It seems like the title of this essay should be "<i>My</i> Daily Standup is a Waste of Time." To which the obvious answer is: ok, so change it. That (in my humble opinion) is the basic core feature of agile, that teams own their own processes.<p>So, if your standup is too long/short/etc, bring it up at retro, propose a fix, try that for a while, and iterate until it's working well. And if you're not empowered to change your process, well, change the title of your essay to, "Agile-in-name-only is a waste of time."
I'm fully aware that the standup could be done on slack or email with similar effectiveness most of the time.<p>However, I still think it's worth it in remote teams. The daily standup is that morning coffee pot discussion with my teammates, before we get on to what we're working on. We make smalltalk and banter a bit. There aren't as many chances to do that in a remote setting, I think it's worth it for that alone.<p>However, often times I'm having a problem that my teammates give valuable ideas or feedback about and visa versa. Or we discuss some hairy edge case and come to a decision about what the behavior should be. So some percent of standups are really valuable.
> It goes awry when the team gets larger than seven or so people.<p>Everything does. <i>Teams</i> don’t scale, its not a special feature of daily standups. Beyond that, you need teams of teams.<p>But, sure, the standup format is a waate, because the filler is stuff that should be evident from a status board, and the meat—impediments—should be addressed as they emerge, not delated for a daily meeting.<p>> Now, you may be thinking that this format takes a lot of time. It doesn’t!<p>I think that it just means that the dominant personalities that have touched any given ticket will be the only ones who talk, which is part of my the reason the classic format is organized by people, not tickets. It also has the same redundancy issues as the classic format, and while it may have a linear improvement in time over the classic format, when both formats are followed equally well, the <i>scaling</i> is exactly the same as classic. So, the problem it seems to solve is “standups aren’t adequately venues for social dominance displays”, not “standups don’t scale”.
If you do the standup the way it's supposed to be done, it'd be quicker and easier to just send an email. Assuming you've got people who can read and write intelligibly, which is a big if.<p>The biggest thing that I hate about standups is that it ends up being the de facto start of the work day. If you're supposed to start work at 9am, you can't do the standup at 9AM, because a third of the people who are supposed to be there will be running late any given day. So you do it at 9:30, or 10:00, or, god help you, at 10:30. And then it just works out that you can't actually do any real work in the morning with that hanging over you, so you diddle around doing email, or everybody just starts planning on getting to the office five minutes before the standup is scheduled to start. And then it's just a big waste of time because nobody has read their email or thought about what they are supposed to be discussing, and you start getting pressure behind your eyes and the irrepressible urge to scream.
The worst and most common argument I’ve heard for the daily standup is that it somehow facilitates team bonding and and passive, “osmosis-like” transfer of knowledge.<p>Like... why would you ever do x with the vague intention of getting y as a side benefit? Why don’t you just do y directly?<p>I frankly don’t care what my teammates are up to. I don’t care what the team is up to. It’s not my job to care. It’s my job to send commits and get paid. If I need to collaborate with a teammate why wouldn’t I just <i>reach out directly</i>? If I need “context” about something, whether it’s company goals or how some piece in the code works, why don’t I just have a meeting specifically about that? If we want team bonding why don’t we have the team bond over actually working together in real ways?<p>I hate this culture of by default having all these regular meetings for no explicit reason.
I’ve been looked at as a madman or a heretic for calling daily stand ups a waste of time for years. I’d include this person’s “walk the board” idea as also a waste of time.<p>There’s only one situation where a daily stand up makes sense, and that’s when you have a small group on a very tight deadline, ie an emergency situation.<p>A daily standup is a many to one communication meeting. The implementing engineers are telling a project manager how much progress they made. Engineer to engineer communication is rarely meaningful. So many daily stand ups I’ve attended I either had no need to know what anyone else was working on, or I wanted an update from exactly one person at the meeting, yet I had to stand around and wait for for a bunch of irrelevant updates.<p>What works better? Let the engineers self organize their communication. As long as everyone knows who is doing what, then they know who to ask. Have each engineer write an update a team doc at the end of the week saying how much was done, then update the tickets. Quickly review the doc at your team meeting, and move on.
After reading the negative comments I feel like a misfit. We have <i>two</i> standups a day and it has been great so far. After a year into this social appocalipse I am just happy to see faces. We do not have any issues with severe noise or hardware though.<p>For the usual noise, like keyboard, Krisp [1] has been a pleasure to use <i>(beware, shameless referal link plug)!</i><p>[1] <a href="https://ref.krisp.ai/u/u2fa290c46" rel="nofollow">https://ref.krisp.ai/u/u2fa290c46</a>
Daily Standup is wrong if you are doing it wrongly. It shouldn't take more that few minutes for each person to do a briefing. Any other meetings with substantial scope are scheduled with later time.<p>It's like shell scripting of the meeting, use it when you need to. You don't use bash as your primary language
Author doesn't understand the unstated point of standups, even though he does allude to it when describing his thought process.<p>> I start thinking about my update to prove I should keep my job<p>In non-contract-work development, the entirety of Agile is micro or maybe "mini" management so that less performant people are managed into average performance. (The downside is that high performance people are dragged down to average. This is acceptable because it's infinitely easier to hire average and below average people who don't live and breathe the product.) The standup specifically puts very public, social pressure, on people who would otherwise be happy to be the slack that others have to constantly take up.<p>As such, it serves a critical function and is not a waste of time at all. The author just isn't seeing the forest for the trees.
Daily stand ups seem a waste of time to me.<p>Maybe once a week or perhaps Monday and Friday.<p>Still, I’m being paid for what I see as a waste of time so that’s the upside..... and it’s the boss who values it, so if they want to pay me well whatever I guess.
Any process is worthless if it doesn't exist to solve a problem, doesn't solve the problem, or targets an imaginary problem. It could be better if it solves the problem inoptimally.<p>What problem does the standup solve? in my experience it solves the manager's desire to know what each team member is doing every day, ie its a trendy rename of the status report meeting. It is an inefficient solution because you are setting up a parallel resource consumption (everybody's time) and then using those resources in serial (one person speaks at a time).<p>Either the format should change to a parallel one (everybody emails a report to the manager) or its supposed to be solving a different problem (you'd have to ask the organiser what the intent of the meeting is).
I like my daily stand ups. To be honest, I need it to get my day started, and I also care about what my teammates are up to.<p>Team of 7 we usually get this done around 15/20mins. In the office we used to grab a coffee after. We can't do that these days, but still nice to see each other face and hear each other voice (we all have the camera on).
Daily standup experience correlates with competence of the scrum master. If they can keep it under 5 minutes, call people out for rambling, prevent engineers from going down a rabbit hole,and do complexity and time management well, people wouldn't hate it as much.<p>It has to be a tight ship. If I ran my standup, I would say - standup lasts 5 minutes. The timer starts now and it exactly lasts 5 minutes. Everyone goes through once ASAP. Afterwards you can break out into your discussions, whatever. But don't waste everyone else's time.
Honestly, as both a regular engineer and a team lead, I now understand the point of stand-ups. They are a blunt tool to micro-manage work. <i>And I love it.</i><p>In daily stand-ups, I go over all our current in-progress & blocked issues in Kanban. I ask about every task someone is working on or is blocked. Besides helping people unblock work, I also ask questions about in-progress work when something seems unusual. I can often either identify duplicate work, give someone information they would have spent time trying to find, or ask someone to rework something if a given solution looks like it will be a dead end.<p>There is no more efficient way for me to do all of those things in one place. Using this method, I can constantly help prune work in progress in one short spurt of time. It benefits junior engineers who are still learning how to juggle tasks. And it helps the team in general, as a lead is making sure there are tickets on the board and pushing when no progress is being made. As long as someone is actually <i>doing something</i> at the stand-up, it is definitely useful.<p>If you do it poorly, it's going to suck. I've been part of a lot of sucky, pointless stand-ups. I now make a point to ask more questions in those stand-ups if I think the lead/scrum master/etc isn't probing enough. It often starts a brief discussion that leads to meaningful work.
In my current team we’re exactly on the opposite situation. Daily standup is the <i>only</i> agile-like meeting that works for us.<p>The rest of meetings have converged into a weird thing were everyone is interrogated about the tasks needed until the release, and everyone has learned quickly that the trick is listing your tasks in excruciating detail, because they will be valued at least 1 point, and you can inflate your way up into doing little while looking very busy.<p>Then we collectively assign point estimates, which is a nuisance because everyone is making the estimates in hours and then trying to convert to points with a very impractical 5/8 ratio, and also completely pointless because our team is so diverse and specialized, that no one really understands their tasks except themselves.<p>In the whole, I’ve estimated to be losing about 2 full days every 10 working days into this madness, while no clarity is gained. We (still) discover our blockers on our daily meetings and have enough backlog that blockers just imply reshuffling the work around.
I have never really loved standups and have tried to tinker with them, but I've not found much that works any better, tbh. I've just sort of accepted the standup as an imperfect meeting that is probably still worth having. It does sort of keep everyone up to speed with what is going on, and it can surface blockers that might have lingered otherwise. Plus, without it, engineers, especially remote ones, might not really see or communicate with their team that much during the week if they are are otherwise head down. The other nice thing about standups is that they are short! I'm more okay with the shortcomings of standups because they don't take up much time at all.
I discovered stand ups two weeks before the first lockdown and found it stressful and inefficient.<p>I needed to interrupt any task I was doing (I'm usually early, and the standup often happens at a time my focus is best), or rush to arrive on time if I was ever late, listen to people in a state not necessarily fit for listening correctly, at a speed that is sometimes too high, sometimes too low, not always concerned by everything every people did or do. No note so I was stressed about remembering each thing that might be relevant to me.<p>During the lock-down, we started doing it using video calls. We had to wait for everybody to come, including those who where fighting the technology, the sound wasn't always great, the flatmate was still sleeping so it was not ideal for him too.<p>And then, we switched to text in a dedicated channel in our chat. The result?
- I can write it whenever I want before 10 am, without needing to interrupt in the middle of something. I could even write it the evening before if I wanted.
- everybody is efficient in their writing: the standup is actually short and to the point without needing a good moderator!
- I can take my time to formulate, to forget nothing (I don't need to prepare in advance neither)
- I can take my time to read, and to react to other people when relevant, and organize without stress.
- all the relevant info is here
- sometime someone forgets something and responds to there own answer to let people know, and this is good.
- we are supposed to add an "eye" emoji to each standup message so we tell people we read their stuff.<p>Seeing people's faces is great but the standup was an awful occasion for that. But what we did during the first lockdown was following the standup by a "coffee break" to which people were advised to go, and then we got to see people and keep building relationship by speaking about anything, often unrelated to work. I recommend trying this.<p>I don't see a point for the daily synchronous stand up now that I lived standup in text format. If you need to build relationship, do breaks in which people get to speak about something else than work… or about work at times! But without rush and without lengthy unwanted digressions.
ITT a lot of can't do mentality...<p>"Daily standup are useless because one email would be enough"<p>If email were then required: "emails are useless because nobody reads them, jira is enough"<p>"Jira is shit"<p>If emails are then not required: <i>everyone works by themselves without communicating and symptoms of that, frictions start happening</i> "Our project is poorly managed."<p>People just don't seem to understand that yeah, ideally everyone would just do their work, and those pieces would perfectly fit into the project. Unfortunately, that's not how reality works.
If you want to understand what a standup is and how to do a good one you need to read the original paper that documented the daily standup Borland Software Craftsmanship: A New Look at Process, Quality and Productivity (<a href="https://1pn8a8ult4o2bls5f2jxuel1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/borland-process.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://1pn8a8ult4o2bls5f2jxuel1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...</a>).<p>The standup is a planning meeting, not a status meeting. If you feel your standup meeting is a status meeting, you are doing it wrong.<p>The reason the standup became popular was because the Borland Quatro Pro team was EXTREMELY productive and it seemed standup helped the team be productive.<p>Here is the relavant quote.<p><pre><code> The core architecture team met daily to hammer out C++ class interfaces, to discuss overall algorithms and approaches, and to develop the basic underlying mechanisms on which the system would be built. These daily meetings were several hours in duration; from what I heard,the project was made more of meetings than anything else.
</code></pre>
That's right, they had a 'standup' that could last hours. Yet they were extremely productive.<p>I hope this sheds some light on what the daily standup should really be. Maybe people should sit down.
> <i>The problems with the traditional daily standup is a lack of focus and off-topic discussions.</i><p>This is not a problem with daily standups. This is a general problem with all meetings and discussions that are not <i>ruthlessly</i> kept on-topic and to the point by someone of authority who should be ready to interrupt as soon as the discussion goes off-track.
I've seen now this article too many times, lol. Already mentioned to the author that the points are great, I would only add that slack standup bot, like this one <a href="https://standupbuddy.app/" rel="nofollow">https://standupbuddy.app/</a> in 2021 might be a good alternative to those standups since it keeps you organized and you can move together towards the sprint goal. The one I mentioned is just simple, but has many alternatives to choose from on the market.
Title was a little clickbaity but the solution and conclusions are how I have run standups and I can't see any other way than forms of walking the board, unblocking, & working to solutions in real time.<p>We also have come up with a form of this called Library Time where we stay on one feature as a team for 2 hours. No outside interruptions. We hone in on architecture or bug bashing and solve it together as a team distributed.
The pandemic has made the morning stand ups valuable again!<p>Before the pandemic my mornings felt pretty useless. First a face-to-face standup and then an online stand-up with another team. An hour in total.<p>Since the pandemic started that hour has proven more valuable than ever. I do these meetings on my phone now, while taking a brisk walk in the forrest. The morning check-in meetings now feel more valuable than ever, as a means to socialise.
The least boring standups I've ever had were IT department "ticket roundups" where, once a week, we went through and bitched about the tickets in the IT Jira and what was keeping us from closing them and whatever else was work-related. This was all pre-COVID, so we found a disused conference room in a disused section of the building and made sure the door was closed.
>It goes awry when the team gets larger than seven or so people.<p>Agreed generally.<p>With my current employer we do it every day.<p>5 people, just a few / maybe one minute each... maybe a tangent here or there to discuss something that came up as a group that would benefit from more than one person on the team's input, etc.
His "walk the board" section is what modern standups are supposed to do.<p><a href="https://agileforall.com/7-tips-for-a-more-effective-daily-scrum/" rel="nofollow">https://agileforall.com/7-tips-for-a-more-effective-daily-sc...</a>
I like to type my standup update into Teams and read from it when I’m on the mic. I tried to get the rest of my team to try that so we could skip the meeting itself but it didn’t stick.
IME, daily standups exist primarily for management to take attendance. This is usually framed as "removing any immediate blockers to keep employees productive".