a suitable time at their convenience or I can pre-emptively direct them to someone who can help. Unless the problem is urgent in which case we discuss it then and there.

This way I know what's what and the guys have an open channel to me.

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#123

Post by bstpierre »

tcharron wrote: post #86
Aaronontheweb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as an engineering manager - I've only had to use standups in environments where engineers were not good at checking in their code and closing out issues regularly. I HAVE to have that information, regardless of how I get it. I would strongly prefer to have a stream of commits and JIRA issues in HipChat to review the following morning than have to do a standup. But not all engineers are as good as they like t…

Since you are a manager, I might suggest that the Agile and Scrum the daily stand-up isn't for you. While I appreciate your need to know what's going on with the team, in Agile and Scrum, the daily stand-up isn't there to provide status to managers. The purpose of the meeting is for the team to get together and co-ordinate the work that needs to be done in order to meet their Sprint goals. So while you may be able to…

> Since you are a manager, I might suggest that the Agile and Scrum the daily stand-up isn't for you

I definitely agree with this. Standups/scrums have become much more productive since management stopped attending. It's hardly a "status" meeting any more -- sure, we talk about what we're working on, but there's a lot of jumping in by other team members with suggestions, help, or "I was going to do something similar, let's coordinate after the meeting".

Re: Standups are Not Poisonous

#124

Post by Morcane »

paulrademacher wrote: post #65
brazzy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe ist's a combination of never having experienced the monstrosities agile was invented to replace, having experienced agile done wrong, and natural cowboy coder hybris.

In my experience, the "cowboy coder" is sometimes indeed disruptive (large unannounced refactors, e.g.), but almost always they are the most productive people on the team, the ones who contribute the best and most code.

well, in my experience, cowboy coders fuck up, leave and have others fix the mess they left.
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