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by twic 2346 days 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?

3 comments

Having it be the first thing in the morning seems to be the least efficient option possible, way worse than being interrupted in flow. This is the peak working time for most people, peak alert time for the majority of the population, and therefore the most productive time for many people, even many of those who are not prone to waking up early. Starting with something that's mostly useless to the developer and taking focus away from what really needs to get done that morning sometimes kills the entire morning. I'd rather be interrupted mid-flow and I'm certain I'm not alone considering the majority of the population actually is most alert in the morning (along with the other peaks of energy throughout the day). The optimal time for such a meeting would probably be either right before or after lunch, with lunch being variable and taken based on the workload of that day.
> But to be honest, what you're doing is almost certainly not very effective, so maybe stop doing that?

You most certainly don't have enough information to make such a recommendation.

> This is why you do the standup first thing, before people have started working. There is no flow to interrupt.

That requires all the people to come to work at the same time.

This point is dealt with in the article. People have different traveling arrangements. In my case sometimes I have to drop off my child at school and head in after the morning rush hour. So daily stand up is not first thing in the morning.
I worked on a project where we had the daily scrum (by conference call) at 4pm, precisely because people all started work at different times. All that that achieved was to mean that I was unproductive from about 2pm because I was thinking "if I get into something now I'll get interrupted before I properly finish it"