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Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

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Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#91

Post by detaro »

a_ranom_dev wrote: post #90
lbriner wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know you mean well with your comment, but I secretly suspect that you are actually saying that you like your team and think this is jerk behavior. I have never seen how a standup actually helped team cohesion. Being called to stand in front of the middle manager and say your spiel about how soon you'll be done doesn't help team cohesion, unless you mean by simply submitting to the same crap the others are. Team coh…

If your standup meeting is "stand in front of the middle manager", you're doing it wrong(tm). As with all things "agile", many places love the labels, don't understand the ideas. In my (limited) experience, standup meeting involving leaders only work if the leader is clearly part of the team (and e.g. the pressure to get things done comes from outside).

Of course, that doesn't help you if you're stuck in an organization doing it badly.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#93

Post by balfirevic »

When I was put in charge of a new team for a new project at my previous company, we did the most agile thing there is. We got together and asked ourselves (all of us having previously been on teams that had daily standups): "So, what do you all think, is the daily standup worth it? No? Alright, let's try without it."

It worked great. We ended up doing a quick meetings 1-2 times a week to sync-up and get the idea of where we are. Any blockers would be brought up informally (through Slack or in-person). We all knew each other well, so trust was high to begin with. Also, it was a relatively small team of 5 people.

I guess the point is that "having daily standups" is not agile. Regularly asking yourselves if they are or would be useful (whatever the answer may be) is.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#94

Post by djKianoosh »

TomMarius wrote: post #43
djKianoosh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow this would suck in a 20 person standup

Why would you have 20 person standups?

because government project? although I imagine this happens in non-gov settings too, this is just my experience.

Here's the reason: managers are so spread thin that they don't want to be in 5-10 standups all morning, so they combine around organizational structures rather than product(s)/deliverable(s). Another case of the software delivery matching org structure...

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#95

Post by djKianoosh »

bmcfeeley wrote: post #48
djKianoosh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow this would suck in a 20 person standup

I know we tend to have little control over this as ICs, but I think the party line here is that 20 is too many people to effectively make use of most agile/scrum ceremonies. Do you actually need to know all 19 other persons’ updates?

Individuals don't, but the managers, who may be well meaning, feel the need to.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#96

Post by seer »

lowercased wrote: post #57
seer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about information sharing, dailies are crappy for that anyways. You should always have async information centre so people can get up to speed. The idea is to be able to share the squishy emotional human bit of working with a team of people. Without it I've seen people just slowly drift apart. You'd see a comment from a coworker on your PR and be like "argh who is this guys think he is! He's totally wrong" bu…

> You'd see a comment from a coworker on your PR and be like "argh who is this guys think he is! He's totally wrong" but if you can talk with him about it in video it becomes a lot less confrontational. You can apologise and be apologised to. Unless that doesn't happen. Perhaps he digs in his heels that he's "right" when he's demonstrably wrong? Or 'he' is the team lead, and it doesn't matter whether he's right or wr…

Well one thing that "How to win friends and Influence People", "Never split the difference" and "Non Violent Communication" in general has thought me is that it's very hard to "convince someone you're right". Dealing with people successfully to win them to your cause is a very hard skill to master, one that I'm struggling with myself.

A better strategy I think is to try to get emotionally in sync with the other person first. Win them as a friend so to speak. And visual queues in that case become paramount. Co-location is even better, but we're talking about remote now don't we.

People sadly don't usually listen to the facts, especially if there's an argument, and double that if the argument is public (more than two people involved). It requires enormous emotional courage to admit someone's right before a lot of people, so we hardly every do it. That's what most of the advice from those books is to get to know people first, gain their trust and talk to their emotions rather than the facts.

Dailies are not meant to fix that I think, more like keep the team working in the long run if it had a good start, and help leaders find out about problems quickly and address them elsewhere.

Going off topic a bit though but in your example - a team lead that's going off to a demonstrably wrong direction - well they have more things on their mind than that particular thing probably, "does my team listen to me" might be one of them or "other business consideration that we're not privy to" is another.

One way to approach this is to support them publicly but have a one-on-one with them and express your concerns, without personal judgement and the like. After which you can ask them to help you with a particular task, preferably one that you know will hit the problem where you've thought the direction would be bad. And never say "I told you so!" Help them through the arising situation and bam! You will have them on your side plus the project would be moving in a good direction.

Also a lot of times it might turn out that this direction was actually preferable. You'll get to say "yeah you were totally right" and win them to your side as well, and learn a new thing in the process!

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#97

Post by dragonwriter »

djKianoosh wrote: post #40
andy_boot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also noticed this. We came up with a variant to fix this. You have to say what the next person in the circle said they'd do yesterday before your talk. This forced everyone to pay more attention as you don't know who would be standing next to you tomorrow. It wasn't easy to do but I think it did make people more aware of what was going on.

wow this would suck in a 20 person standup

Well, yes, a 20 person standup is a little more than twice the maximum size conventional wisdom holds is appropriate, so it is going to suck to start with and much advice for normal 5-9 person stand-ups will be counterproductive and make it worse.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#98

Post by mattmanser »

detaro wrote: post #91
a_ranom_dev wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you mean well with your comment, but I secretly suspect that you are actually saying that you like your team and think this is jerk behavior. I have never seen how a standup actually helped team cohesion. Being called to stand in front of the middle manager and say your spiel about how soon you'll be done doesn't help team cohesion, unless you mean by simply submitting to the same crap the others are. Team coh…

If your standup meeting is "stand in front of the middle manager", you're doing it wrong(tm). As with all things "agile", many places love the labels, don't understand the ideas. In my (limited) experience, standup meeting involving leaders only work if the leader is clearly part of the team (and e.g. the pressure to get things done comes from outside). Of course, that doesn't help you if you're stuck in an organizat…

It doesn't matter if it's a manager or your peers, you shouldn't have to justify your work every single day.

It's childish and immature and if you for some reason need to do it to be able to communicate, learn how to communicate properly, don't foist your miserable way of working on others.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#99

Post by TomMarius »

djKianoosh wrote: post #94
TomMarius wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you have 20 person standups?

because government project? although I imagine this happens in non-gov settings too, this is just my experience. Here's the reason: managers are so spread thin that they don't want to be in 5-10 standups all morning, so they combine around organizational structures rather than product(s)/deliverable(s). Another case of the software delivery matching org structure...

Of course the next question in line is "why is a manager involved in the standup?"

> because government project? although I imagine this happens in non-gov settings too, this is just my experience.

Why not split into smaller work groups? What's the advantage of 20 person teams?

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#100

Post by spzb »

mmsimanga wrote: post #84
balfirevic wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This point is dealt with in the article. People have different traveling arrangements. In my case sometimes I have to drop off my child at school and head in after the morning rush hour. So daily stand up is not first thing in the morning.

I worked on a project where we had the daily scrum (by conference call) at 4pm, precisely because people all started work at different times. All that that achieved was to mean that I was unproductive from about 2pm because I was thinking "if I get into something now I'll get interrupted before I properly finish it"
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