Hacker News Reader

Comment by famousactress | Hacker News Reader

The first couple of times I was in a group that implemented daily standups, I was encouraged.. Seemed like it might increase operational awareness in a lightweight way. I was wrong. I think they're stupid.

The day-boundary is arbitrary. It encourages someone who gets stuck on something at 2pm to spend the rest of the day banging on it and bring it up tomorrow. Or, in better functioning teams, we deal with it at 2pm and the standups become irrelevant. That was what I found.. is that as a team lead I knew what everyone was doing before we met in the morning. Another popular tendency is to pull in PM, or maybe my boss.. but then I get to waste 6 people's time trying to communicate what's happening to them on a still-arbitrary schedule.

View on HN

Arbitrary schedule and bad habits about wasting time on stupid problems aside, I'd agree that a standup for a well functioning, co-located dev team is largely going to be redundant.

The most value I've found in standups are when you have a cross functional team that can communicate status on different things to everyone all at once. BAs, QAs, devs, IM/PM, and product owners aren't all going to stay up to date with each other naturally on most teams.

Of course, if teams are working in very long iterations with out-of-cycle QA then each functional aspect of the team staying up to date with each other on a daily basis yields less value. Such a setup tends to bring about other problems in many scenarios though.

In the end it's all about context. To say a daily standup is a stupid practice without context (implying in any context) is a bit too broad of a statement IMHO.

Thing is:

1. In general, I'd like to receive information asynchronously. Meetings should be for solving problems. They're a team-mutex, and mutexes should be avoided.

2. Standups are generally by definition, not for solving problems.

Standups are good for both surfacing as well as identifying problems (e.g. things that don't appear to be problems).

Standups aside, sure, ssync information is good. However, it's not nearly as rich as face to face communication.

I'm not sure why you say meetings should be for solving problems. The majority of my meetings are about sharing information and planning. I solve problems at my desk.

I've worked at places with these meetings. I was always talking to people who either already knew the information or didn't need to hear about it every day. In that setting a quick weekly status update would have made more sense.

Two other unfortunate things happened at one place that were I guess more a sign of dysfunction than a problem with stand ups per se. First, there was an arms race of "what I did yesterday" type descriptions that turned stand ups into a 30-minute production. Second, our manager had a habit of calling people out in the meetings in front of everybody (!). It created a stressful situation where people rambled on about nothing at length every morning. Stand ups were probably the least desirable part of that job.

Stand-ups are trying to push a rope. Good teams already know how to communicate well, and know how often they need to talk. Often, it's unconscious. It just works.

On bad teams, it's not going to help, and it will eventually become a source of irritation and resentment.

On good teams (which are humming along just fine, thank you), the process becomes an irritation and a resentment.

What about the following:

What if you had a team dashboard, minimalist in style. It had a selection whereby you could choose one of 3 status for how your efforts were going: Red, Orange, Green.

At a certain time, you are prompted to pick one of the 3 status.

All team members pick their status - and the lead gets a weighted summary of overall status. If too many orange/red status are selected the team meeting gets called - if more green/orange then he can choose to defer, if mostly green then it says no meeting necessary.

You'll never know what other members pick and, by default, the lead wont know who picked what (unless he wanted to audit).

This would be an non-intrusive method of polling the team, without risk, as to whether or not a meeting was required.

I'm not sure I understand.. "won't know who picked what", and "without risk".. Are you trying to solve the problem of people being afraid to report that things aren't going great?

I think that's a dysfunction that should be repaired, not institutionalized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com