Having a >short< daily meeting is important part of any dev-team.
Goals are:
1. Discussion on who's doing what ( details )
2. Discussion on who did what, since last meeting.
3. Help / suggestions based on the conversations above.
Goals are:
1. Discussion on who's doing what ( details )
2. Discussion on who did what, since last meeting.
3. Help / suggestions based on the conversations above.
1. I'm already aware of what everyone is doing which is relevant to my own work outside the daily meeting. Everything else is just noise.
2. I don't want to know what someone else did since the last meeting unless it was relevant to my stream of work, in which case I already know about it.
3. See above.
Needless to say I found the daily stand-ups a complete waste of time.
- How do you or they know that it will have no affect on your area without the daily stand up?
- If someone is experiencing a blocker, you might have come across the same issue earlier in your career or even last week. Then you can help them.
I can't understand what other people are actually doing when it's provided in 1-2min snippets each day.
Even after a few months of this I will be clueless.
That is, the information has never been actionable for me, so it really doesn't matter what people did.
People SHOULD flag stuff they encountered that others should know about, but to me that's part of the 3. "what you need/can help on" category (essentially "anything you want to flag?" be it gotchas, blockers, offers of help etc)
Even 1. I find usually not useful, provided you do regular planning meetings (I like them to be weekly personally) where people are roughly assigned to areas and then just work off the backlog, although it can vary I suppose.
I buy into the peopleware model personally: status meetings are a distraction, other meetings need an agenda (with a clearly defined "end point") and be time boxed. Aligning people and sharing knowledge should be accomplished through informal "coffee morning" conference-breaks-hallway-conversation style events. Ideally an hour set aside once a week, purely for this. That largely covers the cases of people overhearing what you're doing and saying they can help.
In my experience, my team works so closely anyway that the standups don't add much, if anything, and the people who could benefit are not at the meeting (other teams basically). I've tried text updates in slack and that had the great side effect that other teams could see them and offer advice or help, but the downside is they're boring and people often don't read them. Informal coffee morning chats largely solve that in my opinion.
Besides peoplewares suggestions on meetings, I also really like the GROWS Method model of agile.
In my experience, the frequency seems to be more about maintaining a feeling of supervision.
And in many cases, the precise details of what someone is doing aren't really relevant to everyone, either.
Maintaining discipline for daily standups is phenomenally difficult.
I am just trying to say that you do not necessarily need a daily meeting to achieve these goals. And that you might get all the value from the daily scrum with something that better suits your team.