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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

#41

Post by kstrauser »

JohnFen wrote: post #19
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.

Standups could make sense in a team that isn't operating well, but in a well-functioning team, everyone is having these sorts of discussions with each other during the natural course of each workday anyway. Standups are unnecessary then. My experience with standups is that they're almost entirely worthless. They're rote and performative and rarely, if ever, provide anything that was missing.

I disagree. Especially with remote teams, standups are how I find out that other people on the opposite end of my team are blocked on something I can easily help them with, or that they're doing something that has implications on my own work. I communicate with some people continually. There are others I'd hardly see if it weren't for standups.

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

#42

Post by zeeed »

CalChris wrote: post #3

Any blockers? If blockers have been resolved immediately then the short answer to the question will be no . Otherwise it will be yes . Sounds like a decent question to me.

A better version I recently came across is “is there anything you need from anybody?”

This includes the classic “blocker” but besides that opens up for interesting conversations, encourages cooperation and isn’t overly management focused.

For the manager it helps uncover potentially hidden dependencies or team animosities.

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

#43

Post by QuercusMax »

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…

Meeting up over lunch doesn't work for remote teams. Nothing worse than eating while on camera. No thank you, I've tried and it's really not great. Especially if you have a hybrid team where some people are in the office eating together in a conference room and some are remote solos, the dynamics get really weird.

One of the biggest benefits to a synchronous standup is you know everyone has showed up and is available to discuss work stuff. With remote teams and flexible schedules, having a hard sync point helps people communicate better, even if it's just "hey, let's stay on the call (or start a new one) for an extra 10 minutes to sort this out" instead of spending hours or days in async communication.

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

#44

Post by Domenic_S »

jconley wrote: post #21

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 pro…

> make managers feel like they're adding value.

Managers don't need to attend.

> If people are waiting until the next workday to be unblocked your team is moving too slowly.

Nobody said anything about waiting. Getting blocked can come up after yesterday's standup and still be an issue lesss than 24 hours later despite working on it.

> If there isn't team visibility to what everyone is working on then something else is broken.

Some people don't claim/update their tickets. Most people don't update their tickets with progress every day. Most people don't push WIP branches (and if they did, who has the time to look thru the entire team's WIP code?). Teammates on the ground are interested in what, specifically, their peers are working on and thinking about overlap/potential conflicts on the ground.

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

#45

Post by leetrout »

MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #37
JohnFen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standups could make sense in a team that isn't operating well, but in a well-functioning team, everyone is having these sorts of discussions with each other during the natural course of each workday anyway. Standups are unnecessary then. My experience with standups is that they're almost entirely worthless. They're rote and performative and rarely, if ever, provide anything that was missing.

It's still valuable to share information about progress and impediments with the whole team. Alice and Bob may have some blocker that they've been communicating about, but Chris wasn't a part of those one-on-one conversations, so the standup gives him some valuable context about what's going on with the rest of the team. Maybe his work depends on something Bob was supposed to complete today that's going to take a few…

If you need a designated meeting for communicating with your teammate you already failed the qualification of highly functioning team.

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

#46

Post by bluGill »

jwagenet wrote: post #23
operatingthetan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> a junior has been told to or assumes they need to “figure it out” and wastes a bunch of time instead of asking.

Often you don't even know. More than once I've discovered someone working on a complex problem - they were making progress so didn't realize that someone else already had a solution and so they could save days of effort by asking the right person the right question.

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

#47

Post by leetrout »

kstrauser wrote: post #41
JohnFen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standups could make sense in a team that isn't operating well, but in a well-functioning team, everyone is having these sorts of discussions with each other during the natural course of each workday anyway. Standups are unnecessary then. My experience with standups is that they're almost entirely worthless. They're rote and performative and rarely, if ever, provide anything that was missing.

I disagree. Especially with remote teams, standups are how I find out that other people on the opposite end of my team are blocked on something I can easily help them with, or that they're doing something that has implications on my own work. I communicate with some people continually. There are others I'd hardly see if it weren't for standups.

This is exactly what the parent is calling out. Using a standup as a bandaid for fundamental team behavior.

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

#48

Post by ado__dev »

I disagree. They're a great way to quickly get a status update on how things are progressing, what progress is going to be made today, and what is potentially blocking that progress.

Stand-ups meetings by definition are activity focused and not outcome focused. You don't need a daily reminder of what the outcome is, but you do need a daily status update as to how you're moving towards achieving that outcome.

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

#49

Post by ironmagma »

bluGill wrote: post #35
ironmagma wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are too specific, formulaic, and reek of management tactics. If you mean, "how's it going?", say, "how's it going?" As the wise Dr. Seuss said, "I meant what I said and I said what I meant."

Hows it going is too vague for many. Every ask a kid what they learned at school today? The answer is always "nothing", or silence. You need to ask a different question to get a good answer. Which is one reason look for and ask different questions - if may break someone out of a rut.

If you answer "fine" to "how's it going" at standup, you aren't doing your job. It's not the prompt that needs to be specific, it's the engineer. If there are follow up questions, those can be asked, but asking the same three specific but thoughtless questions is just like having a form you have to fill out any time you make a change.

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

#50

Post by bradley13 »

Honestly, any and all of these fads - Scrum or whatever - are just ways for poor managers to feel important. Oh, and for expensive consultants to earn money.

If you have a solid team, literally any methodology will work. The best methodology is the one the team chooses, and that may well change for each particular project.

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