[dos1]

I'm genuinely curious, how are standups not status meetings?

From the article:

- Make sure everyone is working on the right thing

- Help out other team members by taking work off their plate or helping them by sharing domain-specific knowledge

- Keeping everyone informed

How is that different from a status meeting? I've heard "standups are not status meetings" over and over from the agile community, but I don't get it. They sure seem to be quick status meetings that allow everyone to get a handle on the current status of the iteration?

[ams6110]

I've never experienced standups that weren't status meetings, and weren't serious flow disrupters. You get to the office, but don't really want to get too deeply into your work because you know standup time is 9:00. The team gets together, each person summarizes what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, what blockers they have. Everyone else mostly zones out. Next thing you know 30 minutes have passed, and by the time you get back to your desk and start to get ready to work you are already thinking "well lunch is coming up, no point in getting into anything substantial until the afternoon..."

I think standups could work, but they should only focus on things that impact the project (breaking change to an interface, or significant new things that are available) or things that are blocking work. And honestly I think email does a better job at that with a lot less impact on flow.

[mmatants]

30 minutes? That's definitely a long time. I've only been in an environment that does standups for a few months now, but for 5-8 people (team + PM/etc) it has rarely gone beyond 5-7 minutes (everyone rhymes things off in 40-60 seconds each, and any spin-off conversations are aggressively deferred).

It actually has worked really well in preventing of siloing/cliquing of work effort. Another thing that has helped greatly is using a physical task board and organizing conversation by task instead of by person. This puts less emphasis on "looking useful" as individuals and more on championing tasks to see their completion.

[ajitk]

> This puts less emphasis on "looking useful" as individuals and more on championing tasks to see their completion.

This is a very good approach. Separating task and people is key to getting things done. When things are getting tough for an individual, the team can rally behind.

[pyre]

The common thread I see in your complaints about stand-ups are the "I can't break my work into pieces, I need several hours of intense focus to work on anything."

E.g., Your stand-up is from 9-930a. After which you can't start anything substantial because 'lunch is coming,' but that's 2.5 hours away (assuming you lunch at noon).

[jbellis]

That's pretty common. "Maker's schedule" http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html rings true to every technical person I know.

[davidwoof1]

You're looking at the wrong side of the meeting. It's the time before the meeting, not the time after.

I like morning stand-ups, but a big problem is that if the stand-up is at 9, I start winding down whatever I'm doing around 8:30, and I don't start new tasks after 8-8:30. Multiply the loss by the entire team every day and that's potentially a big loss of time. And because everyone's schedule is different, there's really no place to put the meeting that avoids the problem.

The benefits of a well-run standup can outweight this productivity cost, but it's a real cost that needs to be considered.

[ams6110]

Has anyone ever tried an end-of-the-day standup? Would not tend to disrupt flow, because you're going home afterwards. Also might help keep the gathering focused and on-topic.

I guess this does presume that everyone wraps up at about the same time every day, which I've generally found to be the case, but may not work well with widely distributed workers or places where people actually practice a wider range of work hours.

[tcharron]

I have seem teams use end of day stand-ups. The problem with those is that they tend to devolve into status updates pretty quickly.

Team members report on what they did that day, but seldom think about the things they are going to get done next and the things that are preventing them from getting started on the next thing, which in my opinion, are the more important things to focus on.

[msrpotus]

A team I interned with did standups at the end of the day but honestly, at that point, you just want to go home; you don't want to stay to hear what's going on with everyone else.

[sultezdukes]

One thing we had for an action item of our retrospective is to start consolidating meetings.

We had a huge problem with non-delivery people scheduling meetings willy-nilly, just because people's calendar's were free.

I've put the kibosh on that, as much as possible, especially in the afternoon.

[Aaronontheweb]

Speaking as an engineering manager - I've only had to use standups in environments where engineers were not good at checking in their code and closing out issues regularly. I HAVE to have that information, regardless of how I get it.

I would strongly prefer to have a stream of commits and JIRA issues in HipChat to review the following morning than have to do a standup. But not all engineers are as good as they like to believe they are at following development workflows and processes.

[tcharron]

Since you are a manager, I might suggest that the Agile and Scrum the daily stand-up isn't for you. While I appreciate your need to know what's going on with the team, in Agile and Scrum, the daily stand-up isn't there to provide status to managers.

The purpose of the meeting is for the team to get together and co-ordinate the work that needs to be done in order to meet their Sprint goals. So while you may be able to get status information out of that, it's more important for team members to use that time to figure out how to meet their goals.

In addition, status should be obvious in Agile teams. This is why you usually see things like cards on walls and burn down charts. If status isn't obvious to everyone, you may want to see if there are other ways the team can make that information highly visible.

Check out: https://www.udemy.com/improv-your-agile-scrum-stand-up/?coup... for more.

[bstpierre]

> Since you are a manager, I might suggest that the Agile and Scrum the daily stand-up isn't for you

I definitely agree with this. Standups/scrums have become much more productive since management stopped attending. It's hardly a "status" meeting any more -- sure, we talk about what we're working on, but there's a lot of jumping in by other team members with suggestions, help, or "I was going to do something similar, let's coordinate after the meeting".

[wpietri]

Yes, you've experienced terrible stand-up meetings. My rule of thumb is 10 minutes, max. Is everybody really standing comfortably for 30 minutes? Your coworkers must be tougher than I am.

Also, who are people talking to if not the rest of the team? Why are they saying things that other team members don't care about?

[bguthrie]

The difference is the audience. I usually think of a status meeting as a one-way infodump from worker to manager. In a well-run standup, your audience is the whole team, because you're accountable to the team rather than any one person, and as a team member you're an active listener. If everyone's talking at the boss while the standup is going around then you're doing it wrong.

Edit: wrong, not right.

[wpietri]

Exactly this. I've seen plenty of faux stand-up meetings, where it's all about keeping the boss informed, and everybody else zones out. That's entirely wrong.

Another wrong way is to take a long time. It's a quick meeting, where everybody syncs up for the day and major issues are raised. I think of it as like the way players will quickly huddle together on a sports field. It should be high energy, biased toward finishing, and tabling any significant discussions for later.

As far as I'm concerned, they only make sense in a team environment. Where people are jointly working on shared goals and extensively support one another. In the Extreme Programming approach, they go along with a team work queue and collective code ownership.

If people, say, have individual work queues parceled out by a boss and don't interact much, then as far as I'm concerned the stand-up meeting is the wrong tool.

[FourthProtocol]

Easy enough to say, not always easy in practice. If "the boss" has political sway then it's never going to happen. I worked in an environment that considers itself "very agile", because it "does standups". Any suggestion that it's being done wrong makes you look confrontational.

I was there because the money was good. Motivationally it was about as effective as being micro-managed on a waterfall project.

[babarock]

Disclaimer: I'm not an "agile guru". I've worked for years in an old-school corporate environment and just recently switched job and joined a small agile team. My views on agile don't come from reading or theory, they come from my one month experience so far.

The only difference between standups and status meeting is that you're not there to fill a report card. You're not there to show your manager you did something. You're just there because it's the only 10 minutes in the whole day where the whole team comes together to discuss. It's (at least in my place of work) highly informal, very chilled and very genuine. What we do is say what we're working on and ask for help and/or ideas.

We have a private IRC channel for this, but the fact that we meet face to face for 10 mins a day really does bring up interesting fast conversations.

The whole point of standups is not to take notes, not to keep track and just have a quick break to talk (not type) about work.

[suppressingfire]

I think there's a stigma attached to the notion of the status meeting. Beyond that, at least to me, a status meeting is a kind of assymetric situation where one person with some kind of authority (manager, PM, ...) is trying to keep tabs on everyone else's work, where each attendee has to prove that they've been doing their job. In a standup, it's a kind of egalitarian environment where everyone is speaking to everyone else, and nobody is taking notes to report up the food chain.

[potatolicious]

This is exactly it, and I can't help but wonder if the people who vehemently dislike standups actually work in such environments (I know I have).

I also feel like the original "Standups are Poisonous" author may work in such an environment also.

I once worked for a company (who shall remain nameless) where the development process could be generously described as a perversion of agile. They wanted the cool buzzwordy notion of agile, but didn't want to actually subscribe to an egalitarian, hands-off environment where the engineering process is largely self-managed.

So, manager as scrum-master (noooooooooo), manager present at standup (noooooooo), and worst of all, story points becoming a measure of productivity (noooooooooo!). Standups would routinely last half an hour, even though our team was literally 4 people large, because the scrum master/manager would stop someone and drill down constantly.

Oh, and the manager ran estimation too, and with pressure from above would blatantly try to influence estimates downwards. The rest of the team compensated by inflating small tasks. Yay.

Tasks would also get assigned to specific team members from the get-go, because the team was horrifyingly silo'ed and we were constantly "too busy" to cross-train by spreading tasks around. I find that silo'ing is by far the biggest thing that makes standups seems irrelevant - why listen to what that guy is doing if that task has no bearing whatsoever on anything you're working on, or will be working on?

[tcharron]

Yeah, these are all common dysfunctions in teams getting started with Agile.

You see these a lot in cargo-cult style adoptions. They understand that they need to do these practices, but they don't understand why. The end result is that they try to pervert them to serve their own purposes (e.g. daily stand-up as a status meeting for managers) and lose the real value. Then they complain that "Agile doesn't work here".

[whydee]

Funny, that reminds me a lot of my last job. I am sure there are a lot of people stuck in a similar situation out there. Team members can't help but become biased against the process, and by association, the 'Agile' label.

[_delirium]

I agree this is the key difference, and I think the root of one of the problems: many workplaces that implement standup meetings have a manager or PM present at the meeting, even though this is discouraged by many agile evangelists. Sometimes the PM even acts as the scrum-master, despite the scrum process as officially conceived really discouraging that. And then it turns into daily short reports to the boss.

[johnbellone]

I agree with this. Most of the time status meeting is usually something I associate with bringing my manager up to date on what my team is doing. Typically this is a 1-on-1 situation. Sometimes it involves other managers outside of my hierarchy but still under product ownership.

[conatus]

I've been doing agile scrum in a seven person team (scrum master, four developers, a product owner and our immediate line manager, with the occasional addition) for over a year now every single day. We try and get it over with as quickly as possible with people letting one another know when they are stepping over being particularly "stand up" - i.e. having a discussion or talking with one another. We don't always get it right, but like everything in agile it is iterative.

I find it supremely useful - it builds self-understanding in the team and a sense of actual teamwork, even camaraderie, improves visibility of what everyone is doing (and where you may be able to help - we often chip in when someone says they are stuck to say "yeah I know a bit about that, let's chat about it after stand up") without feeling like surveillance. You also get to know if there are going to be any demand on your time for discussion (say of upcoming work) from our line manager. It is not a status meeting. Both the theory and our lived practice make it a synchronisation meeting that defines the heartbeat of the sprint process. Its actually a comfort to know if you are stuck you can say so in the stand up and people are aware you are having difficulty.

If you are doing scrum right then status meetings should be unnecessary during a sprint. The interaction between the team and the product owner (co-ordinated by the scrum master to prevent the product owner becoming noise) should be sufficiently smooth that when you get to the demo at the end of the sprint nothing should be a surprise to the product owner (they are part of the team after all) but should be for consolidation and display to wider stakeholders. We use e-mail and GitHub issues to keep the product owner in the loop at all times (increasingly moving to just GitHub) and HipChat for status throughout the day. As for "higher level" status meetings, our line manager has no need for this from us because she is much closer to the work through the stand up and our scrum master will handle these duties as required so we can get our heads down in the sprint. Status meeting for more senior management are the job of the line manager, who also plays a role in just letting the team get on with development. Status meetings as people seem to be describing them here seem to be the kind of productivity killing time sinks that the scrum process defines as "noise" and attempts to use the scrum master to keep as far away from the team as possible.

(PS I work in IS Web Development University of Kent where we take agile process in our team very serously - we'll shortly be hiring ;-) )

[seivan]

I've been thinking of writing a script that pulls down commits from <yesterday>, formats it "properly" and pipe them to SAY.

"Wednesday, 24 April Fixed bug #434, added protocols between user and tasks. "

And if they _really_ want to know what I am going to work on or what issues I have. Please check my tracker. There are bugs, features and chores. And each of them has comments that describe any issues I might have run into or will.

Problem solved.

[vpeters25]

Actually in a well ran agile team, you should not need that as you should be focused working on only one user story.

If you are fixing bugs then the story should be "x bugs related to foo feature" and your daily standup report should be "I fixed x bugs on foo, I have y to go, should be done today, no blockers"

[seivan]

But there are a lot of things on the tracker that is in the icebox but assigned to me. Doesn't mean I am doing all at once :P

[vpeters25]

First, in agile teams, there is no assigning of tasks, each member takes the ones they feel like tackling.

Agile in not optimal for maintenance or emergency production issues. These are dealt immediately and only mention in the daily stand up as a blocker stopping you from finish the task you actually intended to complete. They are not even added to the product/sprint backlogs.

As a rule of thumb all user stories added to a sprint should take between half and 2 days to complete. If you have a whole bunch of small bug fixes, group them together so they fit in that time-frame (i.e. all UI bugs in page foo). Otherwise you end up polluting the backlog with hundredths of little things and turning your planning meetings into overwhelming nightmares.

Just think about it: if everybody in the team is working on only one or two tasks every day, the daily stand up will take each member about 30 seconds and the whole meeting less than 5.

[nahname]

Enjoy!

standup = log --graph --decorate --oneline --author="YOURNAMEHERE" --since="yesterday"

[ratherbefuddled]

Standups are useful to the team. They are for making sure everybody knows what's being done and impediments that can't be fixed inside the team get kicked to someone who can focus on them. Anything in a standup that isn't useful to the whole team should fall by the wayside. They are standups to encourage them to be short.

Status meetings are for the benefit of a manager. They allow everybody to report to the manager so the manager can feel comfortably informed. These are typically useless to everybody else because they drag on for far longer and nobody pays attention whilst each individual briefs that manager. These sorts of meetings are detrimental to getting a team to self organise.

[tcharron]

The daily stand-up as a status meeting is a common anti-pattern and one I often have to coach teams out of.

While yes, you may be able to derive status from a daily stand-up meeting, that's not the point.

The point is for the team to co-ordinate their work and figure out how they're going to get things done. Done well, it has more in common with a planning meeting than a status meeting.

I actually have a whole course on how to have good stand-up meetings.

Here's the link: https://www.udemy.com/improv-your-agile-scrum-stand-up/?coup... I added a discount code for anyone who's interested.

[Evbn]

Wow that is entirely wrong. You don't figure out how you are going to get things done in a 10 minute meeting. You quickly call out where you are and if you are stuck, so people know who to needs help, or who can give help, or what needs to be done that no one is doing yet.

Good luck with your course.

[mindcrime]

You don't figure out how you are going to get things done in a 10 minute meeting.

Sure you do, at a very high level. "Milo is doing the SYNAPSE adapters, Stinky is working on the compression drivers, Lisa is doing the UI stuff and Teddy is fixing the build system."

That can be covered in 10 minutes, and then the individuals involved can (and should) go off and hold whatever independent meetings - if any - are required for their specific tasks.

[johnbellone]

When I think status meeting its usually beyond roadblocks that were brought up during standup or several standups. Some of our stakeholders aren't present.

To me a standup is a tool to keep the team fully gelled and jump on any issues which will cause a sprint to spiral out of control. They should only last a few minutes per person (we have about ten people) and we schedule coffee immediately following to tackle any issues that were tabled due to a timebox.

Note: We have a 'coffee club' where everyone brings in coffee and we french press it every morning. So its scheduled only so that nobody pulls us into meetings ;). We love our coffee.

[efsavage]

Standups are definitely status meetings, and there's nothing wrong with that. As someone else mentioned, it's the audience that matters. 5 or 6 good engineers and a clueful manager in a room are going to sync up and get back to work, usually in less than 10 minutes. Some people, including engineers, are prone to go on and on, perhaps even about something interesting like a bug or a new library they found. Make those people go last.

If the meeting takes longer than it's supposed to, walk out or hang up.

If someone is rambling on about something that isn't going to help the team move forward, say something.

Standups will not fix a bad team, or a bad manager.