An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings

I dunno... I feel like if I'm totally honest, there's a good chance I would wind up just ignoring 90% of those e-mails, or at least not reading them carefully enough.<p>For me, I feel like the benefit of a stand-up is exactly that it forces everyone to pay attention and meet for 5 min, not just so that everything important gets communicated, but that everyone knows <i>everyone else</i> heard it. And people can ask important questions and know everyone else heard the concern and answer as well.

I think people make a mistake when they assume that the stand-up is about an exchange of data. It's not. It's a social construct. Technology development, especially in a team, is a social activity. We need to create social rituals for it to work at maximum efficiency.<p>The "bugs" he sees in the process, "synchronous, everyone needs to be in the room (or on the phone), and often after the meeting much of the content is lost" -- those are features.<p>People need to synchronize for social purposes. They need body language to help debug subtle performance issues. They need to have problems shoved in their face to either act on or forget.<p>That's all great stuff.

Everything old is new again. Email status is a check-in method as old as, well, email.<p>This works great if you have a reasonable number of people working largely on independent areas, or if your pace is slow enough to drive consensus through email.<p>If you need to reach team consensus regularly and quickly, e.g. on architectural or design decisions, synchronous standups are still better, even virtual ones over IRC or FaceTime or whatever. (If you hear people saying "wait, why/when did we do that?" a lot, you may be in this situation even if you'd rather not be.)<p>I'm not a standup (or capital-a Agile, bleh) zealot by any means, but if you've got more than two people working closely on an area, and you're going quickly, regular and delineated synchronous communication still beats email threads for efficiency.

Tired of these self promoting articles.<p>"An alternative to stand-up meetings" -&#62; We use our product. Oh, shameless plug, try it.<p>What's even more frustrating is how they game the upvote to reach front-page. So, not only it's a disguised article, but it also hide more interesting ones.<p>&#60;/end-of-grumpy-rant&#62;

Now on the one hand, we do mail-ins as well whenever someone can't make it to the stand-up, especially since any team member can work from home whenever they like. Plus our starting time is loosely defined as "let's all try to be there around 10-ish", so some people are already in the flow since 8:30 by the time the last team member shows up.<p>However, every time someone proclaims to have found a better alternative for the stand-up, I always go looking for the "you-were-doing-it-wrong" red flag. One thing stand out:<p><i>"No need to take notes in a stand-up or bother someone with questions [...]"</i><p>Notes? Bothering someone with questions? These are hints that there was a dysfunctional stand-up in place to begin with, in which case it's hard to judge how well the alternative works.<p>In my experience, mailing in works fine as a workaround for situations where having a physical standup is impossible or disruptive, but certainly no equal alternative to spending a few minutes actually sharing information face to face with all the non-verbal high bandwidth communication that goes with it. One look, one gesture can say more than an entire email.

&#62; Stand-ups are great but they have some major flaws: they're synchronous, everyone needs to be in the room (or on the phone), and often after the meeting much of the content is lost<p>That pretty much nails it. I'll admit though I <i>hate</i> standups. Any value it has as a concept is completely lost in its practice.

For a long time, Agilists recommended that teams colocate as an antidote to the kinds of tepid collaborations that happen at large software teams in large companies. But collaboration tech has gotten better, and modern, nimble teams should be "built to explode" - you should be able to work together in the office, or at Starbucks, or anywhere on Earth, if you have to. Start with distribution as a goal and few physical issues will disrupt you.<p>This sounds great as long as you keep the spirit of the standup alive - a standup is for the whole team, not management, and should be a quick read.

No, no, and no. A 15-minute standing meeting is much more efficient. Mandating daily email check-ins means developer time would be wasted writing these emails, and everyone's time is then wasted reading these emails and then participating in the ensuing off-topic discussion threads spawned from each email.<p>A scrum-master's job is remove impediments, and thereby allowing developers to concentrate on development. Mandating that developers generate and then participate in a lot of email noise is counterproductive.

Tried this with a wiki page once, it worked pretty well.<p>Once thing I noticed that I have a lot of information at the <i>end</i> of the day, and not the beginning. First thing in the morning I barely know my name, about the worst time to ask me anything. So I've always found the morning fascination a bit odd.

I feel the thing that many people are missing is that 10 minutes 'stand-up' meetings every morning are important because they encourage 'accidental communication'. You might be debugging something that just broke, and remember, 'Oh John said this morning that his main priority today was to add some code to XYZ, which affects this, so I'll just check with him'.<p>Contrary to popular opinion on HN, regular communication is <i>important</i> for most (if not all) business activities.

Everyone sending email status updates to everyone else daily is an alternative to stand-up meetings?<p>I mean, I guess it is.... it's in particular, an alternative that was very common before stand-ups were invented and became popular, which was judged ineffective and inefficient by those who invented stand up meetings. But, sure.<p>In other news, planning everything out in advance is an alternative to agile development.

Great post, we (Formstack) built DailyStatus (<a href="http://dailystat.us" rel="nofollow">http://dailystat.us</a>) to ease our standup meeting pain. We're a remote company so dealing with timezones and internet connections for video was always a pain.

This might be a good alternative for someplace like my company where team members are in different time zones. When I'm getting to work around 9 in SF, it's already evening for the team members in Bulgaria.

I'm surprised no one mentioned <a href="https://idonethis.com/" rel="nofollow">https://idonethis.com/</a> Is that not as popular as I thought it was?

"Google does weekly emails" Practices at Google vary widely between teams. Nothing as trivial as this is going to standardized across the company...

when the daily, morning status meeting started being referred toas 'the stand-up', concepts got blurred.<p>a meeting is held as a stand-up in order to encourage brevity.<p>so the poster is looking for alternatives to morning status meetings, not stand-up meetings.<p>stand-up meetings are just fine. thankyouverymuch

Email is absolutely fine. Just learn to write succinctly.

sounds great if your team doesn't really work together