13 ms·

Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

75 points by klemola 7y ago

nakodari 7y ago
For a small remote company like ours, it would be exhausting to do daily scrum meetings. Instead, we have an hour-long weekly scrum meeting on Monday and it's more effective.
- ljf 7y ago
  Can you give a little more context about why it would become exhausting for remote workers? I'd seen terrible stand ups and good ones, but the location of those taking part has rarely been a deciding factor.
  - nakodari 7y ago
    It is a waste of time. Whatever you need to discuss regarding the tasks can be discussed once a week and then once the tasks have been assigned and discussed, trust the team to work at their own pace and time and deliver it by next Monday instead of micromanaging the team every day.
    - ljf 7y ago
      But why is that especially exhausting for remote workers? Why not local ones too? You also foucs on assigned tasks rather than a team working together to get stuff done. Sounds like Software engineers, not product engineers. If you are pre assigning tasks and working separately then yes a daily scrum has no value. But that isn't the point of a daily scrum, or scrum/agile at all. The focus needs to be on getting value to a customer together as fast as possible - not individuals doing a task each to build to a pre-defined whole. Iteration not increments.
_tkzm 7y ago
i loved the dailies. it was the best way to earn money without doing any work. i always tried to prolong the meetings as much as possible. ah, i miss those days.
sod 7y ago
> Usually the better the project is going, the less you need the daily. That quote sums it up pretty nicely. To bad of a naming for this type of meeting. Hard to negotiate to do a "daily" less then daily.
- Plyphon_ 7y ago
  Agreed - whether it should be done daily or not is a decision based on a wide number of inputs. When it's work best anecdotally, is when we hold regular retrospectives ON our agile ways of working. EG: Is the standup working for us? What should we stop/start/continue in our standups? When this 'retro of agile' (rather than just project/product retros) take place regularly you quickly come across a format and cadence that works for the team. Tools are just tools, they should work for us, not the other way around.
einpoklum 7y ago
This kind of daily meetings make me feel like I'm standing trial for my crimes. Especially if I've had a bad/down/unproductive day, which happens. Maybe it's better when you take away the power relations. And reduce the frequency during non-critical periods.
- twic 7y ago
  Making classic standups useful and comfortable definitely requires psychological safety. You need to feel like you can occasionally say "worked on X, didn't make any progress", and a manager or a rival isn't going to pounce on you for it. If you don't have pervasive psychological safety, there's a lot of stuff from XP that isn't going to work.
  - lbriner 7y ago
    Exactly what I was about to say. There are many things that are dismissed in team culture because of the fear of feeling exposed or blamed but that is an issue of culture and/or insecurity, not a disadvantage of using agile methods.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    This reminds of this scene: https://youtu.be/OMDQzITWJyU?t=204 https://youtu.be/OMDQzITWJyU?t=204 From "The Dictator", where Nuclear Nadal is reporting on his progress.
- loa_in_ 7y ago
  I skipped some meetings randomly (I was busy on the phone), so that's the escape hatch. But alternatively one might argue that if it's mandatory nobody will come. I don't have a good argument for the second part, except that I'd attend it to be up to date whenever I could.
- philjr 7y ago
  My 2c - the key is that the focus should be on delivery and not some justification for the work you did yesterday. The idea being that you are standing up looking at the work in front of you and the TEAM itself should be focused on how to move things across the board (ie delivering it to whatever definition of done makes sense for you)
jpkeisala 7y ago
> Another variation would be to do the daily on Slack which can even be asynchronous. That is exactly what I do. Every morning answer 3 things in Slack. It is also good way to say "Good morning, now I start to work on X, yesterday I did Z and I need some help on Y.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  The point of a stand up is to get everyone face to face to enable quick interactions and collaboration, and to do so in a very lightweight way. Doing it as you suggest is simply doing daily update reports and negates the point of a daily scrum. I feel often Agile principles are taken as buzzwords without really trying to understand the point. Now, whether the point works for you and your team is another question.
- seer 7y ago
  The thing with dailies is not that you share your updates, its more that you’re forced to listen to everyone else’s. Granted you can always snooze a bit and pretend, but that kind of bad faith is usually indicative of other deeper problems with the team. Also this can become a drag if you’re “held accountable” rather than “helped in need” but smart leaders would recognize that and attempt to fix the problem in the team, and a daily like that can be a tool for them to diagnose problems like this.
  - jeresuikkila 7y ago
    > you’re forced to listen to everyone else’s. This seems to be an overlooked aspect here in the comments too. Yes, nobody likes to be forced to do something but in this case it's worth it. We have enough distractions as it is so taking 15 minutes to focus on what's important to our colleagues can bring forth valuable connections of ideas and people.
    - mytailorisrich 7y ago
      Face to face communication, and thus listening to others, is the whole point of the daily scrum.
seer 7y ago
I think they are worth it for remote teams. Most of the work comms can be easily done in slack, but there’s definitely a benefit of making people talk to each other and express emotions at least once a day. Normal offices accomplish that with water cooler talk and informal chatter, but you miss on that with remote teams. There might be a better way to solve the “loosing of esprit de corps” thing but dailies are the easiest thing I’ve seen do that.
- bitL 7y ago
  Why not weekly? Or twice a week? Advantage of remote is that you can prioritize incoming information and everybody is onboard with asynchronous communication by default.
  - seer 7y ago
    It's not about information sharing, dailies are crappy for that anyways. You should always have async information centre so people can get up to speed. The idea is to be able to share the squishy emotional human bit of working with a team of people. Without it I've seen people just slowly drift apart. You'd see a comment from a coworker on your PR and be like "argh who is this guys think he is! He's totally wrong" but if you can talk with him about it in video it becomes a lot less confrontational. You can apologise and be apologised to. A jira board is just a means to have some shared concern to talk about. And done properly can leave you with a feeling of being part of something bigger, rather than a lonely coder talking to a computer.
    - lowercased 7y ago
      > You'd see a comment from a coworker on your PR and be like "argh who is this guys think he is! He's totally wrong" but if you can talk with him about it in video it becomes a lot less confrontational. You can apologise and be apologised to. Unless that doesn't happen. Perhaps he digs in his heels that he's "right" when he's demonstrably wrong? Or 'he' is the team lead, and it doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong, we all now move in that direction "because". Having to have video/f2f in situations like that adds more stress. Dealing with this situation now, and it's bad.
kozhevnikov 7y ago
Daily stand-ups have two formats, one is Round Robin that has origins in Scrum, other is Walk the Board that is more Kanban. I highly recommend you switching from "did yesterday/do today" to "walking the board" as it is less about checking what each employee delivered in a day but rather what the team can do to move tickets through the board. It is also more inclusive allowing quiet/introverted/non-native English speaking members of the team to participate in the meeting rather than rehearse their updates in their heads ignoring others.
- rumanator 7y ago
  It should be noted that the "round robin" format has an important aspect which is to enable each team member to air his/her personal grievances regarding anything related to the project.
  - moystard 7y ago
    I would rather have this kind of discussions in the retrospective. It is a dedicated time for the team to discuss pain points, and to take actions to heal them.
    - vasco 7y ago
      I think the sooner the team is aware about issues the better.
      - robjan 7y ago
        I'm going to assume the GP meant blockers rather than grievances. Grievances are more like injustices and shouldn't really be aired at standups in a healthy team.
  - ses1984 7y ago
    Grievances should relate to a ticket on the board, if not then make a ticket for it, if not that then is the grievance important?
petetnt 7y ago
I see the value in daily communication and the general topics (yesterday, today, blockers) of the dailies, but at the same time the daily standups show how the in general much of the modern work and communication has moved to asynchronous methods but the text book example still requires the events to happen in a synchronous way (eg. standup at 9 am) which obviously causes issues. Then you move forward to move say the dailies in Slack, at which point they just get posted whenever people see fit, which sort of works unless the problems themselves need to be solved synchronously, as it is with many cases and they easily just end up being status reports instead of actual planning.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  I know, right? How would two consenting adults ever work together to solve problems by communicating? Thankfully we have them stand up daily, without which they'd both just continually walk into the wall like lemmings.
  - petetnt 7y ago
    You joke, but the "engineers engineer until ready don't break flow" trope is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a project which is why putting emphasis on _daily_ communication (not just communication) is kinda important.
  - matthewmacleod 7y ago
    I know you're being facetious but basically yes. Some developers are great at working together and communicating with no formal structure in place. I have found over my career that maybe 50% of developers are absolutely appalling at doing so, and prefer to continue stumbling round in the dark. This applies even to developers who are reasonably technically competent. For these people, the enforced daily standup solves that problem.
  - twic 7y ago
    Don't lemmings turn round when they hit a wall?
Yizahi 7y ago
I don't like or dislike daily meetings much personally, but I think they are needed - mainly for scrum master and PO. Daily can't be replaced realistically with bug tracker dashboard because 80% of daily time is not bug status discussion but let's say mostly human problems. Also I believe there is zero correlation between success of the project as a whole and a need for daily, none at all. People suggest async text in chat but eventually harder and more detailed issues will raise a need to actually talk and while it will save 20 minutes time of each participant who now don't have to listen to other people's issues it will also isolate people from potentially useful information and prevent them to suggest their ideas or ask for clarification , basically limiting in-team collaboration.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  I think they are needed - mainly for scrum master and PO...[but] there is zero correlation between success of the project as a whole and a need for daily So, basically, what you're really saying is they're not needed and you don't need scrum masters or POs.
  - Yizahi 7y ago
    No, I mean that when project is successful a need for daily (or other detailed sync) doesn't diminish. You are still making decisions, plan complex features and communicate with the same humans, only company account has more zeroes, that's all difference. PS: in our case SMs and POs are actually doing useful work and we aren't holding any worthless meetings which are solely to entertain people not doing anything. If that was what you implied.
hugg 7y ago
Personally, I like the slack message standup over the meeting, but that's mainly because I'm a terrible listener, at least with text I can go back and see what a certain person has decided to mention. I also feel like it's easier to mention someone that I might need help from during the day
- lbriner 7y ago
  The problem I have with the Slack model is that it becomes opt-in. Lots of Devs simply won't read the channels because they won't care what other people were doing even if that knowledge helps people to skill-share, coach, encourage or take part of the work off of someone else.
dd82 7y ago
For me, they are. More so in my current role with a fully remote company. All calls are video calls, with RingCentral, Slack or Google Meet. We get to see each other face to face, get some social time and chit-chat a few minutes before diving into the standup. Other teams do async standup via Slack, via Standup Alice. It seems to work for them. I also really like the addition of an "open forum" in my team. Is there anything you've heard from other teams that will probably have an impact on this sprint's tickets or ones in the queue for the next one? Its also a good time for the PMs to relate any relevant conversations had with other PMs that we should know about. The real key to this is there's no power play involved, and to have a good sense of scope about what's appropriate to bring up and what isn't. We're also a hybrid core/product team, so regular checkins are beneficial overall.
tarique313 7y ago
No
fjfaase 7y ago
As so many things with scrum, a lot depends on the attitude of the scum master. If the scrum master is an ambitions person and focusing on results, stand-up meetings can be become a drag. If however, the scrum master has a focus on the team and it members, it can become a source of cooperation and encouragement. Many companies that want to implement scrum, do not want to pay the cost of hiring people who are good at being scrum masters (and are not necessary software engineers), but decide to assign the role to some existing people in the company, which, often results in people who see it is a stepping stone to a management position to opt for the role of scrum master.
- jeresuikkila 7y ago
  I agree with the importance of Scrum Master in the meeting but from a different perspective. Without a dedicated Scrum Master the meetings often feel either flat or take an off-topic life of their own. I believe that sort of communication is also important but should then be done outside of the Daily.
mcv 7y ago
I think they're absolutely worth it. The interruption of flow is minor, because they're predictable. You can plan around them. If you're working on something really complex and urgent, I don't mind if you skip it occasionally (but don't make that a habit). I think it's good to start the day together, with some idea of what everybody is working on. It helps to detect some issues that otherwise might be ignored or detected too late. Generally, communication is good, and short communication is better.
- lbriner 7y ago
  Yeah, nothing worse than finding out that someone has implemented something that you've already done somewhere else because you didn't know it was being worked on. Short is definitely good as is the chance to chip in a bit of unsolicited advice from one dev to another ;-)
mmsimanga 7y ago
> This will interrupt programming flow. This for me is the biggest drawback. When you are in the zone and interrupted it takes long to get back in the flow again. Another point is I don't solve problems in a linear fashion. When I am stuck I sometimes jump to another part of the application that I know I will have to tackle later on. That's just me. This is hard to explain in Agile with a PM/scrum master present. Edit: PM/scrum master because we have mixed environment.
- mcv 7y ago
  There's no PM present in the Scrum daily. In fact, there's no PM in Scrum. Jumping between different stories before finishing them is fine in solo projects, but if you're working with others, it means more code conflicts. That said, it is absolutely possible to work on multiple stories in Scrum.
  - mmsimanga 7y ago
    I work Business Intelligence (BI) using SQL and a reporting tool of choice. There are times when I just cannot write another peace of SQL. I can tell what I am churning out is long winded and likely to be slow. There are always other tasks such as setting up stylesheets, setting my templates, distribution lists for reports and so on. The problem I have is I don't know when I will be tired, typical issue is always the data quality that results in complex SQL.
- twic 7y ago
  > This will interrupt programming flow. This is why you do the standup first thing, before people have started working. There is no flow to interrupt. > Another point is I don't solve problems in a linear fashion. When I am stuck I sometimes jump to another part of the application that I know I will have to tackle later on. That's just me. If you're doing XP, or any kanban-flavoured variety of agile, you pick up one story/feature/etc and work on it until it's done. You might jump around in the codebase to build that feature, but you work on one feature. That's easy and natural to describe in a standup. If you're not doing that, then indeed, it's going to be hard to talk about what you've done. But to be honest, what you're doing is almost certainly not very effective, so maybe stop doing that?
a_ranom_dev 7y ago
I'm sorry, stand ups are literally a psychological trick played by middle managers to put pressure on devs. They undoubtably lead to higher turnover from devs fleeing chickenshit and I've never seen one actually lead to better code.
- kierenj 7y ago
  I would wager that 'better code' isn't the main (or even a major) objective of standups... getting the project done is. But both are important
- distantaidenn 7y ago
  In a past life as a Product Manager, one of my top devs rarely attended standups. One day, she rolled into the office mid standup, went over to the coffee machine, and prepared a cup. Never looked in our direction, and proceeded to begin her work. Later during our 1-1, I asked her what the issue was, and she bluntly told me that she thought standups were useless. I never brought it up again, as she was an amazing developer, and her documentation was absolutely pristine. After that, I myself stopped seeing the value in universal standups. If a person is good, they make it known in other ways.
  - lbriner 7y ago
    That isn't the point at all. The standup isn't to make her a better developer, it is to make the team work more effectively. What happens when someone is taking a long time to do something that she knows a shortcut for but they won't know because "she doesn't need to come". It's a sad culture when a developer thinks they don't need the team or when, for some reason, they don't have to come to standups.
    - a_ranom_dev 7y ago
      I know you mean well with your comment, but I secretly suspect that you are actually saying that you like your team and think this is jerk behavior. I have never seen how a standup actually helped team cohesion. Being called to stand in front of the middle manager and say your spiel about how soon you'll be done doesn't help team cohesion, unless you mean by simply submitting to the same crap the others are. Team cohesion is just flat out more complicated than 10 minutes of parrot and nod.
pszndr 7y ago
Every article: Title: Is [x] better than [y]? Article: Depends on context
- THrau 7y ago
  Well, isn't this how the world works? If yes, then x. If not, then y. I'm happy to live in a non-binary world.
agigao 7y ago
NO.
- kierenj 7y ago
  Because?
mikece 7y ago
Q. Are daily scrum meetings worth it? Programmers: no. Project managers: Why can't we do this twice a day?
ferreus 7y ago
The one true benefit that i remember from my time working in scrum was when we moved the scrum meeting from morning to 12 o`clock. And the benefit? After the meeting, everyone was already standing, so we went straight to lunch as a group without any further delay. Saved a lot of time and effort to organize everyone.
athenot 7y ago
I haven't found a way to make daily standups work in my team which is fully remote and spread out on 3 continents and 4 time zones (so there is no "start of day"). Instead I have a weekly sync with everyone and 1:1 with each person on a weekly basis. Kanban board gets reviewed weekly for assignment and direction (and I keep an eye on it thoughout the week). Blockers get addressed asynchronously in dedicated discussion spaces as soon as they arise. If a solution isn't found in chat then it becomes a topic on the sync meeting. But generally, there's no "spinning wheels" as everyone is mature and doesn't need a short leash. Which leads me to trust. Everyone in our team has a decent amount of experience. They all know when they are stuck and they all know where to ask for help. I've always felt that trust is empowering and that's what I wish for everyone on my team. But in this context, 1:1 are very important and I try my best to make them safe spaces for people to bring up issues which would be more uncomfortable to bring up in a group setting, especially for introvert personalities. Ideally, pick what works best for YOUR team. Experiment and try new things. What works today may not be the right thing in a year. These are tools, not dogmas. The worst process is the one everyone follows but nobody knows why nor how/if it helps.
balfirevic 7y ago
When I was put in charge of a new team for a new project at my previous company, we did the most agile thing there is. We got together and asked ourselves (all of us having previously been on teams that had daily standups): "So, what do you all think, is the daily standup worth it? No? Alright, let's try without it." It worked great. We ended up doing a quick meetings 1-2 times a week to sync-up and get the idea of where we are. Any blockers would be brought up informally (through Slack or in-person). We all knew each other well, so trust was high to begin with. Also, it was a relatively small team of 5 people. I guess the point is that "having daily standups" is not agile. Regularly asking yourselves if they are or would be useful (whatever the answer may be) is.
valcker 7y ago
Yes, they do but it depends on the context. In my previous company (web agency) they were solving several issues at the same time: - Project Manager (Proxy Product Owner) is communicating with the client on a daily basis and is getting some important updates about the progress of the Sprint; - if there are some unexpected developments (for example, some User Stories appeared to be more complex) the Team and the PO can make a decision about it together, discuss various options, etc; - the distributed team has a chance to see each other (we were encouraging video calls via Google Meet). However, there are some certain rules which should be followed in order to make Daily Scrums effective: - video (or at least audio) conferences for distributed teams – it can actually be slower to have this meeting via Slack; - they must be timeboxed (15 minutes max); - stay pragmatic about what you are discussing and ask the feedback of your team about it.
JohnFen 7y ago
In my experience, daily scrums are without value. A well-functioning team already knows what everyone else is working on, what problems they're having, and etc. If a team isn't well-functioning, then daily scrums could have some value -- but I think a better approach would be to fix the team.

75 points by klemola 7y ago

For a small remote company like ours, it would be exhausting to do daily scrum meetings. Instead, we have an hour-long weekly scrum meeting on Monday and it's more effective.

ljf 7y ago
Can you give a little more context about why it would become exhausting for remote workers? I'd seen terrible stand ups and good ones, but the location of those taking part has rarely been a deciding factor.
- nakodari 7y ago
  It is a waste of time. Whatever you need to discuss regarding the tasks can be discussed once a week and then once the tasks have been assigned and discussed, trust the team to work at their own pace and time and deliver it by next Monday instead of micromanaging the team every day.
  - ljf 7y ago
    But why is that especially exhausting for remote workers? Why not local ones too? You also foucs on assigned tasks rather than a team working together to get stuff done. Sounds like Software engineers, not product engineers. If you are pre assigning tasks and working separately then yes a daily scrum has no value. But that isn't the point of a daily scrum, or scrum/agile at all. The focus needs to be on getting value to a customer together as fast as possible - not individuals doing a task each to build to a pre-defined whole. Iteration not increments.

_tkzm 7y ago

i loved the dailies. it was the best way to earn money without doing any work. i always tried to prolong the meetings as much as possible. ah, i miss those days.

sod 7y ago

> Usually the better the project is going, the less you need the daily. That quote sums it up pretty nicely. To bad of a naming for this type of meeting. Hard to negotiate to do a "daily" less then daily.

Plyphon_ 7y ago
Agreed - whether it should be done daily or not is a decision based on a wide number of inputs. When it's work best anecdotally, is when we hold regular retrospectives ON our agile ways of working. EG: Is the standup working for us? What should we stop/start/continue in our standups? When this 'retro of agile' (rather than just project/product retros) take place regularly you quickly come across a format and cadence that works for the team. Tools are just tools, they should work for us, not the other way around.

einpoklum 7y ago

This kind of daily meetings make me feel like I'm standing trial for my crimes. Especially if I've had a bad/down/unproductive day, which happens. Maybe it's better when you take away the power relations. And reduce the frequency during non-critical periods.

twic 7y ago
Making classic standups useful and comfortable definitely requires psychological safety. You need to feel like you can occasionally say "worked on X, didn't make any progress", and a manager or a rival isn't going to pounce on you for it. If you don't have pervasive psychological safety, there's a lot of stuff from XP that isn't going to work.
- lbriner 7y ago
  Exactly what I was about to say. There are many things that are dismissed in team culture because of the fear of feeling exposed or blamed but that is an issue of culture and/or insecurity, not a disadvantage of using agile methods.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  This reminds of this scene: https://youtu.be/OMDQzITWJyU?t=204 https://youtu.be/OMDQzITWJyU?t=204 From "The Dictator", where Nuclear Nadal is reporting on his progress.
loa_in_ 7y ago
I skipped some meetings randomly (I was busy on the phone), so that's the escape hatch. But alternatively one might argue that if it's mandatory nobody will come. I don't have a good argument for the second part, except that I'd attend it to be up to date whenever I could.
philjr 7y ago
My 2c - the key is that the focus should be on delivery and not some justification for the work you did yesterday. The idea being that you are standing up looking at the work in front of you and the TEAM itself should be focused on how to move things across the board (ie delivering it to whatever definition of done makes sense for you)

jpkeisala 7y ago

> Another variation would be to do the daily on Slack which can even be asynchronous. That is exactly what I do. Every morning answer 3 things in Slack. It is also good way to say "Good morning, now I start to work on X, yesterday I did Z and I need some help on Y.

mytailorisrich 7y ago
The point of a stand up is to get everyone face to face to enable quick interactions and collaboration, and to do so in a very lightweight way. Doing it as you suggest is simply doing daily update reports and negates the point of a daily scrum. I feel often Agile principles are taken as buzzwords without really trying to understand the point. Now, whether the point works for you and your team is another question.
seer 7y ago
The thing with dailies is not that you share your updates, its more that you’re forced to listen to everyone else’s. Granted you can always snooze a bit and pretend, but that kind of bad faith is usually indicative of other deeper problems with the team. Also this can become a drag if you’re “held accountable” rather than “helped in need” but smart leaders would recognize that and attempt to fix the problem in the team, and a daily like that can be a tool for them to diagnose problems like this.
- jeresuikkila 7y ago
  > you’re forced to listen to everyone else’s. This seems to be an overlooked aspect here in the comments too. Yes, nobody likes to be forced to do something but in this case it's worth it. We have enough distractions as it is so taking 15 minutes to focus on what's important to our colleagues can bring forth valuable connections of ideas and people.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Face to face communication, and thus listening to others, is the whole point of the daily scrum.

seer 7y ago

I think they are worth it for remote teams. Most of the work comms can be easily done in slack, but there’s definitely a benefit of making people talk to each other and express emotions at least once a day. Normal offices accomplish that with water cooler talk and informal chatter, but you miss on that with remote teams. There might be a better way to solve the “loosing of esprit de corps” thing but dailies are the easiest thing I’ve seen do that.

bitL 7y ago
Why not weekly? Or twice a week? Advantage of remote is that you can prioritize incoming information and everybody is onboard with asynchronous communication by default.
- seer 7y ago
  It's not about information sharing, dailies are crappy for that anyways. You should always have async information centre so people can get up to speed. The idea is to be able to share the squishy emotional human bit of working with a team of people. Without it I've seen people just slowly drift apart. You'd see a comment from a coworker on your PR and be like "argh who is this guys think he is! He's totally wrong" but if you can talk with him about it in video it becomes a lot less confrontational. You can apologise and be apologised to. A jira board is just a means to have some shared concern to talk about. And done properly can leave you with a feeling of being part of something bigger, rather than a lonely coder talking to a computer.
  - lowercased 7y ago
    > You'd see a comment from a coworker on your PR and be like "argh who is this guys think he is! He's totally wrong" but if you can talk with him about it in video it becomes a lot less confrontational. You can apologise and be apologised to. Unless that doesn't happen. Perhaps he digs in his heels that he's "right" when he's demonstrably wrong? Or 'he' is the team lead, and it doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong, we all now move in that direction "because". Having to have video/f2f in situations like that adds more stress. Dealing with this situation now, and it's bad.

kozhevnikov 7y ago

Daily stand-ups have two formats, one is Round Robin that has origins in Scrum, other is Walk the Board that is more Kanban. I highly recommend you switching from "did yesterday/do today" to "walking the board" as it is less about checking what each employee delivered in a day but rather what the team can do to move tickets through the board. It is also more inclusive allowing quiet/introverted/non-native English speaking members of the team to participate in the meeting rather than rehearse their updates in their heads ignoring others.

rumanator 7y ago
It should be noted that the "round robin" format has an important aspect which is to enable each team member to air his/her personal grievances regarding anything related to the project.
- moystard 7y ago
  I would rather have this kind of discussions in the retrospective. It is a dedicated time for the team to discuss pain points, and to take actions to heal them.
  - vasco 7y ago
    I think the sooner the team is aware about issues the better.
    - robjan 7y ago
      I'm going to assume the GP meant blockers rather than grievances. Grievances are more like injustices and shouldn't really be aired at standups in a healthy team.
- ses1984 7y ago
  Grievances should relate to a ticket on the board, if not then make a ticket for it, if not that then is the grievance important?

petetnt 7y ago

I see the value in daily communication and the general topics (yesterday, today, blockers) of the dailies, but at the same time the daily standups show how the in general much of the modern work and communication has moved to asynchronous methods but the text book example still requires the events to happen in a synchronous way (eg. standup at 9 am) which obviously causes issues. Then you move forward to move say the dailies in Slack, at which point they just get posted whenever people see fit, which sort of works unless the problems themselves need to be solved synchronously, as it is with many cases and they easily just end up being status reports instead of actual planning.

celticmusic 7y ago
I know, right? How would two consenting adults ever work together to solve problems by communicating? Thankfully we have them stand up daily, without which they'd both just continually walk into the wall like lemmings.
- petetnt 7y ago
  You joke, but the "engineers engineer until ready don't break flow" trope is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a project which is why putting emphasis on _daily_ communication (not just communication) is kinda important.
- matthewmacleod 7y ago
  I know you're being facetious but basically yes. Some developers are great at working together and communicating with no formal structure in place. I have found over my career that maybe 50% of developers are absolutely appalling at doing so, and prefer to continue stumbling round in the dark. This applies even to developers who are reasonably technically competent. For these people, the enforced daily standup solves that problem.
- twic 7y ago
  Don't lemmings turn round when they hit a wall?

Yizahi 7y ago

I don't like or dislike daily meetings much personally, but I think they are needed - mainly for scrum master and PO. Daily can't be replaced realistically with bug tracker dashboard because 80% of daily time is not bug status discussion but let's say mostly human problems. Also I believe there is zero correlation between success of the project as a whole and a need for daily, none at all. People suggest async text in chat but eventually harder and more detailed issues will raise a need to actually talk and while it will save 20 minutes time of each participant who now don't have to listen to other people's issues it will also isolate people from potentially useful information and prevent them to suggest their ideas or ask for clarification , basically limiting in-team collaboration.

mattmanser 7y ago
I think they are needed - mainly for scrum master and PO...[but] there is zero correlation between success of the project as a whole and a need for daily So, basically, what you're really saying is they're not needed and you don't need scrum masters or POs.
- Yizahi 7y ago
  No, I mean that when project is successful a need for daily (or other detailed sync) doesn't diminish. You are still making decisions, plan complex features and communicate with the same humans, only company account has more zeroes, that's all difference. PS: in our case SMs and POs are actually doing useful work and we aren't holding any worthless meetings which are solely to entertain people not doing anything. If that was what you implied.

hugg 7y ago

Personally, I like the slack message standup over the meeting, but that's mainly because I'm a terrible listener, at least with text I can go back and see what a certain person has decided to mention. I also feel like it's easier to mention someone that I might need help from during the day

lbriner 7y ago
The problem I have with the Slack model is that it becomes opt-in. Lots of Devs simply won't read the channels because they won't care what other people were doing even if that knowledge helps people to skill-share, coach, encourage or take part of the work off of someone else.

dd82 7y ago

For me, they are. More so in my current role with a fully remote company. All calls are video calls, with RingCentral, Slack or Google Meet. We get to see each other face to face, get some social time and chit-chat a few minutes before diving into the standup. Other teams do async standup via Slack, via Standup Alice. It seems to work for them. I also really like the addition of an "open forum" in my team. Is there anything you've heard from other teams that will probably have an impact on this sprint's tickets or ones in the queue for the next one? Its also a good time for the PMs to relate any relevant conversations had with other PMs that we should know about. The real key to this is there's no power play involved, and to have a good sense of scope about what's appropriate to bring up and what isn't. We're also a hybrid core/product team, so regular checkins are beneficial overall.

tarique313 7y ago

fjfaase 7y ago

As so many things with scrum, a lot depends on the attitude of the scum master. If the scrum master is an ambitions person and focusing on results, stand-up meetings can be become a drag. If however, the scrum master has a focus on the team and it members, it can become a source of cooperation and encouragement. Many companies that want to implement scrum, do not want to pay the cost of hiring people who are good at being scrum masters (and are not necessary software engineers), but decide to assign the role to some existing people in the company, which, often results in people who see it is a stepping stone to a management position to opt for the role of scrum master.

jeresuikkila 7y ago
I agree with the importance of Scrum Master in the meeting but from a different perspective. Without a dedicated Scrum Master the meetings often feel either flat or take an off-topic life of their own. I believe that sort of communication is also important but should then be done outside of the Daily.

mcv 7y ago

I think they're absolutely worth it. The interruption of flow is minor, because they're predictable. You can plan around them. If you're working on something really complex and urgent, I don't mind if you skip it occasionally (but don't make that a habit). I think it's good to start the day together, with some idea of what everybody is working on. It helps to detect some issues that otherwise might be ignored or detected too late. Generally, communication is good, and short communication is better.

lbriner 7y ago
Yeah, nothing worse than finding out that someone has implemented something that you've already done somewhere else because you didn't know it was being worked on. Short is definitely good as is the chance to chip in a bit of unsolicited advice from one dev to another ;-)

mmsimanga 7y ago

> This will interrupt programming flow. This for me is the biggest drawback. When you are in the zone and interrupted it takes long to get back in the flow again. Another point is I don't solve problems in a linear fashion. When I am stuck I sometimes jump to another part of the application that I know I will have to tackle later on. That's just me. This is hard to explain in Agile with a PM/scrum master present. Edit: PM/scrum master because we have mixed environment.

mcv 7y ago
There's no PM present in the Scrum daily. In fact, there's no PM in Scrum. Jumping between different stories before finishing them is fine in solo projects, but if you're working with others, it means more code conflicts. That said, it is absolutely possible to work on multiple stories in Scrum.
- mmsimanga 7y ago
  I work Business Intelligence (BI) using SQL and a reporting tool of choice. There are times when I just cannot write another peace of SQL. I can tell what I am churning out is long winded and likely to be slow. There are always other tasks such as setting up stylesheets, setting my templates, distribution lists for reports and so on. The problem I have is I don't know when I will be tired, typical issue is always the data quality that results in complex SQL.
twic 7y ago
> This will interrupt programming flow. This is why you do the standup first thing, before people have started working. There is no flow to interrupt. > Another point is I don't solve problems in a linear fashion. When I am stuck I sometimes jump to another part of the application that I know I will have to tackle later on. That's just me. If you're doing XP, or any kanban-flavoured variety of agile, you pick up one story/feature/etc and work on it until it's done. You might jump around in the codebase to build that feature, but you work on one feature. That's easy and natural to describe in a standup. If you're not doing that, then indeed, it's going to be hard to talk about what you've done. But to be honest, what you're doing is almost certainly not very effective, so maybe stop doing that?

a_ranom_dev 7y ago

I'm sorry, stand ups are literally a psychological trick played by middle managers to put pressure on devs. They undoubtably lead to higher turnover from devs fleeing chickenshit and I've never seen one actually lead to better code.

kierenj 7y ago
I would wager that 'better code' isn't the main (or even a major) objective of standups... getting the project done is. But both are important
distantaidenn 7y ago
In a past life as a Product Manager, one of my top devs rarely attended standups. One day, she rolled into the office mid standup, went over to the coffee machine, and prepared a cup. Never looked in our direction, and proceeded to begin her work. Later during our 1-1, I asked her what the issue was, and she bluntly told me that she thought standups were useless. I never brought it up again, as she was an amazing developer, and her documentation was absolutely pristine. After that, I myself stopped seeing the value in universal standups. If a person is good, they make it known in other ways.
- lbriner 7y ago
  That isn't the point at all. The standup isn't to make her a better developer, it is to make the team work more effectively. What happens when someone is taking a long time to do something that she knows a shortcut for but they won't know because "she doesn't need to come". It's a sad culture when a developer thinks they don't need the team or when, for some reason, they don't have to come to standups.
  - a_ranom_dev 7y ago
    I know you mean well with your comment, but I secretly suspect that you are actually saying that you like your team and think this is jerk behavior. I have never seen how a standup actually helped team cohesion. Being called to stand in front of the middle manager and say your spiel about how soon you'll be done doesn't help team cohesion, unless you mean by simply submitting to the same crap the others are. Team cohesion is just flat out more complicated than 10 minutes of parrot and nod.

pszndr 7y ago

Every article: Title: Is [x] better than [y]? Article: Depends on context

THrau 7y ago
Well, isn't this how the world works? If yes, then x. If not, then y. I'm happy to live in a non-binary world.

agigao 7y ago

NO.

kierenj 7y ago
Because?

mikece 7y ago

Q. Are daily scrum meetings worth it? Programmers: no. Project managers: Why can't we do this twice a day?

ferreus 7y ago

The one true benefit that i remember from my time working in scrum was when we moved the scrum meeting from morning to 12 o`clock. And the benefit? After the meeting, everyone was already standing, so we went straight to lunch as a group without any further delay. Saved a lot of time and effort to organize everyone.

athenot 7y ago

I haven't found a way to make daily standups work in my team which is fully remote and spread out on 3 continents and 4 time zones (so there is no "start of day"). Instead I have a weekly sync with everyone and 1:1 with each person on a weekly basis. Kanban board gets reviewed weekly for assignment and direction (and I keep an eye on it thoughout the week). Blockers get addressed asynchronously in dedicated discussion spaces as soon as they arise. If a solution isn't found in chat then it becomes a topic on the sync meeting. But generally, there's no "spinning wheels" as everyone is mature and doesn't need a short leash. Which leads me to trust. Everyone in our team has a decent amount of experience. They all know when they are stuck and they all know where to ask for help. I've always felt that trust is empowering and that's what I wish for everyone on my team. But in this context, 1:1 are very important and I try my best to make them safe spaces for people to bring up issues which would be more uncomfortable to bring up in a group setting, especially for introvert personalities. Ideally, pick what works best for YOUR team. Experiment and try new things. What works today may not be the right thing in a year. These are tools, not dogmas. The worst process is the one everyone follows but nobody knows why nor how/if it helps.

balfirevic 7y ago

When I was put in charge of a new team for a new project at my previous company, we did the most agile thing there is. We got together and asked ourselves (all of us having previously been on teams that had daily standups): "So, what do you all think, is the daily standup worth it? No? Alright, let's try without it." It worked great. We ended up doing a quick meetings 1-2 times a week to sync-up and get the idea of where we are. Any blockers would be brought up informally (through Slack or in-person). We all knew each other well, so trust was high to begin with. Also, it was a relatively small team of 5 people. I guess the point is that "having daily standups" is not agile. Regularly asking yourselves if they are or would be useful (whatever the answer may be) is.

valcker 7y ago

Yes, they do but it depends on the context. In my previous company (web agency) they were solving several issues at the same time: - Project Manager (Proxy Product Owner) is communicating with the client on a daily basis and is getting some important updates about the progress of the Sprint; - if there are some unexpected developments (for example, some User Stories appeared to be more complex) the Team and the PO can make a decision about it together, discuss various options, etc; - the distributed team has a chance to see each other (we were encouraging video calls via Google Meet). However, there are some certain rules which should be followed in order to make Daily Scrums effective: - video (or at least audio) conferences for distributed teams – it can actually be slower to have this meeting via Slack; - they must be timeboxed (15 minutes max); - stay pragmatic about what you are discussing and ask the feedback of your team about it.

JohnFen 7y ago

In my experience, daily scrums are without value. A well-functioning team already knows what everyone else is working on, what problems they're having, and etc. If a team isn't well-functioning, then daily scrums could have some value -- but I think a better approach would be to fix the team.