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Daily standups should be async

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Re: Daily standups should be async

#81

Post by jayd16 »

mrkurt wrote: post #75
jayd16 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might fall under "non-functional team" but active listening/reading of usually banal but sometimes critical information is simply not an easy thing to do in a routine format. The information in a standup is team-wide because you do not know what will be important to who. It takes some amount of skill and discipline from the team.

We 1000% agree on this, but it's still fun to talk about. I think that's just low signal to noise. It definitely takes skill and discipline, but it's also a matter of improving habits. Standups were originally a "better habit". There's a cost, though, especially as teams are more distributed (and diverse).

Agreed. It seems like most of these problems arise from cargo culting the habits without understanding the purpose behind those habits.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#82

Post by waheoo »

Async stand ups arent stand ups.

I do a form of async stand up at work.

Its mostly progress tracking for my boss.

Never get any feedback. Never share any woth others. (Itried in the beginning)

The real time nature of a standup a d implied time pressure has all kinds of effects that cant be duplicated in a lole for like way.

Im not fully of the belief it cant be adequately substituted im just saying dont call it async standup. It just sounds like youve never used one.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#83

Post by the_other »

jeffbee wrote: post #41
stephc_int13 wrote: post #31

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.

Standups ensure your team cannot achieve anything meaningful. Imagine having a standup at the caltech physics department with Feynman et al. "What did you do since yesterday, Dick?" "Well I sat at my desk and pondered the nature of matter." "Anything blocking you?" "We don't understand the nature of matter." "What are you going to do today?" "Go down to the titty bar and ponder the nature of matter".

That’s not how you do stand-up.

It should more like: I’m struggling to imagine how so-and-so particle gets the energy to reach the next quantum state. Anyone want to share a blackboard? This is gonna take us about six pots of coffee to solve I reckon.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#84

Post by the_other »

mdu96 wrote: post #38
stephc_int13 wrote: post #31

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.

"people starting at the void waiting their turn" -- this is precisely why I think status meetings in general should be avoided!

Fair. The main problem is you’re thinking of these meetings as status meetings. They’re not about state, they’re about mutation to new state.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#85

Post by maitredusoi »

That was also one of my side project idea. But the concept should go further: with a time limit !

My idea was that you should not be allowed to speak about your daily task more than 42 second on a video record shared to all you team mates.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#86

Post by alexbanks »

mrkurt wrote: post #76
alexbanks wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm taking "Bad management" to literally mean "Bad managers", when people mean "the process of management"? Is a team that cannot self manage not (for software teams) a dev problem?

I definitely mean "the process of management". A team that can't self manage is just a bad team. You can have a lot of great people on a bad team, so I don't think it's exactly a dev problem. It's a "whoever puts teams together" problem. There are lots of people who benefit from a named manager. Expecting people to self manage who don't really want to is as bad as micro managing people. I know because I f'd this up a…

Ahhhhh - yes, totally agree with you.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#87

Post by hashmal »

protonimitate wrote: post #24
hyperpape wrote: post #6

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…

Agreed. Async stand ups are an agile smell. If you can successfully get unblocked async over slack/email/whatever, there isn't a need a for standups. That just means you have a functioning line of communication for your team. Stand ups should solve the problem of "I need to get unblocked and I can't get my teams attention effectively". If async "standups" solve that, great. But it's not a one size fits all solution,…

> Async stand ups are an agile smell.

That thinking is an agile smell. Teams choose their own processes.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#88

Post by the_other »

mdu96 wrote: post #44
ohduran wrote: post #5

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.…

Blockers usually take longer than ~15 minutes to discuss & resolve, though, and because those discussions are definitely not relevant for the rest of the group, they're not meant to be had in the standup. Instead, we think blockers should be discussed and resolved as they happen, instead of waiting for the standup the next day to report on them. and point taken on the "here's why"!

The OP confused the issue significantly, IMO, by suggesting that “let’s take this offline” was a bad thing. NO it’s half the point! Identify the blockers, identify who can help, and take the solutionising elsewhere. Also, as you say, solve the blocks as they happen. You still need the stand-up to replan now you’ve used up X amount of unplanned time unblocking something. This might impact delivery.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#89

Post by turdnagel »

> Having a regularly scheduled, synchronous meeting is incredibly disruptive

> In fact, the best teams actually unblock problems as they come up

Maybe I'm reading them wrong, but it seems to me like these two lines are in direct contradiction. Obviously if a problem is a "fire" then yeah, you want to solve it immediately.

But if the problem isn't urgent and can be worked around, why disrupt someone on your team? Overall I think the framework / pattern presented in this post doesn't take urgency or team experience into account -- in my experience, synchronous standups are great and useful for quick discussions of non-urgent blockers, especially when the team is more junior and could benefit from exposure and shared understanding.

Re: Daily standups should be async

#90

Post by waheoo »

mrkurt wrote: post #27
protonimitate wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Async stand ups are an agile smell. If you can successfully get unblocked async over slack/email/whatever, there isn't a need a for standups. That just means you have a functioning line of communication for your team. Stand ups should solve the problem of "I need to get unblocked and I can't get my teams attention effectively". If async "standups" solve that, great. But it's not a one size fits all solution,…

Agile is smelly. People getting blocked in a team small enough for a standup is a concerning smell. Bad standups are a smell, and also seem to be the norm.

I suspect all these smelly meetings might be an agile smell itself.

Maybe agile doesnt quite actually support our needs. Maybe some frequent socialising is a need. Maybe sucking every last second out of our day in the name of productivity while having zero benefit on the true goal is just one huge smell.

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