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by douche
3662 days ago
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It doesn't really matter that it takes almost no time - it's that it is an interruption[1]. You're working along on something, getting in the groove, then Outlook dings at you , so you've got to page out the real work that you're doing, recall the silly scrum answers you're supposed to give, get up, walk over, wait for everybody to show up, blather on about things that you don't care about and already know because you've read the digests from source control checkins and ticketing, say your piece, and escape. Half an hour or more is blown away, plus another half hour to get ramped up to where you were before this all started. Oh, and by the way, somebody surprise-scheduled a customer demo or {InsertOtherMeetingWithNoDefinedAgenda} for you in an hour. Might as well just get coffee and browse the internet, and accept that normal working hours are for looking like you are working, so you can actually get something done later when everybody has gone home. [1] http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-... |
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Stand-ups are only an interruption if they are poorly scheduled. I accept that sometimes it isn't possible to schedule one, such as when there is a large, geographically-distributed team. However, I have rarely seen them take place outside of the first 30 minutes to one hour of the working day, in cases where teams work on-site. This works really well in my experience, offering a little bit of time to get set-up for the day, a stand-up near the beginning to catch up and exchange status, then an uninterrupted rest-of-the-day.
To be honest, it sounds like in most cases I've heard of that teams are just undisciplined about interrupting developers. I obviously agree that interruptions are bad, but I've had great experiences (like my current team) when the standup serves to consolidate all interruptions – there will be no surprise customer demos, unexpected interrupts or other things of the sort, and part of the 'social contract' of the team is 'we will have this short meeting to keep us all up to date, and in exchange we will prevent developers from being interrupted'.
It works great.