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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Oh god. This shows a complete misunderstanding of what daily stand-ups are for. This is just a bot for daily status reports.

The point of a daily stand-up meeting is to get everybody physically together, re-make human connections, quickly surface issues, get people talking, and get everybody charged up to go tackle the day as a team. Having a bot help you put the right cover sheet on your TPS report is in no way a daily stand-up meeting. One way you can tell is that it does not involve people actually standing together.

If people want to do daily status reports, that is totally fine by me, but please just call it that. Then when somebody asks me for help and I suggest they try a daily stand-up meeting, we don't have to spend 15 minutes while they un-learn the wrong thing.

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I was thinking the same thing. Who is really going to read these updates? If I was forced to do this at a company, I'd probably automate responses with a bot of my own. I'd call it the schitt-bot.

That's exactly it. The stand-up meeting was created because typical status meetings were a waste of time. Much was said, but most people were bored out of their minds.

The solution was to get everybody together to have a quick, real conversation about the upcoming day's work. And to keep it quick and dynamic, everybody had to literally stand up. Done right, this is great.

Merely renaming a lame status meeting to a stand-up meeting doesn't fix the problem. If people find so little value in doing an on-line stand-up that you need a machine to force them to do it, that's a sign that nobody sees it as worthwhile.

Hey thanks for the critique. I agree that this is a status report, but I think (virtual) stand-up is also appropriate, because the questions are more or less what's asked of you at an in-person standup.

By having stand-up conducted by a bot, it's less invasive and easier for remote workers to give updates on their own time. But I do agree that nothing beats in-person meetings :-)

I appreciate that you're trying. But this misunderstanding, which you are helping support, does substantial harm to teams.

I agree that some people use those questions to help people get started doing stand-up meetings, but they are at best training wheels. They are only formally part of Scrum's "Daily Scrum" practice. The stand-up meeting comes instead from Extreme Programming. Those questions are not a bad place to start, but every well-meshed team I've seen has grown beyond them.

Saying that it's a stand-up meeting because it has the same questions as some people's stand-ups is missing the point. The whole reason stand-ups were created was to replace status updates. The goal is to get people together and focused on working as team. This tool enabling remote workers to do things on their own time is the exact opposite of that.

If people aren't standing up and talking with one another, it's not a stand-up meeting.

For those wondering what the hell I'm talking about, good places to read more:

http://guide.agilealliance.org/guide/daily.html

http://martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStandingUp.html

And the earliest mention I know of it comes from Ward's original wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?StandUpMeeting

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