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Comment by lostdog | Hacker News Reader

There is a very easy way to fix standups: Do them twice a week or even once a week.

I've never been on a team that was so disorganized that we needed to have a standup every day. I've also never had tasks where you could always make progress in a single day. Meeting once or twice a week matches the meeting frequency to how often things really need communicating (beyond chatting in slack), so the meeting gets used effectively. Meeting every day just trains people to filibuster, and that's a big reason that the meetings stretch out to hours.

I do believe there are teams that get blocked on each other every day and who have tasks that take a few hours to finish. Never been on one myself, but I'm sure Scrum works great for them.

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This has been my experience too. Also when working as a manager, It doesn't hurt if your wanting to do standups to just do a 5 minutes catch up with each team member individually before 11am to get your finger on the pulse of whats happening. If they are hitting issues you can do your manager thing.

Generally agree, but in my experience there are plenty of times when there are minor changes have been implemented in <1day e.g. changed the behaviour of a button or interaction. The standups let the team know that the change has gone through and the behaviour is intentional

How much overlap between people are there? Last several years, the 'agile' stuff I've worked on with various teams was always individual people working on individual things. Whether my button changed behaviour or not was usually of no concern to anyone else except the product owner, and you can talk with them directly. Spending dev time talking about stuff (or hearing about stuff) you had no control over, or involvement in, was usually time wasteful. This waste wasn't always just the time wasted, but the X minutes before and after to transition in and out of 'meeting' mode. 'Daily standup' of '15 minutes' usually cost me an additional 30-40 minutes of mental time of getting back in to the 'zone' (when I was there).

Should that information be part of a daily meeting that will be forgotten quickly or documented somewhere the requirement or documentation exists? How do you share this to someone off today..

Agreed, that is the value of the stand-up, it is forced team communication. Most teams suck at communication so it can have benefits. If you have an amazing communicating team, you don't need them. The big problem that most meetings have is lack of agenda and a meeting runner who doesn't keep people on task. Most meetings end up with one person who can't debug X so can everyone help solve that problem during the stand-up. The point of listing blockers is to pull off a sub team LATER that can help resolve the blocking issue.

It is a shame because all of the corporate processes are designed simply to overcome poor and ineffective communication. If only we invested in teaching people how to communicate instead. Where I am now, they have switch to SAFe which is the least agile process I've ever seen. Planning 3 months at a time is the opposite of agile. It is really just parallel waterfall that is run as "agile" day to day. It is useless. But the higher up want their meaningless GANNT charts so here we are.

Standups can be everyday and be useful. We do them via Slack and they take, maybe 3 minutes? 1 minute to perhaps type up your own standup to share and another 2 minutes to read the rest of the team's. They're quick hitters to get a simple baseline of the day and a snapshot from others on where they're at. Sometimes it can be redundant if you spoke to someone else the evening before about a thing they're trying to do, only to read about it in some form again the next morning. But that does not happen all that often.

Unfortunately, going to once a week or twice a week means teams will tend to drag them out for longer. They become more like discussion meetings or "status" meetings rather than super brief snapshots of the plan of attack for just one day.

That's what I do as sort of scrum master. Meet Tuesday and Thursday and if people don't show it's fine.

The biggest reason to have them is when you have a ton of junior developers who are not very good at unblocking themselves by asking for help. I’ve found it’s invaluable to probe them when they’re stuck on the same ticket for multiple days but haven’t asked for help.

Meeting once a week is status for your boss. Standups are supposed to be for the team.

If everyone's communicating and collaborating and effective, suggest trying an iteration without standups. Then compare effectiveness of the two.

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