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Comment by recroad | Hacker News Reader

Tried similar tools and ad-hoc processes during the pandemic. None worked as effectively as turning your camera's on and walking the board for 15 minutes. In fact, the chance of miscommunication increased when we introduced tooling like this.

Though agile has been bastardized and gotten a bad rep, it's core values of "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" and principles like "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation" I still believe are quite valuable.

The time where these tools did add value when there was a time difference and asynchronous communication was unavoidable. I had a project a few years back where I was leading 15 teams in Ukraine. It helped there.

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I agree with you there. We did email-based stand-ups for a while and ditched it. It devolved into a mechanical habit of "everything is going great" type answers that nobody payed attention to..

The async aspect of it is convenient, but for me as a team lead, often times the standup is also an opportunity to ask follow up questions, to see if stories are on track, or to determine if somebody would benefit from pairing for the day. These things become increasingly important if you have an uneven balance of dev experience or domain knowledge within the team.

To add, the stand-up loses its value if it becomes rote; people will tune out or wait for their turn to speak.

One trick we're using is that the order is always random, and whoever's turn it is gets to pick who is next. Ideally you pick the one who is not paying attention.

Yeah, totally agree on this. Needs to stay fresh. Curious if you've seen other ways of keeping people engaged.

People will stay engaged if standups are valuable.

If enough people are having trouble paying attention that it's becoming a problem, your standups suck. Your team may not need them (they may be communicating just fine without them) or may need them to be run differently. You may have too many people in them, implicit or explicit expectations of saying stuff just to have something to say (which contributes to people losing interest and tuning out), you may have multiple barely- or not-at-all connected teams in the same standup (I've seen this! And of course every member of one team tunes completely out when someone from another team is talking) or any number of other problems. Or, again, your team may just not need daily standups because they communicate fine without them.

Sounds toxic-ish! Why pick on someone who isn't paying attention?

It doesn't have to be toxic. If the team gets along well, it's all a bit of fun.

Haha i bet people hate the person that introduced it. However if you use a randomizer it might be ok.

Yea, same here both as a manager and an IC. I definitely see the value with async stand-ups. A daily slack reminder just doesn't cut it there for most teams. But if you have a time where everyone can meet for 15 minutes then just talking for 10-15 minutes (my team has 30 minutes blocked off but we rarely hit that unless there's some kind of more in-depth discussion that arises) is invaluable.

We support both live meetings and async syncs and allow teams to go back and forth between the two formats as needed while maintaining context from one day to the next

We've also tried various tools in the past which didn't really to the trick which is why we wanted to build something different that's integrated into the Zoom/Meet meeting and streamlines the meeting. Really curious to hear how Spinach.io worked for you if you're up to giving it a shot :)

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