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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

#81

Post by maxcoder4 »

BeetleB wrote: post #71
ipaddr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

This sound eerie and exotic to me. In what world when server is down people wait for the next standup to announce it? Why not just create a shared channel (slack, teams, mattermost, irc, whatever the company standardized on) and use it to communicate asynchronously and resolve problems like that immediately?

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

#82

Post by verve_rat »

QuercusMax wrote: post #43
ipaddr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or just message someone and ask them if they have a few minutes for a call?

Why do you need a extra meeting to have a sync point to ask for a quick chat.

Just fucking talk to your team mates! Is everyone in kindergarten now?

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

#83

Post by BeetleB »

maxcoder4 wrote: post #81
BeetleB wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ou…

This sound eerie and exotic to me. In what world when server is down people wait for the next standup to announce it? Why not just create a shared channel (slack, teams, mattermost, irc, whatever the company standardized on) and use it to communicate asynchronously and resolve problems like that immediately?

> In what world when server is down people wait for the next standup to announce it?

I'm not sure why this is so strange to you. There are many possible scenarios where a server can be down, with varying levels of severity/impact to our team.

It happens all the time. I have 4 things to do. One of them involves a server (that we don't own). It goes down. I file a ticket and work on the other 3 things. It doesn't need to be resolved immediately. But if it isn't resolved in 2+ days, it may affect our timelines. People should know. If it got resolved in a few hours, I've wasted people's time by emailing them.

If it's critical and we need it resolved ASAP, sure - email/IM others in your team immediately to let them know.

> Why not just create a shared channel (slack, teams, mattermost, irc, whatever the company standardized on) and use it to communicate asynchronously and resolve problems like that immediately?

This was answered in my comment: People often ignore it. I can't count how often I've been in non-SUM teams where a developer is asked "Why didn't you tell us?" only to have him whip out one (or several) emails/IMs where he did tell it. Calling it out (repeatedly) in a SUM gives other developers less deniability, and the SM will highlight it: "This person has pointed out 3 days in a row. What's preventing it from being fixed?"

But the question for you: Are you always going to leave it to the individual developer to decide what is important to tell others? He may view it as unimportant whereas others believe it is. Making them explicitly say it as a blocker in a daily meeting ensures the disconnect doesn't last long.

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

#84

Post by tetrisgm »

We've eliminated a lot of the structures of scrum from our team and it's helping be flexible and happier.

Since we don't have any meetings besides when we actually need to be available to coworkers, standup is now a time for us to hang. "What do you have going on?". Sometimes it's sharing an idea, sometimes it's a blocker, or it's to show off a little demo of what they did.

It's not a Frankenstein of postmortem and playtesting and demos and tgif, it's just being there for the team every day.

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

#85

Post by JohnFen »

prepend wrote: post #72
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.

> 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.

But since in a well-functioning team everyone knows where everyone else is already, there is nothing that can be said in a standup that isn't already on everyone's radar.

Maybe I'm just unusually fortunate to have mostly worked on well-functioning teams.

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

#86

Post by prepend »

ironmagma wrote: post #78
prepend wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not acting like children. It’s acting like humans.

If it’s easier to tweak questions or retrain everyone on my team, me included, I’m going with the easier path every time.

In this case easy is right because the specific question isn’t what’s important. What’s important is the community, discussion, and information shared.

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

#87

Post by prepend »

JohnFen wrote: post #85
prepend wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But since in a well-functioning team everyone knows where everyone else is already, there is nothing that can be said in a standup that isn't already on everyone's radar. Maybe I'm just unusually fortunate to have mostly worked on well-functioning teams.

Part of the way they achieve that knowledge is through the standup though.

Maybe you are super fortunate. Standups are just one method too. It’s not like it’s dogma and must be followed.

But it’s a useful technique. So saying it’s unnecessary seems odd. At least generally speaking.

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

#88

Post by poundofshrimp »

Talking about what I did/what I’m planning to do on a regular cadence forces me to reflect on my time spent and makes me more focused. I also love hearing what others are up to because it promotes collaboration between us. The latter point is completely ignored by the author.

However, the blockers question is a waste of time. Blockers should be resolved as fast as possible, not wait until the next scheduled meeting.

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

#89

Post by ironmagma »

prepend wrote: post #86
ironmagma wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not acting like children. It’s acting like humans. If it’s easier to tweak questions or retrain everyone on my team, me included, I’m going with the easier path every time. In this case easy is right because the specific question isn’t what’s important. What’s important is the community, discussion, and information shared.

I don’t think so. People know what the purpose of a standup is. You don’t even need a prompt to get one going, just have everyone go around in a circle and talk. They will do it automatically. Isn’t this basically the point of the article?

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

#90

Post by jacknews »

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.

Agreed.

I also do not see any value in the current questions; individual status should be communicated with in a tracking tool.

The standup is a chance to get everyone together, raise and share any issues or clever solutions or whatever, maybe get a 'feel' for status, and tell some jokes. It should be short, maybe extremely short sometimes.

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