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The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

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Re: The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

#21

Post by jconley »

The standup questions are awkward motivation killers. The people that look good in those meetings are usually just pandering. I'm convinced standups have stuck around because they make managers feel like they're adding value. If people are waiting until the next workday to be unblocked your team is moving too slowly.

On the flip side having the team chat regularly is a value add. Maybe you can talk about upcoming product things, ideas people have, the market in general, and any other thoughts people have top of mind. But forcing everyone to talk about what they're working on is counter productive. Everyone on the team knows if they want to know. If there isn't team visibility to what everyone is working on then something else is broken.

Re: The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

#22

Post by johnny99k »

ipaddr wrote: post #13
ng12 wrote: post #5

The primary point of standup is to make sure the team gets face-time together every day to talk about their shared workload. Humans are social creatures and getting everyone together for a few minutes is a pretty high ROI activity.

The primary purpose is provide highlights that can be sold as stories for management. If you are looking for a social event that's what happens at lunch over an hour while sitting not a 5 minute standup where everyone is trying to say just enough so they can get back to work. It's sad the standups are considered a social event. Back in the good old days you finished your work chilled on a cheap startup couch while tw…

How do you meet up at a bar when your team is 1000 miles away?

Re: The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

#23

Post by jwagenet »

operatingthetan wrote: post #11
ipaddr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate standup culture. If you have a blocker waiting until the next morning is so wasteful.

The process isn't to wait until the next standup. Asking for blockers is the manager's way of ensuring no-one is keeping a blocker from them. A functional team would have devs who float blockers when the arise and most of the time they would answer the question with "no blockers."

This is in contention with the usual developer gripe about being interrupted from focus. Sometimes the blocker is your teammate who doesn’t like interruptions. Or a junior has been told to or assumes they need to “figure it out” and wastes a bunch of time instead of asking.

Re: The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

#24

Post by nerdponx »

ipaddr wrote: post #13
ng12 wrote: post #5

The primary point of standup is to make sure the team gets face-time together every day to talk about their shared workload. Humans are social creatures and getting everyone together for a few minutes is a pretty high ROI activity.

The primary purpose is provide highlights that can be sold as stories for management. If you are looking for a social event that's what happens at lunch over an hour while sitting not a 5 minute standup where everyone is trying to say just enough so they can get back to work. It's sad the standups are considered a social event. Back in the good old days you finished your work chilled on a cheap startup couch while tw…

> The primary purpose is provide highlights that can be sold as stories for management.

Speak for yourself. My team has a small window of overlapping time zones and it's a valuable opportunity to get everyone together and sync on all our projects. But our work is all loosely interrelated, so that's actually something we need to do.

It's not a "social event" in the sense that you all get to hang out and make friends. It's a social event in the sense that it's an opportunity to verbally engage with your colleagues in a group setting.

I agree that standup makes little sense on a team of people who are all working on unrelated projects. The silliest thing you can do here is assume that what works for you will work for everyone, and what doesn't work for you won't work for anyone.

Re: The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

#25

Post by bluGill »

throwaway9191aa wrote: post #16

These three questions are intended to keep standups short. I haven't, personally, been on a team that sticks to this format. It always ends up with individuals talking about their individual implementation thoughts on whatever they are working on. During this time, others zone out, missing anything that could be important. Nobody learns anything, and nobody is able to fully concentrate on their tasks. I purposefully…

I had 8 people in standup today, the whole meeting took 4 minutes - mostly because of 2 people who had some after meeting news to share. As the team tech lead I need to keep track of what everyone is doing and just looking at stories in progress isn't enough to know if they are making progress or I need to jump in. (most of the time they are or they ask questions after the meeting). There is value in everyone knowing how the current story is progressing, but it should only be a few minutes. I run my standup 3x week as I don't need this daily, but I need to keep track that things are happening.

Re: The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

#26

Post by MajimasEyepatch »

throwaway9191aa wrote: post #16

These three questions are intended to keep standups short. I haven't, personally, been on a team that sticks to this format. It always ends up with individuals talking about their individual implementation thoughts on whatever they are working on. During this time, others zone out, missing anything that could be important. Nobody learns anything, and nobody is able to fully concentrate on their tasks. I purposefully…

This is easily solved by just having a facilitator who actually facilitates. Whether that's a scrum master, a manager, a team lead, or just a member of the team who isn't afraid to cut people off, it really is not that hard to keep standups to 15 minutes, maybe 20 for a team that big.

Re: The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

#27

Post by al_borland »

It seems like a decent jumping off point for young teams, but any question asked daily will become routine. I know on my team most people reflexively say, “no blockers,” at the end of their standup, even when they have blockers. In some cases they just talked about their blockers for several minutes while talking about what they were working on, then claimed there were no blockers.

Mixing it up and asking different questions from time to time can help get people to actually think and provide some new answers.

Re: The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

#28

Post by tra3 »

Stand ups suck, long live stand ups. It's like any other meeting, signal to noise ratio is quite low, but what's the alternative? I love remote work, hope to never go back into an office, but humans are social animals. I feel like if I don't get some face time with people, communication becomes challenging. Chalk it up to overhead.

Re: The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

#29

Post by SilverBirch »

I think context is really important. The design of the stand up was meant to be a light touch checkin at regular intervals just to make sure we're staying aligned and people aren't getting stuck on stuff. So criticisms like

>Focuses on activity, not outcomes

Isn't really valid, because the standup isn't where you discuss outcomes, that's a separate thing that alredy happened, we've already decided the activities you're doing and how they align to outcomes. We don't need to rehash that daily.

>Doesn’t reveal any information about when that work will be completed

Again, there's a separate process for that.

I think it's a fair point that if you're doing standups, and you're not doing them as part of a broader agile framework then yes - maybe you do need to think about what role the standup fills and therefore what questions to ask. But if you're actually trying to follow something like Scrum then those questions are not stand up questions, there's a separate process for that.

Re: The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

#30

Post by dctoedt »

I've found what could be called the SPUR agenda to be useful: Status; Plans; Uncertainties; Risks.†

† As I understand it, in economics, "uncertainties" are things that simply can't be known; "risks" are things that have known outcome possibilities but it's not (yet) known which will happen, e.g., which sides of a pair of dice will come up. This is from a book I'm reading, Fluke, by Brian Klass.

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