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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

#71
post #67
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the purpose. It isn't to just sit and wait till the next day to get help. It's to highlight issues that could not be resolved in that time frame, and pointing out that help (or intervention) is necessary. It's the equivalent of saying "Service X was down yesterday, still hasn't come up, and if nothing is done about it, we'll lose another day." In teams without standups, these blockers could go on for s…

Server is still down today.. we can forget about it until tomorrow meeting. Look it's still down. Cancel the standup and go work on the server. A meeting around this issue with people from other teams/external actors causing the blockage is the help you need. Not a daily status meeting. The standup rarely helps here

> Cancel the standup and go work on the server.

If someone spent 3 hours on it the previous day and couldn't get it to work, that extra 15 minutes on it are not really critical, wouldn't you agree?

> The standup rarely helps here

The standup is not intended to solve the problem, but to inform. It's to say "Hey, it's down. Tried all day to get stakeholders to work on it. It's still down because X[1]. We may not hit our commits for this sprint (or month, or quarter, or whatever)".

The goal is to keep everyone on the same page, and make a point of sync. They could have emailed this out, but in my experience, half the team isn't going to read the emails. Or they'll read it and forget it immediately because they're busy with Y. As much as people like to say it, I've found highlighting blockers in the SUM more effective.

At the other end of the spectrum, you don't want a "Oh, the server went down 5 days ago so I couldn't work on X" to be followed with "Why didn't you tell us?!" With the SUM, a lot of those surprises go away.

As an aside, in SUM-less teams, I often have seen "Why didn't you tell us?!" followed by a response pointing to the email that was sent 3 days ago telling everyone. With the SUM, if you have a good scrum master (external to your team), he will force everyone not to ignore it: "OK, this person has been blocked for 3 days due to an external team. Can anything be done about it? If not, I think it's time to inform management/stakeholders of the delay in their timelines".

As another aside: The other purpose of the SUM is to prevent someone from doing something wrong for days on end. It's common to have someone say he's blocked because of X, to be told straight away "What are you doing? You don't need X at all! We need to talk" The conversation resumes between the two after the SUM. In Scrumless teams, I've seen people work on the wrong thing for weeks because no on else knew the developer misunderstood the problem.

BTW, I'm not a fan of Scrum. When done well, it's great. But it rarely is done well. However, I've not seen Scrumless teams perform better than one with an effective Scrum. And a poorly run Scrum is often the worst of them all.

[1] X could be the team responsible isn't responding, has higher priorities, are working on it but haven't resolved it, etc.

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

#72
post #19
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.

> but in a well-functioning team

I think the routine maintenance is key for staying well-functioning. The problem is that once things are not functioning well it may be too far along to fix.

So it’s like saying why should married couples have routine date nights because if they were well functioning, they wouldn’t need to schedule. The point is to function well and it’s a useful technique.

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

#73
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And kids aren’t doing their job by saying “nothing.”

It’s easier to change the questions to improve responses.

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

#74
I'm surprised to not see not more agreement on here so far. I personally find the three questions rote, boring, and coming up with content that feels satisfactory is a chore. I agree with trying to think critically about the goals of the practice and whether the default standard practice is best serving those goals.

But that's just me, and if a team collectively likes the time and the ritual, then they should keep it.

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

#75
post #62
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, my team rarely reports blockers but when they do it's almost always some external factor. If they are reporting the same thing multiple days in a row, I can light a fire under someone's ass, otherwise I might not even know about it.

Why does your staff tell you right away that the timeline has been pushed because of this and why do you need to be told daily? Gantt charts exist for a reason

Excuse me? I didn't say anything at all about the timeline being pushed. You literally just made that up. Talk about strawmen.

Blockers that are reported on daily standups are things that can be worked around for now but will become problematic if not fixed. If something preventing my team from doing literally any part of their job they'd report it right away, of course.

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

#76

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'…

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

#77

I think that the author is making a mountain out of a molehill. But even aside from that, they don't really give an argument for the thesis. Things like "Focuses on activity, not outcomes" are not evidence for something being harmful. It's just arguing against buzzwords with buzzwords.

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

#78
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And kids aren’t doing their job by saying “nothing.” It’s easier to change the questions to improve responses.

Yeah but that's to be expected because they are kids. If your coworkers act like children, that's a problem; they should act like adults because they should be adults. What's easy usually isn't what's right.

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

#79

I'm surprised to not see not more agreement on here so far. I personally find the three questions rote, boring, and coming up with content that feels satisfactory is a chore. I agree with trying to think critically about the goals of the practice and whether the default standard practice is best serving those goals. But that's just me, and if a team collectively likes the time and the ritual, then they should keep it…

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The point is that it's a teammate who wouldn't ordinarily be involved in resolving the issue. There's still value in them learning about it.

Sometimes, but most of the time it's probably going to waste their time (times ten).
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