[wpietri]

This article is like magic! By which I mean the exciting part is all misdirection.

In meetings, the time lost is obvious. Which is why people focus on doing them well. By moving it to email, you're not saving time; you're just hiding it. And, I'm sure, increasing it.

I'm a fast writer. I practice pretty much every day. But there is no way I could write my standup contributions as quickly as just saying them. I'd guess writing is 5-10x as long. In a stand-up, I can point at the board and say, "I'm done with this; it was easy. I'm still working on that; it got hairy." If somebody needs more, I can see it on their face and raise an eyebrow; they'll ask me what they need to know.

To write a decent status update, I have to guess at all the reasonable questions and head most of them off. It is much more work. And then to keep up, I have to check my email. And integrate each person's comments with everybody else's to try to form a coherent picture. And then to follow up on the mysterious bits. A giant waste. I try to keep email off my coding machines entirely; distraction is a productivity-killer.

This also ignores so much of what I get out of stand-ups. I can see who's happy and who's dragging. I get an easy opportunity to grab somebody for a quick discussion. I get information through tone of voice, posture, and expression. Information about relationships, about features, about code. I get charged up at the beginning of the day knowing that we are all diving in on the same thing.

[vacri]

Well said. In my experience, standups were short and covered a lot of ground. Problems were rapidly back-and-forthed. If you didn't have a standup, people would get annoyed because they needed to jaw with the group on something. It was a small, diverse team (one hardware guy, one firmware, two web, two support, a smattering of others) and that may have contributed to the need to cover ground quickly, but the idea that the daily meeting is by default a waste of time is laughable.

Trying to convey a lot of the things we encountered in text would have taken a lot more than 2 min/day, unless you were satisfied with rubbish and unilluminating two-liners. Sure, some days would go by with everyone saying 'going fine, nothing here', in which case we lost all of two to three minutes - around the same time as this magical email that apparently covers the more complex stuff.

[mindcrime]

To write a decent status update, I have to guess at all the reasonable questions and head most of them off. It is much more work

I think the assumption here is that there is a very limited set of basic questions that apply to everybody and that become the default. For example: "What did you work on yesterday?" "What are you working on today?" "Do you have any blockers or concerns?" If you just got everybody to submit those three questions and their answers, it would go a long way.

[wpietri]

Sure, and I am saying it takes a lot more work to write that up well than to have a conversation.

I guess it could be that people were answering those things in an entirely dull way. In which case, no wonder the meeting was seen as worthless. I'd suggest putting the boring information in a shared artifact. Personally, I tend to use as physical board. I also see virtual teams using a virtual board (like Trello) for that.

The value of the stand-up is in what people say that goes beyond the obvious.

[mindcrime]

The value of the stand-up is in what people say that goes beyond the obvious.

I agree. I just don't necessarily think that you need that level of interaction for a status meeting every day. OK, maybe some teams do.. and I can see why some people might prefer it. But my experience has been that it's overkill.

That said, different teams, different cultures, different situations, could definitely dictate different approaches.

My biggest gripe with the daily meetings is that they force a context switch that somehow seems to always come at the most awkward possible time, no matter when you schedule the meeting. Requiring lots of face-to-face meetings also runs counter to the idea of having distributed teams and a lot of "work remotely" flexibility, which I also tend to favor.

But, again, YMMV.

[wpietri]

Yeah, I could imagine contexts where not much is going on, or where the work is pretty routine, or where collaboration is low. In which case, no need to talk frequently.

I usually work in exploratory, high-volatility contexts, where there's plenty to talk about. I also favor continuous deployment; I think the last shop averaged about a release per engineer per day.

Given that very exploratory context, I also really like people generally being present. If that's the default, you can iterate much more quickly.

[mindcrime]

People can talking without having a daily, scheduled, standup meeting! If the only time people are talking is during the standup, I would consider that an anti-pattern. :-)

I'm certainly not advocating not communicating or collaborating, and frequently. Just saying that the daily standup isn't always required.

Given that very exploratory context, I also really like people generally being present. If that's the default, you can iterate much more quickly.

Fair enough.