How do you feel about stand-up? As a developer, I personally do not like them, although I know others that do, both developers and managers. I rarely, if ever, have found what anyone else has said...
How do you feel about stand-up? As a developer, I personally do not like them, although I know others that do, both developers and managers. I rarely, if ever, have found what anyone else has said to be useful/helpful to me, as I am already communicating with the subset of my team I am currently collaborating with for the task at hand. Conversely, I'm pretty sure nobody has found anything I have had to say useful as well. It all seems redundant to me.
Depends a lot on how much overlap your team has. I've found the daily updates more helpful when everyone is working on the same project. I can't talk to everyone on a big team (10+) every day, and...
Depends a lot on how much overlap your team has. I've found the daily updates more helpful when everyone is working on the same project. I can't talk to everyone on a big team (10+) every day, and people often hit similar blockers.
Still, sometimes it does seem to just be for management's sake. Have you considered switching to an every-other-day frequency? Some teams only give updates on Tuesdays and Thursdays if everyone is already on the same page and communication is good.
I've always thought more or less the same thing about their efficacy. The most useful things in our stand-ups turn out to be parking lot items where, after the official standup ends, a deeper...
I've always thought more or less the same thing about their efficacy. The most useful things in our stand-ups turn out to be parking lot items where, after the official standup ends, a deeper discussion of questions that have come up since yesterday can be had. But most of the time, everyone at standup should already know about any blockers I have, because I'd have already reached out to the stakeholders about them.
If done right, I think they're worth while. It should be sufficient to say: Yesterday I worked on story 3971, which is <card summary> and today I'm spiking on <learning module> so that we can...
If done right, I think they're worth while.
It should be sufficient to say: Yesterday I worked on story 3971, which is <card summary> and today I'm spiking on <learning module> so that we can apply it to stories 3980 and 3981, unless I'm sidetracked by <meeting>
You just need a good lead enforcing that structure. It's when those meetings turn into an hour of useless solutioning, that they become a disaster.
This is extremely important. The second 2 people start going into technical discussions, or just talking about the approach of a task in general, it's time for the lead to step in and ask them to...
You just need a good lead enforcing that structure. It's when those meetings turn into an hour of useless solutioning, that they become a disaster.
This is extremely important. The second 2 people start going into technical discussions, or just talking about the approach of a task in general, it's time for the lead to step in and ask them to take it after the meeting.
It should go something like this:
Person 1: I'm blocked by <X>
Person 2: I might have a solution for that, let's discuss after this meeting.
The easiest way to avoid useless talk is to not focus on the people, but on the tasks. I still don't like standups for the same reason as OP, but the best versions I experienced had a simple...
The easiest way to avoid useless talk is to not focus on the people, but on the tasks. I still don't like standups for the same reason as OP, but the best versions I experienced had a simple structure:
Open the board
Take the top ticket in the last column and ask the team: what is blocking this ticket from moving to done? Hopefully the answer is: nothing, we just need to do the work.
Go to the next ticket in the column and repeat.
If all tickets in the last columns are done, move to the column before it and repeat.
As you move from back to front, the statuses of the tickets discussed become more and more fuzzy. This is logical, they are in the startup and design stages. Feel free to only gloss over them, or even completely skip them if the meeting is taking too long. Almost always it is in the last stages where things come together and coordination with the whole team is needed.
I lead a company with a few teams and didn’t originally create standup meetings. I had two weekly calls for people to catch up and never mandatory. But as we grew they just got created organically...
I lead a company with a few teams and didn’t originally create standup meetings. I had two weekly calls for people to catch up and never mandatory.
But as we grew they just got created organically by people who needed them. I think there’s certain people who absolutely need them to help them focus and get cantered, and because I’m not like this it’s difficult to understand it and give the appropriate tools, without accidentally stepping on the toes of those who don’t need or want the meetings.
At a previous job I did Tuesday Thursday stand-ups with a full team project check in on Mondays - it ended up being perfect imo, Tuesday Thursday stand-ups were plenty and everyone got an update...
At a previous job I did Tuesday Thursday stand-ups with a full team project check in on Mondays - it ended up being perfect imo, Tuesday Thursday stand-ups were plenty and everyone got an update from product on Mondays in case there were any changing requirements, new plans, etc.
Topics for standup were: What I did yesterday and what am I doing today
We also did no meeting Wednesdays every week to try to give everyone some deep work time.
I think traditional standups are pretty useless and waste everyone's time. We went fully remote some years ago and ended up with the following process that I like a lot: Half an hour of smalltalk...
I think traditional standups are pretty useless and waste everyone's time. We went fully remote some years ago and ended up with the following process that I like a lot:
Half an hour of smalltalk via video call for the whole team on Wednesdays. Talk can also be work-related, if necessary. It somewhat prevents the feeling of isolation that can come with remote work.
At the end of the day, everyone uses a Slack Workflow that asks you questions like "What did you do today?", "What did you learn today?", and "What blockers or problems did you encounter? Do you need help from another team member?".
Alignment meetings are scheduled when and if necessary.
Falls under my mental category of "Office Astrology". Frequent meetings to make sure everyone is up to speed is a good thing, especially in cases where "oh wait I thought X, but if you're doing Y,...
Falls under my mental category of "Office Astrology".
Frequent meetings to make sure everyone is up to speed is a good thing, especially in cases where "oh wait I thought X, but if you're doing Y, what about...." can be a tremendous time save. Catching just one instance of this kind of thing in a year can easily more than make up for all the time "wasted" where people wind up talking about what everyone already knows or doesn't care about.
However...
The whole problem is the dogmatic adherence to the "ritual" with no understanding of why. Your standup does not need to be in person. It does not need to be standing. It does not need to be once a week. If you've got a chat thread where you ping everyone and say "hey do a quick update" and you know your team is paying attention to at least that, great. Like SOOOO many of these tools, there's legit use cases for them, but they should be adapted to fit the environment. Not copy pasted because some seminar said it'd improve arbitrary metric by totally uncontrolled for %.
My standups have been fully digital since the pandemic and I don't see that changing in the near future. Part of being agile is... Well, being agile. If your current state of being requires your...
My standups have been fully digital since the pandemic and I don't see that changing in the near future. Part of being agile is... Well, being agile. If your current state of being requires your standups to not be standing up, don't do it that way!
The feeling you're obligated to do it a certain way because of tradition is precisely what this way of working should prevent.
As an aside, we've had one standing up standup a month or two ago, and it's the one I forced (read: kindly asked) everyone to stand up. There is real tangible change in the effect on mental presence through the physicality of a person. It took them out of the morning slump and made them present in that moment. Good to kickstart the brain every once in a while, not good to do it everytime and foster resentment.
100%. At my last job we used Slack and we had an entire standup channel that we'd post in every day. The conveyed information was the same as what you'd see in a traditional in person stand up,...
100%.
At my last job we used Slack and we had an entire standup channel that we'd post in every day. The conveyed information was the same as what you'd see in a traditional in person stand up, but it worked for us way better as we could go back through history, and cross link old threads / wiki / JIRA issues. The whole thing felt actually useful... we just needed to adapt the concept to how we work.
I switched from doing my master's degree full-time to working in tech for the first time ever, and I loved having stand-ups when I started. I have ADHD, so it's very easy for me to lose track of...
I switched from doing my master's degree full-time to working in tech for the first time ever, and I loved having stand-ups when I started. I have ADHD, so it's very easy for me to lose track of time and what I'm working on, and having that check-in on what I've been doing. But it's noteworthy that due to timezones, my standups are at the end of my workday, so I can use them as a "report what I've done today" more easily without forgetting overnight. Having the accountability of the standup was super refreshing especially coming from working on a master's thesis with no feedback for months from anyone.
Generally what other people share isn't particularly useful to me, but occasionally I can give a "hey I'm having trouble with this" and someone will volunteer to help out afterwards. I also like my coworkers and since we're fully remote the standup is how I most often see them and can comment on new haorcuts and things.
I will say that I think even more valuable to me than the standup is meeting one-on-one with my direct boss once or twice a week. That's where the actual discussion of plans and tasks happens. You could cancel standups now that I've gotten used to them and I don't think it'd hurt much, but those meetings with my boss are the most important thing for my productivity besides maybe my Vyvanse, and even that's a tossup.
I run them with my team every morning, after we tried it for a month last year and they liked it. We're spread across timezones and it's a useful way to coordinate, particularly when we're all on...
I run them with my team every morning, after we tried it for a month last year and they liked it. We're spread across timezones and it's a useful way to coordinate, particularly when we're all on the same project. I have a couple rules that I think are helpful (and pretty standard).
a firm time limit of 15 minutes (often we're done in 5-10min)
no troubleshooting/problem solving on the call - if that needs to happen, get the appropriate people together separately
I find it's a nice routine to start the day and the consistency has helped us build a team culture that's healthy and supportive, even though several of us have never met in person. It helps me stay informed about how everyone is and what I need to be doing to support them.
Yours is similar to the stand-ups structures I've found most useful. I've only really disliked stand-ups when they're overly long, or with poorly collaborative team-members. As a quick 5-10 minute...
Yours is similar to the stand-ups structures I've found most useful.
I've only really disliked stand-ups when they're overly long, or with poorly collaborative team-members.
As a quick 5-10 minute meeting, where 'no major updates' or 'still working on x' are perfectly acceptable updates, and teammates can feel comfortable popping that into a chat if they're double-booked? It's a great balance of aligning vs. time-commitment, and comforting to know I'll be able to get so-and-so's attention at the beginning of the day if needed.
Stand-ups are incredibly helpful on teams where inter team visibility is low, or where people are encouraged to work on whatever items suit their fancy from their swimlane. In the latter case, the...
Stand-ups are incredibly helpful on teams where inter team visibility is low, or where people are encouraged to work on whatever items suit their fancy from their swimlane. In the latter case, the stand up where people can just announce what they plan to focus on for the day or sprint is important. In the former case, there might be no other way for me to know what artist x is doing, since my team doesn't have visibility into the art team, and knowing what artist x is working on can help me adjust my own scheduling and prioritizing.
I agree with you. I think a large number of companies/managers schedule unnecessary meetings which is where the general dislike for stand ups, meetings that could've been emails, etc. stem from. I...
I agree with you. I think a large number of companies/managers schedule unnecessary meetings which is where the general dislike for stand ups, meetings that could've been emails, etc. stem from.
I also think a lot of technical people only look at it from their own POV. They know that they have good visibility into all the other teams, but is the same true the other way around? As someone who has worked a lot on both ends (technical and functional), I do not always trust people who are strictly technical because they often lack thought or insight into other peoples ways of working. More often than not I've simply had to explain a process for them and they have changed their minds about disliking it almost immediately.
One of the key concepts of agile development is "People over Process". I think this is often interpreted in an exact opposite way than intended. A lot of the processes in agile are "rituals". Like...
One of the key concepts of agile development is "People over Process". I think this is often interpreted in an exact opposite way than intended. A lot of the processes in agile are "rituals". Like stand up meetings, story time, backlog grooming. These things are all needed exactly as much as an individual team benefits from them. It's good to have a regular schedule of course, but not good just keep rituals so we can say we are doing agile.
In my experience, the most kept but least useful "process" is the standup meeting. Most of the standup meetings I've been in have too many people so we are just listening to someone talk about things I don't understand and can't help with. Instead of this ritual that is possibly just for management visibility, I can just talk to my teammates many times a day as needed.
On the other hand, one "process" that is usually thrown away is documentation. "Why do we need documentation, this is agile?". No, you still need documentation but you probably need fewer meetings. Stop throwing away the useful stuff and keeping the easy stuff that isn't useful.
Oh, I think you perfectly described what irks me about standups. They too short to get actual understanding what other people doing (I'm not a manager, I don't need/want to know how other people...
Most of the standup meetings I've been in have too many people so we are just listening to someone talk about things I don't understand and can't help with.
Oh, I think you perfectly described what irks me about standups. They too short to get actual understanding what other people doing (I'm not a manager, I don't need/want to know how other people doing their work) but they also too long and mentaly exhausting because you have to actually listen/learn about other people work.
I tolerate them because I get little out of them, but over the years have learned that other people get a lot out of them. I tend to reach out to people in charge of my blocking issues...
I tolerate them because I get little out of them, but over the years have learned that other people get a lot out of them.
I tend to reach out to people in charge of my blocking issues immediately. This means that my morning standup is just a reminder of the thing that I talked to someone about the previous afternoon. My workflow is a situation where I button up one thing and shelve it and move on to the next if I can't finish.
I have had colleagues of every age group and in wildly different company sizes that just have a different workflow. They know that we have a morning meeting where they will have the attention of the person that they need to speak to, so they just shelve their changes and go on to the next thing in silence.
Both workflows are totally valid, and if a quick chat every morning when I am sipping my coffee helps the latter workflow people keep on track, I am happy to call that a win for the team as a whole.
I don't like stand-up meeting. Too often they become "find someone to blame" game. For me it looks like stand up meetings are trying to replace meaningful collaboration between colleague with...
I don't like stand-up meeting. Too often they become "find someone to blame" game. For me it looks like stand up meetings are trying to replace meaningful collaboration between colleague with quick and dirty agile game. And too often they become another tool in unnecessary micromanagement.
So, in general, there nothing wrong with stand-up meeting but its very hard to do a correct stand-up meeting. "If you don't like Agile, then you doing it wrong" - something like this.
Sorry, but your comment is not very informative. You have feeling/opinion that this is my company/team problem. But how do you come to this opinion? Do you know why your stand-up don't feel like...
Sorry, but your comment is not very informative.
You have feeling/opinion that this is my company/team problem. But how do you come to this opinion? Do you know why your stand-up don't feel like that? Are you a PM, product owner?
I'm a software developer. My stand-ups are me and my fellow developers and software managers announcing what we've been doing, what we are doing, and what we're blocked on (if anything) since the...
I'm a software developer. My stand-ups are me and my fellow developers and software managers announcing what we've been doing, what we are doing, and what we're blocked on (if anything) since the last stand-up. I come to my opinion because I never feel like in my stand-ups that anyone, myself or the other developers, are playing a "blame game."
A person who is blaming others is choosing to blame others. A bunch of people blaming others as a "stand-up" sounds like a work culture that chooses to blame. Blaming is socially negative. My stand-ups don't feel socially negative, we do not blame others for blocks or issues. That's really it. I'm not sure how to further elaborate. It just sounds to me like a toxic work culture if stand-ups at your work feel like playing a "find someone to blame game."
This kind of defensive reaction, if shared by your team, would naturally lead to a blame game. I’ve never seen a stand up turn into this across 3 companies. They’re always really mundane and...
This kind of defensive reaction, if shared by your team, would naturally lead to a blame game.
I’ve never seen a stand up turn into this across 3 companies. They’re always really mundane and people only talk with each other to help out.
I have a strong feeling Deely is part of the problem based on their comment. However, whoever is leading the stand ups should also intervene at this point and ensure the "blame game" stops. If...
I have a strong feeling Deely is part of the problem based on their comment. However, whoever is leading the stand ups should also intervene at this point and ensure the "blame game" stops. If it's a cultural problem they need to identify if and attempt to change it, if it's an individual problem they need to have a real talk with them.
If this isn't already being done, Deely might want to have a chat with his PM/PO about it. Or at least they should try to change their own mindset and not try to be so defensive, it's OK to admit mistakes or being behind schedule.
Upd (16 hours later) other commenter (hobbes64) described what irks me about stand-ups. They too short to get actual understanding what other people doing (I'm not a manager, I don't need/want to...
Upd (16 hours later) other commenter (hobbes64) described what irks me about stand-ups.
They too short to get actual understanding what other people doing (I'm not a manager, I don't need/want to know how other people doing their work) but they also too long and mentaly exhausting because you have to actually listen/learn about other people work.
I've never found them useful. I'm either working closely enough with other people that I already know what they're up to, or I do not care what they're up to. If management needs information, they...
I've never found them useful. I'm either working closely enough with other people that I already know what they're up to, or I do not care what they're up to. If management needs information, they should gather it asynchronously.
Fun fact: the one time I've been threatened with a PIP in my career was for skipping several consecutive months of standups. They had no other complaints about me; this useless meeting was just so important to them that they were willing to fire someone for skipping it. I still don't get it.
I find this mindset so foreign and funny. If your boss says "come to this meeting" and you just... don't, of course the company is going to be pissed!
Fun fact: the one time I've been threatened with a PIP in my career was for skipping several consecutive months of standups. They had no other complaints about me; this useless meeting was just so important to them that they were willing to fire someone for skipping it. I still don't get it.
I find this mindset so foreign and funny. If your boss says "come to this meeting" and you just... don't, of course the company is going to be pissed!
Well, yeah. I understand why they were mad about it, because it looked like I was being intentionally defiant (honestly, I was mostly just sleeping in every day and showing up right after it...
Well, yeah. I understand why they were mad about it, because it looked like I was being intentionally defiant (honestly, I was mostly just sleeping in every day and showing up right after it ended, but they were explicitly not mad about hours worked or productivity, only about this one meeting).
But I don't get why they were that mad about it. Like, this is a thing that's only incidentally related to my actual job. The relationship here is they pay me, and I work on their software thing. If their software thing is being worked on to their satisfaction, it feels like they're just mad because they have slightly less control.
Isn't that almost the definition of being intentionally defiant? :) Like, I get that you weren't rubbing it in their faces, but if the expectation is "the team comes to this meeting" and you chose...
it looked like I was being intentionally defiant (honestly, I was mostly just sleeping in every day and showing up right after it ended, but they were explicitly not mad about hours worked or productivity, only about this one meeting).
Isn't that almost the definition of being intentionally defiant? :)
Like, I get that you weren't rubbing it in their faces, but if the expectation is "the team comes to this meeting" and you chose to willfully sleep in instead, that's pretty defiant to me.
But I don't get why they were that mad about it. Like, this is a thing that's only incidentally related to my actual job. The relationship here is they pay me, and I work on their software thing. If their software thing is being worked on to their satisfaction, it feels like they're just mad because they have slightly less control.
I get what you mean. From a boss's standpoint, it's sort of about the principle. It's very rarely just one thing, in my experience. What I mean by that is that there aren't a whole lot of people who will blow off the one meeting, but do what I need them to do in every other domain. It's a lot more common that the people who refuse to come to the meeting because it's not worth their time are also willing to, for instance, not follow the documentation standards because that's not worth their time either.
I'm not saying that's you, obviously. But from the boss's perspective, that's why little stuff matters. It's not that the one meeting is so important (though it might be), it's more like "if this employee picks and chooses what rules they follow, what else are they picking and choosing about?"
"Willfully" is a strong word for something that was largely caused by a severe lack of willpower, but sure, I see where you're coming from. The causes weren't visible to others; the effects were....
you chose to willfully sleep in instead
"Willfully" is a strong word for something that was largely caused by a severe lack of willpower, but sure, I see where you're coming from. The causes weren't visible to others; the effects were.
It's very rarely just one thing, in my experience. [...] It's a lot more common that the people who refuse to come to the meeting because it's not worth their time are also willing to, for instance, not follow the documentation standards because that's not worth their time either.
If they have other problems, they should tell me about them! If they consistently only bring up one problem, I am forced to conclude that is the only problem they have, or at least by far the most major one. If my documentation is lacking, why isn't that what they're complaining about? Those two things aren't reasonable proxy variables for one another, and I would argue that conflating them is lazy management.
I kinda like stand-ups, don't think they're beneficial to me though. I'm in a team in a good spot about them now though, which is a big decider of how you feel about them. Ours are pretty short,...
I kinda like stand-ups, don't think they're beneficial to me though.
I'm in a team in a good spot about them now though, which is a big decider of how you feel about them. Ours are pretty short, pretty focused, and only 2 or 3 days of the week (other days we so it async over slack).
I zone out during what other people say, and then say my piece and we're done. They seem beneficial to the EM and PM, who can get some quick updates from the whole team and ask quick clarifying questions.
The thing I like about them though, is that they're a social point for the team. We're a remote-first company that does a lot of things async, so it's a nice way of seeing other people on the team, catching up with them, and telling a joke at the end.
My favorite type of standup meeting is where the PMs in charge ask for updates so often that you might as well be in a perpetual meeting. Update: no work completed, too busy writing important updates.
My favorite type of standup meeting is where the PMs in charge ask for updates so often that you might as well be in a perpetual meeting. Update: no work completed, too busy writing important updates.
As a SW architect attending standups with developers, I like them. They help bring blockers/issues to the surface, where the answer is simple but the developer just didn't see it. From a design...
As a SW architect attending standups with developers, I like them. They help bring blockers/issues to the surface, where the answer is simple but the developer just didn't see it. From a design standpoint, they also help me detect if someone is going off the rails with a solution, usually because they either misunderstood the task or aren't very familiar with a particular technology or component in our system. The unspoken benefit is that they also hold the team accountable for delivery. Nobody wants to go to one of these meetings and say that they accomplished nothing the day before, and nobody wants to be the one who caries the same story over from sprint to sprint.
I enjoy the socializing during the first 5 minutes while everyone's hopping on the call...and that is about it. Literally nothing takes place in a stand up that couldn't be handled in Slack...
I enjoy the socializing during the first 5 minutes while everyone's hopping on the call...and that is about it. Literally nothing takes place in a stand up that couldn't be handled in Slack channel/thread/DM or a smaller meeting consisting of only the people relevant to the topic.
If it needs to be said team-wide, throw it in the team's channel.
If it needs to be said to a small group of people, throw it in that group's chat or a thread.
If it needs to be said to a single person, throw it in their DMs.
edit: Should add that mine are daily and up until very recently they consisted of anywhere from 15-25 people at a time, so they often took FOREVER. Currently mine are 5-10 people and go much quicker. But still don't get much use out of them.
They need to be quick but I'm all for them. The act of forcing myself to think big picture about what I've done since the last stand-up, what I'd like to do before the next stand-up, what parts of...
They need to be quick but I'm all for them. The act of forcing myself to think big picture about what I've done since the last stand-up, what I'd like to do before the next stand-up, what parts of what I'm doing would be interesting to my team, and how I can communicate that quickly (I aim for 30 seconds) is a great focusing exercise for me personally. YMMV of course.
I'm curious how long people's standups are, might be why some people think they're useless vs not. My standup is only 15 minutes long right before lunch and it's a good time for me to basically...
I'm curious how long people's standups are, might be why some people think they're useless vs not. My standup is only 15 minutes long right before lunch and it's a good time for me to basically let the PM know that I'm gonna be a bit behind on some work or not (I'm the only developer on my platform on my team so it's pretty isolated plus full remote.) The rest of my team also gets to say what they're working on and then we do some quick backlog grooming. Sometimes it goes over but never more than like 10 minutes and then it's lunchtime basically.
For me mostly it's also a great time to play Super Auto Pets so maybe that's why I don't hate it lol.
I only tolerate our stand ups because it brings our team into a lime light. And personally I only attend them if I'm on call (one week a month) or if I know it can be useful for the team. So the...
I only tolerate our stand ups because it brings our team into a lime light.
And personally I only attend them if I'm on call (one week a month) or if I know it can be useful for the team.
So the overall times I "suffer" trough them is pretty limited.
Also, please note that during these stand up there is always at least one of our team members present (normally the person being on call).
I wish there was a way to make the success of these meetings not dependent on how they are run. They are useful because everyone gets an overview of the project or even other projects. If run...
I wish there was a way to make the success of these meetings not dependent on how they are run. They are useful because everyone gets an overview of the project or even other projects. If run well, there may be some cross-pollination afterwards. People that tend to focus on the task at hand get to see what everyone else is doing.
But it really depends on how they are run. If it feels more like an ass-covering competition in case shit hits the fan, it will spin out into a blame game.
At the same time, it’s also a tool for managers to see if there are any parts they need to review. If they are good managers, they use the stand up to see where they can support rather than intervene.
Speaking from my own experience, I have to opposite of all that. We get a list of new projects and an overview of achievements on Monday. So it’s always much more positive than the actual issues the teams are tasked with and everyone knows it. I don’t think they figured out what a really good 15 minute stand up can do for us.
Meeting facilitation isn’t a skill people are born with, but it seems like everyone is supposed to have it with no training beyond what they see every day. If someone has never experienced a...
Meeting facilitation isn’t a skill people are born with, but it seems like everyone is supposed to have it with no training beyond what they see every day. If someone has never experienced a useful standup, they aren’t going to know how to run one unless they spend time learning to run a good standup. But they don’t find it useful, so why would they do that?
I have to compile notes from stand ups to provide status and progress to key stakeholders around the organization. They want to ensure progress on work is being made and that there are no...
I have to compile notes from stand ups to provide status and progress to key stakeholders around the organization. They want to ensure progress on work is being made and that there are no surprises that could derail project roadmaps.
It’s not enough to look at the sprint board to understand status. I can basically see if something is in progress or not. But it’s not enough for me to say, “this is being worked on” 7 days in a row and then it’s unacceptable if I say that and it won’t finish in the sprint. I need a little more details so I can catch if something is stalling out or if there are some other blockers that need to be addressed.
For any given contributor their stand ups are going to be boring and non-eventful, which is a good thing. Across the entire team there’s usually somebody providing an update where status has changed, and the only way I can get that is with a standup.
That said, I don’t need a literal standup. With a remote team just an end of day update is all I need. Most agile meetings around planning and grooming start with the classic verbal standup.
Standups are supposed to be quick. The original version required participants to stand the whole time to stress the importance of keeping the meeting short so everyone can go back to sitting. I just need what finished, what’s in progress, is everything on track and are there any blockers. Don’t really run into the overlapping code change issues often as we tend to plan for that going into a sprint.
I don’t love doing them because they’re usually uneventful, but I’ve seen countless times what happens to teams across multiple orgs that don’t do them. Sooner or later something falls through the cracks and the whole team gets slammed by the C-suite. A lot of the agile process done right ends up functioning as CYA.
So I guess also just a reminder to everyone to slightly overestimate the story points on your work. Better to be the team that finishes 100% and pulls in extra work in every sprint than the team that’s rushing to close out a sprint, burning themselves out, then getting reamed at for having carryover.
I really like them. We have a standup meeting every MWF for 30min. First 15 min, no troubleshooting or debugging allowed. Then the second 15min are debugging or troubleshooting and whomever isn’t...
I really like them. We have a standup meeting every MWF for 30min. First 15 min, no troubleshooting or debugging allowed. Then the second 15min are debugging or troubleshooting and whomever isn’t needed is free to drop from the call. Our team is a lot of people working on tasks alone, so having a regular meeting to know what people are doing has been helpful. Also, I know what people have been working on the last few months so if I have questions I know who has been doing similar things recently; before I had to ping my manager and ask him who I should talk to, or hope that someone was checking a noisy slack channel. It has also been super helpful for our team with communication. We have a global team from a bunch of different cultures and ages, so it can be hard to understand tone and intention of a person you only talk to on slack. The stand-ups aren’t long, but I better understand how my teammates talk verbally, which has helped clear up a bunch of miscommunications and mend tense relationships because we all kind of understand each other better.
Edit: I feel like I should add that we really don’t do sprints or make use of many JIRA features. We are primarily and SRE team and so a lot of our work is ad-hoc request tickets rather than epics with tasks (though we do have some of those). I don’t know how much that changes things but it did feel like there was a difference in how a lot of the teams here operate and mine. Which, to be clear, is good! Teams should operate in whatever way is found best for their individual team/company and the type of work they do. I have never felt like ours turn into a blame game. Honestly for us it is the opposite, it feels like we get too many people wanting to help.
Any meeting without a clear goal is useless to me. This is why I usually ignore meeting invites with no stated goal or agenda. Sometimes standups exist so the pm can report statuses up to...
Any meeting without a clear goal is useless to me. This is why I usually ignore meeting invites with no stated goal or agenda.
Sometimes standups exist so the pm can report statuses up to management. In this case, standup can save everyone the trouble of the pm tracking everyone down to find out what their status is. This is a good sign that the ticket management system a team is using isn’t doing them much good, or that nobody is updating their status in it. Usually in these standups you see exchanges like,
Dev: “Working on story AM35853, it’s coming along.”
PM: “When do you think it’ll be done?”
Dev: “Should be this week.”
PM: “Do you think you could have it done tomorrow?”
Dev: “I have to take my kid to the doctor this afternoon, so no.”
PM: “What if I assign coworker b to help you, then could it be done tomorrow?”
I absolutely loathe this style of standup. It’s a complete waste of time to anyone not currently talking, usually takes an hour or more, and is not a status update so much as a status forcing meeting.
Sometimes they exist because the team is working really closely together and it’s important everyone there is up to date on the status of each story, even if they were out sick yesterday. This is usually the kind of standup where folks ask for help when they need it.
I generally find these helpful. They do come with some pressure to make forward progress, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Sometimes standup is cargo culting. These standups tend to last a long time and kind of meander because there’s no shared purpose. There’s no telling what might come up or how long that might take. One in particular I attended was used by management to berate employees for having bad morale.
As a developer who works with a remote-first team, I find daily standup to be pretty useful. The first reason why I find it useful is that it is one of the few times during the day that I get to...
As a developer who works with a remote-first team, I find daily standup to be pretty useful.
The first reason why I find it useful is that it is one of the few times during the day that I get to see my teammates. Since I work remotely and some of my team mates work in different time zones, stand up is one of the few meetings where we all come together to talk.
The second reason why I find it useful is because we're pretty strict with what happens in our standup. The only thing that can happen is engineers giving updates and then our manager giving us information at the end. If any extra discussions need to take place, they are either taken to Slack or a private Zoom call involving only those that are needed.
In the past, I have had standups that have felt pretty pointless primarily because people will commandeer the meeting and use it for purposes other than giving updates. On a previous team, this got so bad that we eventually moved standup to be completely async. But I think a standup with strict structure is useful.
On our fairly large team (n = 16-ish), we had long, boring standup meetings that we slowly evolved into nice, interesting ones where people remain engaged: First, we break up the meetings into two...
On our fairly large team (n = 16-ish), we had long, boring standup meetings that we slowly evolved into nice, interesting ones where people remain engaged:
First, we break up the meetings into two randomized subsets of 8 every week
Second, we ask everybody to write down what they were going to say into a Google Doc an hour before the meeting -- you no longer have to attend the meeting to get value out of the meeting; you can think of questions to ask ahead of time, if you're being super duper proactive
Third, we try to get the interesting things discussed first. It's OK if not everybody gets to share. It's OK also to say "I worked on X last week, it wasn't actually that interesting because Y. I'm more interested in hearing about Z. Popcorn over to person to worked on Z."
I think any time a meeting follows the format where each person goes around and says something they're prepared is automatically doomed to fail. At a certain team size, I feel like one has to prioritize what gets said -- it's expensive to keep eight people in a room for an hour, and it's even worse if people are bored! Forcing people to write something takes all the pressure to verbalize everything synchronously and makes room for questions and discussion.
It's not perfect. I think it takes someone in the room to be the conversation babysitter and keep the ball rolling, too. Good process always takes work.
I had a weekly standup a few times. In one standup, I had a straight line to the executive level and told them what I was doing and, if I wasn't doing it fast enough, they would ask me what other...
I had a weekly standup a few times. In one standup, I had a straight line to the executive level and told them what I was doing and, if I wasn't doing it fast enough, they would ask me what other assets I needed to get it done for them. It wasn't fun, since it was usually held at the end of my work day which made my Mondays even longer, but I got updates about what every other section was up to and at least vaguely got something out of it.
My other stand-up was also weekly but it's completely useless and I informed the leader of that meeting that my comments and concerns were not being properly routed or addressed but it's been essentially ignored, so I'm just a teams icon in that one. Good thing it's only an hour that cuts into my usual lunch time so I just eat and listen and bitch about the meeting with my coworker.
Lastly, my own 'stand-ups' were me walking around, usually with coffee or clipboard, positioning myself near coworkers and subordinates whiteboards reading what they've got going on and asking them what they need from me or my teams. This worked great for me and allowed me to improve my person-to-task organization but it doesn't work remotely. I have a very "fire and forget" attitude with teams because if I need something, I'd rather call and get it done. If it's not urgent, I can send a teams message and they'll get back when they can. If I have a diligent worker I can trust to reply (only during work hours) then that's great but it's never worked when I work with scatterbrained airheads like myself.
How do you feel about stand-up? As a developer, I personally do not like them, although I know others that do, both developers and managers. I rarely, if ever, have found what anyone else has said to be useful/helpful to me, as I am already communicating with the subset of my team I am currently collaborating with for the task at hand. Conversely, I'm pretty sure nobody has found anything I have had to say useful as well. It all seems redundant to me.
Depends a lot on how much overlap your team has. I've found the daily updates more helpful when everyone is working on the same project. I can't talk to everyone on a big team (10+) every day, and people often hit similar blockers.
Still, sometimes it does seem to just be for management's sake. Have you considered switching to an every-other-day frequency? Some teams only give updates on Tuesdays and Thursdays if everyone is already on the same page and communication is good.
I've always thought more or less the same thing about their efficacy. The most useful things in our stand-ups turn out to be parking lot items where, after the official standup ends, a deeper discussion of questions that have come up since yesterday can be had. But most of the time, everyone at standup should already know about any blockers I have, because I'd have already reached out to the stakeholders about them.
If done right, I think they're worth while.
It should be sufficient to say: Yesterday I worked on story 3971, which is <card summary> and today I'm spiking on <learning module> so that we can apply it to stories 3980 and 3981, unless I'm sidetracked by <meeting>
You just need a good lead enforcing that structure. It's when those meetings turn into an hour of useless solutioning, that they become a disaster.
This is extremely important. The second 2 people start going into technical discussions, or just talking about the approach of a task in general, it's time for the lead to step in and ask them to take it after the meeting.
It should go something like this:
Person 1: I'm blocked by <X>
Person 2: I might have a solution for that, let's discuss after this meeting.
The easiest way to avoid useless talk is to not focus on the people, but on the tasks. I still don't like standups for the same reason as OP, but the best versions I experienced had a simple structure:
I lead a company with a few teams and didn’t originally create standup meetings. I had two weekly calls for people to catch up and never mandatory.
But as we grew they just got created organically by people who needed them. I think there’s certain people who absolutely need them to help them focus and get cantered, and because I’m not like this it’s difficult to understand it and give the appropriate tools, without accidentally stepping on the toes of those who don’t need or want the meetings.
At a previous job I did Tuesday Thursday stand-ups with a full team project check in on Mondays - it ended up being perfect imo, Tuesday Thursday stand-ups were plenty and everyone got an update from product on Mondays in case there were any changing requirements, new plans, etc.
Topics for standup were: What I did yesterday and what am I doing today
We also did no meeting Wednesdays every week to try to give everyone some deep work time.
I think traditional standups are pretty useless and waste everyone's time. We went fully remote some years ago and ended up with the following process that I like a lot:
Falls under my mental category of "Office Astrology".
Frequent meetings to make sure everyone is up to speed is a good thing, especially in cases where "oh wait I thought X, but if you're doing Y, what about...." can be a tremendous time save. Catching just one instance of this kind of thing in a year can easily more than make up for all the time "wasted" where people wind up talking about what everyone already knows or doesn't care about.
However...
The whole problem is the dogmatic adherence to the "ritual" with no understanding of why. Your standup does not need to be in person. It does not need to be standing. It does not need to be once a week. If you've got a chat thread where you ping everyone and say "hey do a quick update" and you know your team is paying attention to at least that, great. Like SOOOO many of these tools, there's legit use cases for them, but they should be adapted to fit the environment. Not copy pasted because some seminar said it'd improve arbitrary metric by totally uncontrolled for %.
My standups have been fully digital since the pandemic and I don't see that changing in the near future. Part of being agile is... Well, being agile. If your current state of being requires your standups to not be standing up, don't do it that way!
The feeling you're obligated to do it a certain way because of tradition is precisely what this way of working should prevent.
As an aside, we've had one standing up standup a month or two ago, and it's the one I forced (read: kindly asked) everyone to stand up. There is real tangible change in the effect on mental presence through the physicality of a person. It took them out of the morning slump and made them present in that moment. Good to kickstart the brain every once in a while, not good to do it everytime and foster resentment.
100%.
At my last job we used Slack and we had an entire standup channel that we'd post in every day. The conveyed information was the same as what you'd see in a traditional in person stand up, but it worked for us way better as we could go back through history, and cross link old threads / wiki / JIRA issues. The whole thing felt actually useful... we just needed to adapt the concept to how we work.
I switched from doing my master's degree full-time to working in tech for the first time ever, and I loved having stand-ups when I started. I have ADHD, so it's very easy for me to lose track of time and what I'm working on, and having that check-in on what I've been doing. But it's noteworthy that due to timezones, my standups are at the end of my workday, so I can use them as a "report what I've done today" more easily without forgetting overnight. Having the accountability of the standup was super refreshing especially coming from working on a master's thesis with no feedback for months from anyone.
Generally what other people share isn't particularly useful to me, but occasionally I can give a "hey I'm having trouble with this" and someone will volunteer to help out afterwards. I also like my coworkers and since we're fully remote the standup is how I most often see them and can comment on new haorcuts and things.
I will say that I think even more valuable to me than the standup is meeting one-on-one with my direct boss once or twice a week. That's where the actual discussion of plans and tasks happens. You could cancel standups now that I've gotten used to them and I don't think it'd hurt much, but those meetings with my boss are the most important thing for my productivity besides maybe my Vyvanse, and even that's a tossup.
I run them with my team every morning, after we tried it for a month last year and they liked it. We're spread across timezones and it's a useful way to coordinate, particularly when we're all on the same project. I have a couple rules that I think are helpful (and pretty standard).
I find it's a nice routine to start the day and the consistency has helped us build a team culture that's healthy and supportive, even though several of us have never met in person. It helps me stay informed about how everyone is and what I need to be doing to support them.
Yours is similar to the stand-ups structures I've found most useful.
I've only really disliked stand-ups when they're overly long, or with poorly collaborative team-members.
As a quick 5-10 minute meeting, where 'no major updates' or 'still working on x' are perfectly acceptable updates, and teammates can feel comfortable popping that into a chat if they're double-booked? It's a great balance of aligning vs. time-commitment, and comforting to know I'll be able to get so-and-so's attention at the beginning of the day if needed.
Stand-ups are incredibly helpful on teams where inter team visibility is low, or where people are encouraged to work on whatever items suit their fancy from their swimlane. In the latter case, the stand up where people can just announce what they plan to focus on for the day or sprint is important. In the former case, there might be no other way for me to know what artist x is doing, since my team doesn't have visibility into the art team, and knowing what artist x is working on can help me adjust my own scheduling and prioritizing.
I agree with you. I think a large number of companies/managers schedule unnecessary meetings which is where the general dislike for stand ups, meetings that could've been emails, etc. stem from.
I also think a lot of technical people only look at it from their own POV. They know that they have good visibility into all the other teams, but is the same true the other way around? As someone who has worked a lot on both ends (technical and functional), I do not always trust people who are strictly technical because they often lack thought or insight into other peoples ways of working. More often than not I've simply had to explain a process for them and they have changed their minds about disliking it almost immediately.
One of the key concepts of agile development is "People over Process". I think this is often interpreted in an exact opposite way than intended. A lot of the processes in agile are "rituals". Like stand up meetings, story time, backlog grooming. These things are all needed exactly as much as an individual team benefits from them. It's good to have a regular schedule of course, but not good just keep rituals so we can say we are doing agile.
In my experience, the most kept but least useful "process" is the standup meeting. Most of the standup meetings I've been in have too many people so we are just listening to someone talk about things I don't understand and can't help with. Instead of this ritual that is possibly just for management visibility, I can just talk to my teammates many times a day as needed.
On the other hand, one "process" that is usually thrown away is documentation. "Why do we need documentation, this is agile?". No, you still need documentation but you probably need fewer meetings. Stop throwing away the useful stuff and keeping the easy stuff that isn't useful.
Oh, I think you perfectly described what irks me about standups. They too short to get actual understanding what other people doing (I'm not a manager, I don't need/want to know how other people doing their work) but they also too long and mentaly exhausting because you have to actually listen/learn about other people work.
I tolerate them because I get little out of them, but over the years have learned that other people get a lot out of them.
I tend to reach out to people in charge of my blocking issues immediately. This means that my morning standup is just a reminder of the thing that I talked to someone about the previous afternoon. My workflow is a situation where I button up one thing and shelve it and move on to the next if I can't finish.
I have had colleagues of every age group and in wildly different company sizes that just have a different workflow. They know that we have a morning meeting where they will have the attention of the person that they need to speak to, so they just shelve their changes and go on to the next thing in silence.
Both workflows are totally valid, and if a quick chat every morning when I am sipping my coffee helps the latter workflow people keep on track, I am happy to call that a win for the team as a whole.
I don't like stand-up meeting. Too often they become "find someone to blame" game. For me it looks like stand up meetings are trying to replace meaningful collaboration between colleague with quick and dirty agile game. And too often they become another tool in unnecessary micromanagement.
So, in general, there nothing wrong with stand-up meeting but its very hard to do a correct stand-up meeting. "If you don't like Agile, then you doing it wrong" - something like this.
That sounds kind of like a company/team problem. My stand-ups don't feel like that.
Sorry, but your comment is not very informative.
You have feeling/opinion that this is my company/team problem. But how do you come to this opinion? Do you know why your stand-up don't feel like that? Are you a PM, product owner?
I'm a software developer. My stand-ups are me and my fellow developers and software managers announcing what we've been doing, what we are doing, and what we're blocked on (if anything) since the last stand-up. I come to my opinion because I never feel like in my stand-ups that anyone, myself or the other developers, are playing a "blame game."
A person who is blaming others is choosing to blame others. A bunch of people blaming others as a "stand-up" sounds like a work culture that chooses to blame. Blaming is socially negative. My stand-ups don't feel socially negative, we do not blame others for blocks or issues. That's really it. I'm not sure how to further elaborate. It just sounds to me like a toxic work culture if stand-ups at your work feel like playing a "find someone to blame game."
This kind of defensive reaction, if shared by your team, would naturally lead to a blame game.
I’ve never seen a stand up turn into this across 3 companies. They’re always really mundane and people only talk with each other to help out.
I have a strong feeling Deely is part of the problem based on their comment. However, whoever is leading the stand ups should also intervene at this point and ensure the "blame game" stops. If it's a cultural problem they need to identify if and attempt to change it, if it's an individual problem they need to have a real talk with them.
If this isn't already being done, Deely might want to have a chat with his PM/PO about it. Or at least they should try to change their own mindset and not try to be so defensive, it's OK to admit mistakes or being behind schedule.
Upd (16 hours later) other commenter (hobbes64) described what irks me about stand-ups.
They too short to get actual understanding what other people doing (I'm not a manager, I don't need/want to know how other people doing their work) but they also too long and mentaly exhausting because you have to actually listen/learn about other people work.
I've never found them useful. I'm either working closely enough with other people that I already know what they're up to, or I do not care what they're up to. If management needs information, they should gather it asynchronously.
Fun fact: the one time I've been threatened with a PIP in my career was for skipping several consecutive months of standups. They had no other complaints about me; this useless meeting was just so important to them that they were willing to fire someone for skipping it. I still don't get it.
I find this mindset so foreign and funny. If your boss says "come to this meeting" and you just... don't, of course the company is going to be pissed!
Well, yeah. I understand why they were mad about it, because it looked like I was being intentionally defiant (honestly, I was mostly just sleeping in every day and showing up right after it ended, but they were explicitly not mad about hours worked or productivity, only about this one meeting).
But I don't get why they were that mad about it. Like, this is a thing that's only incidentally related to my actual job. The relationship here is they pay me, and I work on their software thing. If their software thing is being worked on to their satisfaction, it feels like they're just mad because they have slightly less control.
Isn't that almost the definition of being intentionally defiant? :)
Like, I get that you weren't rubbing it in their faces, but if the expectation is "the team comes to this meeting" and you chose to willfully sleep in instead, that's pretty defiant to me.
I get what you mean. From a boss's standpoint, it's sort of about the principle. It's very rarely just one thing, in my experience. What I mean by that is that there aren't a whole lot of people who will blow off the one meeting, but do what I need them to do in every other domain. It's a lot more common that the people who refuse to come to the meeting because it's not worth their time are also willing to, for instance, not follow the documentation standards because that's not worth their time either.
I'm not saying that's you, obviously. But from the boss's perspective, that's why little stuff matters. It's not that the one meeting is so important (though it might be), it's more like "if this employee picks and chooses what rules they follow, what else are they picking and choosing about?"
"Willfully" is a strong word for something that was largely caused by a severe lack of willpower, but sure, I see where you're coming from. The causes weren't visible to others; the effects were.
If they have other problems, they should tell me about them! If they consistently only bring up one problem, I am forced to conclude that is the only problem they have, or at least by far the most major one. If my documentation is lacking, why isn't that what they're complaining about? Those two things aren't reasonable proxy variables for one another, and I would argue that conflating them is lazy management.
I kinda like stand-ups, don't think they're beneficial to me though.
I'm in a team in a good spot about them now though, which is a big decider of how you feel about them. Ours are pretty short, pretty focused, and only 2 or 3 days of the week (other days we so it async over slack).
I zone out during what other people say, and then say my piece and we're done. They seem beneficial to the EM and PM, who can get some quick updates from the whole team and ask quick clarifying questions.
The thing I like about them though, is that they're a social point for the team. We're a remote-first company that does a lot of things async, so it's a nice way of seeing other people on the team, catching up with them, and telling a joke at the end.
My favorite type of standup meeting is where the PMs in charge ask for updates so often that you might as well be in a perpetual meeting. Update: no work completed, too busy writing important updates.
As a SW architect attending standups with developers, I like them. They help bring blockers/issues to the surface, where the answer is simple but the developer just didn't see it. From a design standpoint, they also help me detect if someone is going off the rails with a solution, usually because they either misunderstood the task or aren't very familiar with a particular technology or component in our system. The unspoken benefit is that they also hold the team accountable for delivery. Nobody wants to go to one of these meetings and say that they accomplished nothing the day before, and nobody wants to be the one who caries the same story over from sprint to sprint.
I enjoy the socializing during the first 5 minutes while everyone's hopping on the call...and that is about it. Literally nothing takes place in a stand up that couldn't be handled in Slack channel/thread/DM or a smaller meeting consisting of only the people relevant to the topic.
If it needs to be said team-wide, throw it in the team's channel.
If it needs to be said to a small group of people, throw it in that group's chat or a thread.
If it needs to be said to a single person, throw it in their DMs.
edit: Should add that mine are daily and up until very recently they consisted of anywhere from 15-25 people at a time, so they often took FOREVER. Currently mine are 5-10 people and go much quicker. But still don't get much use out of them.
They need to be quick but I'm all for them. The act of forcing myself to think big picture about what I've done since the last stand-up, what I'd like to do before the next stand-up, what parts of what I'm doing would be interesting to my team, and how I can communicate that quickly (I aim for 30 seconds) is a great focusing exercise for me personally. YMMV of course.
I'm curious how long people's standups are, might be why some people think they're useless vs not. My standup is only 15 minutes long right before lunch and it's a good time for me to basically let the PM know that I'm gonna be a bit behind on some work or not (I'm the only developer on my platform on my team so it's pretty isolated plus full remote.) The rest of my team also gets to say what they're working on and then we do some quick backlog grooming. Sometimes it goes over but never more than like 10 minutes and then it's lunchtime basically.
For me mostly it's also a great time to play Super Auto Pets so maybe that's why I don't hate it lol.
I only tolerate our stand ups because it brings our team into a lime light.
And personally I only attend them if I'm on call (one week a month) or if I know it can be useful for the team.
So the overall times I "suffer" trough them is pretty limited.
Also, please note that during these stand up there is always at least one of our team members present (normally the person being on call).
I wish there was a way to make the success of these meetings not dependent on how they are run. They are useful because everyone gets an overview of the project or even other projects. If run well, there may be some cross-pollination afterwards. People that tend to focus on the task at hand get to see what everyone else is doing.
But it really depends on how they are run. If it feels more like an ass-covering competition in case shit hits the fan, it will spin out into a blame game.
At the same time, it’s also a tool for managers to see if there are any parts they need to review. If they are good managers, they use the stand up to see where they can support rather than intervene.
Speaking from my own experience, I have to opposite of all that. We get a list of new projects and an overview of achievements on Monday. So it’s always much more positive than the actual issues the teams are tasked with and everyone knows it. I don’t think they figured out what a really good 15 minute stand up can do for us.
Meeting facilitation isn’t a skill people are born with, but it seems like everyone is supposed to have it with no training beyond what they see every day. If someone has never experienced a useful standup, they aren’t going to know how to run one unless they spend time learning to run a good standup. But they don’t find it useful, so why would they do that?
I have to compile notes from stand ups to provide status and progress to key stakeholders around the organization. They want to ensure progress on work is being made and that there are no surprises that could derail project roadmaps.
It’s not enough to look at the sprint board to understand status. I can basically see if something is in progress or not. But it’s not enough for me to say, “this is being worked on” 7 days in a row and then it’s unacceptable if I say that and it won’t finish in the sprint. I need a little more details so I can catch if something is stalling out or if there are some other blockers that need to be addressed.
For any given contributor their stand ups are going to be boring and non-eventful, which is a good thing. Across the entire team there’s usually somebody providing an update where status has changed, and the only way I can get that is with a standup.
That said, I don’t need a literal standup. With a remote team just an end of day update is all I need. Most agile meetings around planning and grooming start with the classic verbal standup.
Standups are supposed to be quick. The original version required participants to stand the whole time to stress the importance of keeping the meeting short so everyone can go back to sitting. I just need what finished, what’s in progress, is everything on track and are there any blockers. Don’t really run into the overlapping code change issues often as we tend to plan for that going into a sprint.
I don’t love doing them because they’re usually uneventful, but I’ve seen countless times what happens to teams across multiple orgs that don’t do them. Sooner or later something falls through the cracks and the whole team gets slammed by the C-suite. A lot of the agile process done right ends up functioning as CYA.
So I guess also just a reminder to everyone to slightly overestimate the story points on your work. Better to be the team that finishes 100% and pulls in extra work in every sprint than the team that’s rushing to close out a sprint, burning themselves out, then getting reamed at for having carryover.
I really like them. We have a standup meeting every MWF for 30min. First 15 min, no troubleshooting or debugging allowed. Then the second 15min are debugging or troubleshooting and whomever isn’t needed is free to drop from the call. Our team is a lot of people working on tasks alone, so having a regular meeting to know what people are doing has been helpful. Also, I know what people have been working on the last few months so if I have questions I know who has been doing similar things recently; before I had to ping my manager and ask him who I should talk to, or hope that someone was checking a noisy slack channel. It has also been super helpful for our team with communication. We have a global team from a bunch of different cultures and ages, so it can be hard to understand tone and intention of a person you only talk to on slack. The stand-ups aren’t long, but I better understand how my teammates talk verbally, which has helped clear up a bunch of miscommunications and mend tense relationships because we all kind of understand each other better.
Edit: I feel like I should add that we really don’t do sprints or make use of many JIRA features. We are primarily and SRE team and so a lot of our work is ad-hoc request tickets rather than epics with tasks (though we do have some of those). I don’t know how much that changes things but it did feel like there was a difference in how a lot of the teams here operate and mine. Which, to be clear, is good! Teams should operate in whatever way is found best for their individual team/company and the type of work they do. I have never felt like ours turn into a blame game. Honestly for us it is the opposite, it feels like we get too many people wanting to help.
Any meeting without a clear goal is useless to me. This is why I usually ignore meeting invites with no stated goal or agenda.
Sometimes standups exist so the pm can report statuses up to management. In this case, standup can save everyone the trouble of the pm tracking everyone down to find out what their status is. This is a good sign that the ticket management system a team is using isn’t doing them much good, or that nobody is updating their status in it. Usually in these standups you see exchanges like,
I absolutely loathe this style of standup. It’s a complete waste of time to anyone not currently talking, usually takes an hour or more, and is not a status update so much as a status forcing meeting.
Sometimes they exist because the team is working really closely together and it’s important everyone there is up to date on the status of each story, even if they were out sick yesterday. This is usually the kind of standup where folks ask for help when they need it.
I generally find these helpful. They do come with some pressure to make forward progress, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Sometimes standup is cargo culting. These standups tend to last a long time and kind of meander because there’s no shared purpose. There’s no telling what might come up or how long that might take. One in particular I attended was used by management to berate employees for having bad morale.
This is not a sign of a healthy or cohesive team.
I had daily standup meetings and they were a colossal waste of time. People regularly went over time and out of scope.
As a developer who works with a remote-first team, I find daily standup to be pretty useful.
The first reason why I find it useful is that it is one of the few times during the day that I get to see my teammates. Since I work remotely and some of my team mates work in different time zones, stand up is one of the few meetings where we all come together to talk.
The second reason why I find it useful is because we're pretty strict with what happens in our standup. The only thing that can happen is engineers giving updates and then our manager giving us information at the end. If any extra discussions need to take place, they are either taken to Slack or a private Zoom call involving only those that are needed.
In the past, I have had standups that have felt pretty pointless primarily because people will commandeer the meeting and use it for purposes other than giving updates. On a previous team, this got so bad that we eventually moved standup to be completely async. But I think a standup with strict structure is useful.
On our fairly large team (n = 16-ish), we had long, boring standup meetings that we slowly evolved into nice, interesting ones where people remain engaged:
I think any time a meeting follows the format where each person goes around and says something they're prepared is automatically doomed to fail. At a certain team size, I feel like one has to prioritize what gets said -- it's expensive to keep eight people in a room for an hour, and it's even worse if people are bored! Forcing people to write something takes all the pressure to verbalize everything synchronously and makes room for questions and discussion.
It's not perfect. I think it takes someone in the room to be the conversation babysitter and keep the ball rolling, too. Good process always takes work.
I had a weekly standup a few times. In one standup, I had a straight line to the executive level and told them what I was doing and, if I wasn't doing it fast enough, they would ask me what other assets I needed to get it done for them. It wasn't fun, since it was usually held at the end of my work day which made my Mondays even longer, but I got updates about what every other section was up to and at least vaguely got something out of it.
My other stand-up was also weekly but it's completely useless and I informed the leader of that meeting that my comments and concerns were not being properly routed or addressed but it's been essentially ignored, so I'm just a teams icon in that one. Good thing it's only an hour that cuts into my usual lunch time so I just eat and listen and bitch about the meeting with my coworker.
Lastly, my own 'stand-ups' were me walking around, usually with coffee or clipboard, positioning myself near coworkers and subordinates whiteboards reading what they've got going on and asking them what they need from me or my teams. This worked great for me and allowed me to improve my person-to-task organization but it doesn't work remotely. I have a very "fire and forget" attitude with teams because if I need something, I'd rather call and get it done. If it's not urgent, I can send a teams message and they'll get back when they can. If I have a diligent worker I can trust to reply (only during work hours) then that's great but it's never worked when I work with scatterbrained airheads like myself.