31–40 of 156 posts
Waiting until the next standup to resolve blockers is clearly not efficient.
What I've observed during standups is mostly people staring at the void waiting their turn and a few obnoxious nerds trying to bullshit their way up the hierarchy by talking way too much for their own good.
The best communication I've seen was during brainstorm meetings.
Our team does our stand-ups in Slack, in a separate channel called "#daily-status". Every morning, each team member posts a short bullet list of the items they are planning on working on that day, along with details about any things they are blocked by. This happens asynchronously as people start working every day, so one person might post their message at 7 am, while another person posts at 10 am. Any conversation t…
The whole purpose of daily standups is to be short, to the point, and force developers to discuss blockers. That can't be async, because I need the other members of the team to answer. The issue the author is addressing is that for some, this is wasted time. But a) that's why these meetings are short, thus the standing up part, and b) Usually it isn't but an opportunity for more seniors to chime in with suggestions.…
The manager and project manager are there to glare at anyone who isn't "maintaining velocity".
I think if your standup can be async, then it's ineffective, and you should get rid of it. And to be clear, that's fine! Not every team needs standups. The only value in a standup is when team members actually share ideas about what they're working on. The detailed conversation happens outside the standup, but the purpose of the standup is just to get that moment of "I know about that, let's talk". In that case, havi…
I agree, with one caveat:
If you tell engineers that standups can go async or be cancelled if they're ineffective, they will find creative ways to make the standups ineffective.
Poorly run standups are bad. Standups where the engineers are half-engaged are bad. But having a well-run standup that synchronizes the team, spreads vital information, and keeps people accountable is truly valuable.
However, a good standup requires everyone to put in effort to keep it useful, fast, and on track. If everyone decides that standups are a waste of time, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the leads have to pull unprepared reports out of each individual, summarize things because people aren't listening to each other, start over because people are arriving late, and so on. If you tell people the standup can go away if it's bad, you've accidentally incentivized those people to make it bad enough to get it cancelled.
In my opinion, standups are useless - asynchronous or not. Waiting until the next standup to resolve blockers is clearly not efficient. What I've observed during standups is mostly people staring at the void waiting their turn and a few obnoxious nerds trying to bullshit their way up the hierarchy by talking way too much for their own good. The best communication I've seen was during brainstorm meetings.
The whole purpose of daily standups is to be short, to the point, and force developers to discuss blockers. That can't be async, because I need the other members of the team to answer. The issue the author is addressing is that for some, this is wasted time. But a) that's why these meetings are short, thus the standing up part, and b) Usually it isn't but an opportunity for more seniors to chime in with suggestions.…
Am I the only one who raises a flag immediately when there is a blocker? Why would I wait until the next day?
In my experience, async standups mean everyone posts their status and does not read any other status. Counterpoint: In my experience, at synchronous standups, people totally ignore everyone until its their time to speak, and then share an update, and then go back to not listening.
That has been my experience, too.
Going async sends a message that people don't need to care about what their team members are working on. That's a dream come true for the people who just want to pull Jira tickets out of the queue, finish them in isolation, and then collect a paycheck.
However, it doesn't make for great team cohesion and knowledge sharing. Teams end up compensating with extra meetings and coordination overhead, which starts to defeat the point of async standups.