[distantaidenn]

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]

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.

[mnm1]

I think she said standups are useless, not that the team is useless. I completely agree. I've never found any use for them in years of being forced to do standups. They are 100% for managers. If someone has an issue I can help out with, they message me directly or post in a channel and we work on it. That's what happens. Very simple. They don't have to wait until the next day and they don't have to bother everyone else with their likely-irrelevant issue.

Also, how can standups be designed to make the team work more effectively? They essentially steal some of the best development time in the day by insisting on being the first thing done in the morning, when most people are fresh and ready to go. There's no way in hell this was designed to be anything but a manager's control tool designed to slow down the team in bureaucracy and bullshit. And it does a great job at that.

[sime2009]

> Also, how can standups be designed to make the team work more effectively?

Tips:

* NO MANAGERS. The standup is for the scrum team to organise and help itself. It is not there give a status update for the manager. The manager isn't in the team, and people have trouble talking freely when the manager is around.

* Do an issue based standup. Discuss the status of each issue on the board from the right to left. The primary question is "What can we do to keep these issues moving along through the process?".

* At the end you can ask "Does anyone have anything else important to add?". Maybe people have to leave early today etc etc.

That's it.

[a_ranom_dev]

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.

[detaro]

If your standup meeting is "stand in front of the middle manager", you're doing it wrong(tm). As with all things "agile", many places love the labels, don't understand the ideas. In my (limited) experience, standup meeting involving leaders only work if the leader is clearly part of the team (and e.g. the pressure to get things done comes from outside).

Of course, that doesn't help you if you're stuck in an organization doing it badly.

[mattmanser]

It doesn't matter if it's a manager or your peers, you shouldn't have to justify your work every single day.

It's childish and immature and if you for some reason need to do it to be able to communicate, learn how to communicate properly, don't foist your miserable way of working on others.

[detaro]

Why does a standup have to be "justifing your work" (it's not supposed to be), but other communication about status not?

[mattmanser]

The very article linked shows the 3 questions.

"What did you do yesterday".

How is that not a loaded question?

JUSTIFY YOUR EXISTENCE. Every day.

Anyone encouraging standups is just contributing to the poor mental health of programmers.

[distantaidenn]

Wow, I didn't think my comment would be so contentious. Just to clarify, I did not say that she felt she didn't need the team, nor am I sure where you got that impression.

She was quite communicative in other ways -- just didn't see the need for standups. Due her effectiveness, I had no reason to try to change that behavior. She got shit done, and everyone knew it -- with our without a standup.

Edit: And please note that I said "universal" standups. I feel we often want to apply a one size fits all to developer mindsets. Maybe she was shy. Maybe she felt pressure from the ceremony. Maybe she did just feel it was a complete waste of time. Either way, my job as PM was to get products built, and a big part of that was understanding the individual mindsets and capabilities of the engineers on my team.