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Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

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Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#71

Post by twic »

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 story/feature/etc and work on it until it's done. You might jump around in the codebase to build that feature, but you work on one feature. That's easy and natural to describe in a standup.

If you're not doing that, then indeed, it's going to be hard to talk about what you've done.

But to be honest, what you're doing is almost certainly not very effective, so maybe stop doing that?

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#72

Post by lbriner »

twic wrote: post #65
einpoklum wrote: post #3

This kind of daily meetings make me feel like I'm standing trial for my crimes. Especially if I've had a bad/down/unproductive day, which happens. Maybe it's better when you take away the power relations. And reduce the frequency during non-critical periods.

Making classic standups useful and comfortable definitely requires psychological safety. You need to feel like you can occasionally say "worked on X, didn't make any progress", and a manager or a rival isn't going to pounce on you for it. If you don't have pervasive psychological safety, there's a lot of stuff from XP that isn't going to work.

Exactly what I was about to say. There are many things that are dismissed in team culture because of the fear of feeling exposed or blamed but that is an issue of culture and/or insecurity, not a disadvantage of using agile methods.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#73

Post by sime2009 »

rumanator wrote: post #56
sime2009 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a simple solution to this. After the board is done someone can just ask "Has anyone got anything else to add?"

>>There is a simple solution to this. After the board is done someone can just ask "Has anyone got anything else to add?" That doesn't cut it. Being expected to talk about stuff doesn't put you on the spot, and purposely requesting the team to address a concern makes you stand out as the one creating problems where none existed.

If team members need to be directly asked if they see problems otherwise they won't do it themselves, then there is a much bigger trust or "safety" issue at play.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#74

Post by lbriner »

bitL wrote: post #15
seer wrote: post #6

I think they are worth it for remote teams. Most of the work comms can be easily done in slack, but there’s definitely a benefit of making people talk to each other and express emotions at least once a day. Normal offices accomplish that with water cooler talk and informal chatter, but you miss on that with remote teams. There might be a better way to solve the “loosing of esprit de corps” thing but dailies are the e…

Why not weekly? Or twice a week? Advantage of remote is that you can prioritize incoming information and everybody is onboard with asynchronous communication by default.

Agile is about moving things fast from left-to-right. Way too many people do not put their hands up when they get stuck, they just keep soldering on. The daily is the chance to either unstick or to put difficult tasks back into the pot - something the Scrum Master will be more qualified/willing to do to unblock than the developer will be assuming it will make them look bad.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#75

Post by lbriner »

mcv wrote: post #29

I think they're absolutely worth it. The interruption of flow is minor, because they're predictable. You can plan around them. If you're working on something really complex and urgent, I don't mind if you skip it occasionally (but don't make that a habit). I think it's good to start the day together, with some idea of what everybody is working on. It helps to detect some issues that otherwise might be ignored or dete…

Yeah, nothing worse than finding out that someone has implemented something that you've already done somewhere else because you didn't know it was being worked on.

Short is definitely good as is the chance to chip in a bit of unsolicited advice from one dev to another ;-)

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#76

Post by balfirevic »

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…

> This is why you do the standup first thing, before people have started working. There is no flow to interrupt.

That requires all the people to come to work at the same time.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#77

Post by twic »

rumanator wrote: post #18
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…

It should be noted that the "round robin" format has an important aspect which is to enable each team member to air his/her personal grievances regarding anything related to the project.

I think putting this in terms of "grievances" isn't helpful. Blockers, problems, observations, are all useful to report.

"Worked on adding discounts to the shopping cart page. Went over to talk to Chris in billing about that, and he mentioned in passing that they are planning to move on to SAP next year."

That could be incredibly important information for the team! It doesn't come up as naturally when working through stories as in a round robin.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#78

Post by ljf »

a012 wrote: post #21
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…

Walking the board is effective to have all team members in the same page of what's going on. But if the amount of tickets on kanban boards is huge, it could be time consuming. I'd rather have weekly "walking the board" meeting than a daily.

Genuine question - how big is this team and how many work in progress tickets are there? For a 7 person team I'd question how many in progress tickets you genuinely could be working on, unless you are breaking down to a very very low level of task.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#79

Post by lbriner »

distantaidenn wrote: post #70
a_ranom_dev wrote: post #49

I'm sorry, stand ups are literally a psychological trick played by middle managers to put pressure on devs. They undoubtably lead to higher turnover from devs fleeing chickenshit and I've never seen one actually lead to better code.

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.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#80

Post by twic »

celticmusic wrote: post #17
petetnt wrote: post #10

I see the value in daily communication and the general topics (yesterday, today, blockers) of the dailies, but at the same time the daily standups show how the in general much of the modern work and communication has moved to asynchronous methods but the text book example still requires the events to happen in a synchronous way (eg. standup at 9 am) which obviously causes issues. Then you move forward to move say the…

I know, right? How would two consenting adults ever work together to solve problems by communicating? Thankfully we have them stand up daily, without which they'd both just continually walk into the wall like lemmings.

Don't lemmings turn round when they hit a wall?
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