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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Here's why they aren't "useless":

They force people to think about what they're doing, talk about any problems they're having (so the group can help), and keep everyone apprised of what else is going on.

It's literally what the 3 questions are for, and it does it admirably. In a previous company, we followed the "Agile" rules for "standups" very strictly, and it worked for us.

And here's why a truly "agile" (not "Agile") version of standups is great: Our company uses it to socialize as well. We get the business part of the "standup" (we don't stand) out of the way and then spend some time socializing for a while.

We were already doing this for a couple years, but now that one of our team is 100% remote from across the country, it's our best chance to socialize with them and keep the team close-knit.

And it's working.

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Pretty much every Agile practice is a victim of Semantic Diffusion.

The Daily Stand-up isn't a status update.

It's purpose is to be a micro re-planning session.

The team has a sprint goal agreed by the Product Owner and them at the start of the sprint and they're supposed to achieve it by the end of the sprint.

The daily stand-up following the 3-question pattern is to validate what they have done yesterday towards the sprint goal, what they are doing today towards the sprint goal, any impediments that are impacting them and most importantly "are we still going to meet the sprint goal?". If the answer to the "are we still going to meet the sprint goal" is "no" then the team re-plans and may need to bring in the Product Owner to confirm the Sprint Goal can still be satisfied with any suggested changes.

If your team's daily stand-up doesn't reflect that then you're not doing a daily stand-up as it is supposed to be done and of course in that case YMMV. Yours may even be better or more appropriate for your team but it kind of ceases to be "the daily stand-up" and comparable to others.

Agreed. As the original article said, stand-ups are useful in a run-up to a release. If you're releasing every week or two, a release should never be far out.

I wanted to point out the same thing around socializing. We set aside 15 minutes for standup. The business part of standup takes 5 minutes and folks get to hear what their colleagues have been up to at work or outside. Its critical for a remote organization in my eyes.

The way the author talked about standup made me think they are a developer/designer/maker. The 15 mins of standup cost way more than 15 mins if its at an inopportune time. This can be where async standups help out. Get the information out without disrupting someones day.

He actually doesn't mean to remove it from the process but suggests a way to adjust to late stages of the sprint. I think main issue roots to need of an extra effort to represent your work all the time (e.g. cold phase of the project) while PMs could do it for you.

I’m a proponent of team socialization, but it generally works out a lot better to do team lunches and the like—a quality hour or so to socialize over food on a Friday perhaps—rather than jamming in 10 minutes of chitchat during the morning or whatever.

In our case, it's not just 10 minutes. It's however long we want. In practice, it's about 30-45 minutes on Mondays, and about 15-20 minutes on other weekdays. We talk until nobody has anything to say, and then break up and go about our day.

Lunches never worked for us because we each prefer a different lunchtime. I was always about 2-3 hours earlier than the latest people.

Oh, did I mention that we set our own schedule? I'm the earliest. And now with someone remote, the latest is 4 hours later.

But I'll freely admit that Friday lunches might work better for many teams.

This company has monthly events that has the whole company close the doors and do something, and also monthly birthday/cupcake events where we just announce any news, birthdays, anniversaries, and eat cupcakes. I think that basically takes the place of the Friday lunch thing that you'd have.

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