Standup Antipatterns

My team ditched the standups, and now we just post our stuff in a slack channel: - What we&#x27;re working on (jira ticket numbers, titles) - Yesterday&#x27;s unplanned work - Blockers<p>It&#x27;s wonderful. I worked on teams with standups for years, and they were utterly mind-numbing and worthless unless you&#x27;re collaborating with someone, in which case they&#x27;re just redundant.

Sounds like a bad standup.<p>We&#x27;re a remote team so it&#x27;s important for us to communicate in person everyday in a more intimate way than just Slack, which is why we do it. It also helps me get a really loose gauge (audibly) how everyone is doing mentally (aside from one on ones) because I can&#x27;t be there in person. You can hear&#x2F;see frustration 1000x faster than you can read it in text.<p>We set the ground rules early on what would be in our standup:<p>- No longer that 10 minutes<p>- If you can&#x27;t be there just let the team know ahead of time, no penalties for absence<p>- Specialists only call in once a week<p>- Talk about what you are working on that day even if it&#x27;s just &quot;Still debugging image sequencing&quot;<p>- Ask for one-on-ones with other teammates to deep dive, don&#x27;t do it at standup<p>It&#x27;s really been effective at keeping the team moving in the same direction, because even minor audible&#x2F;visual communication keeps the ship on course better than text.

Another antipattern, not specific to standups: everyone sitting around absorbed in their laptops not paying attention to anything until their turn comes around. (Another reason to actually stand during standups, I suppose.)<p>Another mentioned in this thread -- if you have distinct groups within a team who are working on mostly separate projects, don&#x27;t combine their standups. Otherwise, you just encourage half of the attendees to tune out (exacerbating the situation above.)

Great article, I like the bit about<p>&quot;Many organizations misuse the daily standup in order to accomplish ulterior motives. A big one that comes to mind is having a ‘start time’ for the work day.&quot;<p>My thoughts exactly. This to me indicates poor management style and a control mechanism for insecure tech managers. It&#x27;s been a great way for me to quickly avoid joining terrible teams that use weird metrics to measure performance.<p>Why is there so much resistance to common sense approach to knowledge sharing? I always feel much resistance from the force in the move away from 9am stand-up.

Maybe we need a standup-twitter where you have your 140 characters worth of input, and if you realize you need more than 140 characters then your standup should be &quot;Severely blocked by X, need help from Y on how to move forward&quot; (~70 characters)

Worst is when a problem comes up and ppl dive right into trying to figure out a solution right there and then.

I was on a team with tedious, competitive standups. It was horrible and I dreaded it every day. If I kept my contribution to about 1 minute (as it is supposed to be), I would be interrogated. Oh the memories.

To me worst participants are folks who like hearing themselves talk. Most people finish their part in 30 seconds and then you have people who give a 10 minute monologue.

A daily meeting where you force everyone to be in the office, and interrupt their work with irrelevant status updates that have to be too short to communicate anything useful is itself an anti-pattern.<p>I have never seen them be useful. Not once. And people are addicted to them, always for &quot;management ulterior motives&quot;. Once had someone say &quot;we need to make sure people are actually working&quot;.<p>Personally, I would like to make it a requirement of my next job search that if the company does a standup, I&#x27;m not taking their offer.

I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever been in a situation where a daily standup adds value if everybody is not working on the same thing and not focused on the same project&#x2F;codebase.

I like the idea of an 11:50 standup. It gives people an obvious incentive to stop talking.

Is this really so popular? I kind of thought these stand-ups are something out of the books on management, that is never used in reality by people who do the actual work.<p>Seriously, I don&#x27;t see why my team would need this. We just have an IM-chat, if you want to notify others on the team about the problem we have — here you go. If there is something a bit less open for discussion and involvind a greater number of people — write an email. Besides that, if you are working in the same office at the same time and need a discussion — why not just speak of a problem, when it arises?

There&#x27;s a fair amount of hostility to standups here. I&#x27;m surprised. At my current job we didn&#x27;t have standups, so I made a slack channel and just posted what I was working on for the day in there. I find it useful to have as a specific driver for myself - regardless of what other folks are doing. I think the idea of condensing the current tasks into a few sentences and saying _that_ is what I&#x27;m doing is valuable, both to myself and any others who are on the same team.

Anyone care to explain what a &#x27;standup&#x27; is for those of us (lucky enough?) to not have heard the term outside of the context of a comedy club?

I do standups twice a week. Though it is a violation of true agile principles, it&#x27;s pretty tolerable.