[Pentamerous]

The blog post mentions too many meetings. Its the 15m daily everyday, then a retro and a planning once per sprint. I understand it is too much for a one-week sprint (as stated in the post) but how is that too much otherwise? Seems exaggerated to have a four week sprint because of those two moments. In fact, I would argue that having longer sprints means longer meetings (if you're having a productive retro you'll have a lot more to talk about during four weeks than two)

And how is having meetings a negative thing for remote work? Remote shouldn't mean "no interaction". Remote should adapt for collaboration.

[BlargMcLarg]

>but how is that too much otherwise?

Because people lack discipline, will powder Scrum meetings on top of existing meetings, create more meetings from stand-ups because Scrum doesn't teach individuals to be disciplined, drag out the meetings, etc. Scrum's entire premise of "get everyone together and talk" is the very thing which encourages people to talk. A lot. Without providing any suggestions to counteract it beyond "draw the head of the owl, now draw the rest"-type of advice.

>And how is having meetings a negative thing for remote work?

Meetings imply synchronous communication. Author is conflating remote with asynchronous, but nothing about the story implies collaboration needs to be synchronous / meeting-heavy either.

[irrational]

I’ve rarely see stand ups end in 15 minutes. I’ve had stand ups that drag out for two and a half hours. When I say I need to go to get work done, I’m told this is work and you need to stay. So… many… meetings. And then I’m asked why I didn’t get my things done this sprint. Gee? I wonder why?

[twic]

I've also seen these awful interminable standups. But i've also seen quick and effective standups, even on a big team. The difference is simply discipline.

If you ask a developer to talk about what they did yesterday, their instinct will be to waffle on, go into all sorts of interesting details, reflect on decisions they made, voice various concerns, etc. If you ask a whole team what they did, and they follow their instincts, you will have a long, boring, low-value meeting.

If the developers have a discipline of reporting only the most important things they can fit into two minutes - whether through self-discipline, or discipline imposed by a strict and heartless overlord - then you will have a short and effective meeting.

Discipline does not appear out of thin air! It has to be intentionally cultivated or imposed. Many teams don't do either. I think some just don't understand that this discipline is required; it simply doesn't occur to them that they should avoid waffling, because every standup they've ever seen is full of waffling. Others intellectually understand that they should follow that discipline, but their brain hasn't connected to their glands, so they don't actually do it, and they don't have a leader cruel enough to impose it.

The best example i have seen was at my first full-time programming job. We ended up with a team of about twenty developers, mostly senior. There was a tendency to waffling. Luckily, our team lead was an absolute bastard, who had no problem controlling it. First rule, stand in a circle. Second rule, stand next to the person you paired with yesterday. Third rule, if you are the first in your pair to speak, you have two minutes to say what you did and anything that others should know. The boss will have a timer running, and will cut you off without ceremony at the two minute mark. Fourth rule, if you are the second in your pair to speak, say "nothing to add", unless you do, in which case do it quickly. Fifth rule, if you have something you desperately want to say that will take you over two minutes, tell people you will send an email about it. Twenty people, ten pairs, twenty-minute standup, like clockwork.

So, if you are suffering from long and waffling standups, and if you also have retros, raise it at the retro. Ask people "do you think standups are too long?". Await the chorus of agreement. Tell them that the only solution is to strictly limit the amount of time people speak for. Some will complain that they have too many important things to say to be limited. Remind them that a limit is the only solution. Some will still complain. Bully them into submission or have them fired. Go on to enjoy fast and satisfying standups.

[bkuehl]

Yeah, and not every scrum implementation needs to have a ton of meetings. We do 1 week sprints with no 15m daily stand-ups and a monthly or so retrospective. If someone is blocked I don't need them to wait to the next day to bring it up in standup. That's why we have group chat collaborarion tools after all right??

[adrianmsmith]

> Its the 15m daily everyday, then a retro and a planning once per sprint. I understand it is too much for a one-week sprint (as stated in the post) but how is that too much otherwise?

One place I worked at had two week sprints. The entirety of one day every sprint was spent on demo, retro, planning, commitment. But because the scrum master had to "build" a sprint and couldn't do that without knowing the size of tickets, there were two morning meetings every week to "analyse" tickets.

So you had: Week 1, 1 full day Scrum day, 2 half days. Week 2: 2 half days. So 3 days out of the 10 day sprint, so 30% time spent on Scrum.

Plus standups, so the hour before the standup nobody did anything (as judged by the number of PRs and comments and Slack activity) so that's an hour plus the time for standup every single day.

Maybe that's insanity, I mean I certainly thought so, but these things do happen.

[heisnotanalien]

It's not so much time, it's more cognitive load. In scrum teams, it feels like you're always talking about the future. I think it just builds on the anxiety many people have frankly. It's just another attempt to unrealistically control the future.

[jt2190]

The theory of a meeting is that the team will gather, go through a list of problems, solve those problems, which will keep the work moving forward.

Standup/scrum meetings should be about identifying the work that has stopped moving forward or is progressing slower than we’d like it to. The team might find a solution on the spot or a new ticket is created and assigned to someone to dig deeper for a solution. Probably that ticket is assigned to the Product Owner.

Most standups/scrum meetings are not about unsticking work. What they are about will vary depending on the particular dysfunction of the company, e.g. managers trying to make sure everyone is working.

[novia]

it's because the 15 minute daily becomes a 30 minute daily

[bluGill]

I typically get our 15 minute daily done in 3-5 minutes. About once a week someone has a more complex problem and just those people who can help with that problem stay after for 10 more minutes while the rest of the team goes back to work. As the team lead I get regular (3x/week) checkins to make sure people are doing work and not stuck, but it doesn't take a lot of time while people talk about projects the rest of the team isn't on.

[novia]

Glad your team is not ridiculous. My team treats the daily as a report up to our boss, and our boss treats the daily as a time to go on a long monologue