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Comment by robert_tweed | Hacker News Reader

Funnily enough this format is nearly identical to what I call the "scrum email" which is something I've previously asked remote freelancers to send in daily and found it works as well if not better than actual stand-ups. That list of things to put in a sitrep is one of the things that Scrum gets right:

- Brief summary of what was done since last report

- What's next

- Any blockers

- Anything else important (optional)

The only difference is the inclusion of OKRs/KPIs, which makes sense if you are using them. I tend to do something similar with project status reports as well, which will usually have red/amber/green in the subject line and if the status isn't green, the email starts with the reason!

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I love the idea of the standup. Getting a read on what everybody is doing is a great idea. It's idiotic to do it as a synchronous operation that stops the world and frigs up everybody's day, though. This is one of those things that would take five minutes to think about, write up, and post to someplace public first thing in the morning, after which you could dig in and actually get some work done.

Why the hell don't more people do this? I sit on lengthy stand-ups where people gripe or lecture with no expected resolution, meanwhile all I have to say is "business as usual" and I don't need anyone else's status, and could skim over updates in a few seconds, and even catch up with them later if need be.

If you don't need or are interested in what other people are working on, maybe your team is too big?

It can happened with a small team spread across a number of projects too.

Or sometimes you just really don't care.

> Or sometimes you just really don't care.

Agreed. Hearing about the minutiae about someone's task is tedious. To me the daily scrum is like getting home and asking your significant other "how was work today?". Boring question, boring answer.

I definitely prefer the asynchronous approach. That way if I don't care about what you're working on (or vice versa), we don't need to waste time standing in a room together.

My take is that if the work other people are doing isn't interesting, you shouldn't be at the same meeting.

If you can't learn from what they're saying, don't need to know it, and can't contribute, then you shouldn't be there. This is why we use feature crews as a subset of the team.

It's not that I'm not interested. It's just that I respect their time too much to interrupt their important work for the selfish purpose of satisfying my curiosity. I'll have a chance to ask them casually when the time is right, or if I am dying to know, I'll take a look at their check-in messages.

If part of my work depends on theirs, or requires specific coordination, I'll use whatever mutually agreeable medium to exchange the information that is needed.

I've never really felt like I didn't know what people on the team were working on, despite not having a daily meeting or weekly status.

I don't get the blockers thing either. If I'm blocked, you're getting an email or IM immediately. I'm not going to wait until the weekly status email, or even the next day, to tell you. And I'm not going to bother the people who can't do anything about it.

If you spoke more openly about what you did, maybe briefly about any challenges you faced, someone may ask you about that. They may realize you solved a problem they were having. Maybe your team lead would be able to notice, "oh, you were struggling with that? So was your other teammate, you two should talk!"

But understand the hesitation. And if someone is blocked, agreed, it should result in a quick email or IM. Of course, if you spent all day yesterday trying to figure something out but are just feeling kind of stuck, standup call is a great place to say, "hmmm, I can keep working on this, but if someone has some time, I could sure use a second brain to help."

A 'lengthy standup' is the problem. It's not in the intended spirit of a standup to be long.

I have found standup works best when it's

- Quick, 5 to 10 minutes

- Strictly focused on current status and blockers,

- Attended only by people who are directly working on the same project.

- Has someone designated to run the standup, who is empowered to table any discussions that start to drift.

5 minutes is too long and ruins the concept of a "standup"

If you sit on a standup, your meeting is broken and you should speak up about it.

I'm not a big fan of standups. I should be able to glance at the plan/burndown chart/backlog/whatever and know everything I need to know: Which tasks were finished lately? Which tasks are in progress? Who is working on which task? Which tasks are blocked? What is our goal for the next week/2 weeks? How close are we to meeting that goal?

If you don't have a tool or an easy to update document that shows this at a glance, then you have a problem. If you are asking people to give you all this information and then trying to collate it, then you have a problem. If people are not very simply causing this information to be visible as part of their normal workflow, then you have a problem.

Meetings are not the solution to any of these problems. What meeting are good for is: Human contact. People often find that if they don't interact directly with someone that the other person might have important information that isn't being shared. The longer the time between contact, the more that irrational feeling grows. Not everybody feels that way. I don't and it took me years before I realised that it is hugely important for other people.

The best thing I can say is that, if you don't have a short meeting where people can fist-bump, eventually someone on your team is likely to go crazy and cause huge problems. Usually that person is your manager, as it turns out.

My advice is to treat any substantive conversation in standup as being something to be fixed. You don't want that. You want people to show up, complain about how boring standup is and disappear. Every time you find important information showing up in standup, ask yourself how it could have been shared more easily as a normal part of the work flow. Keep working at it and eventually standup will be all fist-bump and no content.

Thanks for posting this. This is the best perspective & concrete advice on DSU I've seen. I'm not a big fan of going through the motions, but understanding why we go through the motions changes my outlook.

If the people don't take the meeting seriously, you'll never hear anything either way, so you'll never know whether there is something you should be hearing about or not.

You know what perpetuates people not taking the meeting seriously? Having a 10 minute meeting every day just for fist-bumps.

Replacing standing up with holding the plank position, will solve that problem.

Stumbled across this Slackbot the other day which conducts a "standup" asynchronously - the best of both worlds.

https://geekbot.io/

No affiliation, just seems like a cool product. Probably wouldn't be hard to whip something similar up if it's not already on GitHub.

We use this aty company, even though we're a small team of 6. We have enough people working from home that it helps keep us in sync every day.

There are a few others to try. I don't think any has a distinct advantage, just varying levels of polish. But I would recommend using it, especially for (semi-)remote teams.

My team adopted Geekbot as we transitioned from in-office to primarily remote. We tried a handful of tricks and tools early on, with Geekbot the stickiest. Spending 30 seconds submitting my report while getting up to speed each morning is an easy routine. Nowadays, I prefer Geekbot to in-person standups (and definitely don't miss the interminable ramble that they too easily fall into).

I think you're right to wonder about alternatives, though. The aspects of Geekbot we use would be fairly easy to replace with a bot of our own. Geekbot pricing has a very narrow sweet spot, which I imagine varies significantly by team.

We have something similar internally as well. Everyone messages the IRC bot their yesterday + today + blockers, and it sends out an email midday to the team. Much more efficient.

I suggested this to my program manager - and it went to deaf ears.

There is an ingraned urge to interrupt everyone and force people to waste 30 minutes of their daily time.

This is very cool! We use HipChat (migrating to Slack soon) and Assembla (which has a standup module). We have coded a bot which checks who has not added their standup in Assembla and reminds them on HipChat.

I started cooperating with external freelancers recently, and after 2-3 weeks of less-than-perfect communication, decided for GeekBot as well. I'm curious how will it play out in the long run, because first results are pretty promising.

We use this except with IRC: https://github.com/racker/standupbot

The concept is pretty similar. Not everyone uses it, but I like having it to keep track of my work.

Agreed! Instead we use a Slack channel called #todayiwill and people just enter a few bullet points when they get in.

I find standup useful exactly because it's synchronous. It's like a checkpoint, and keeps the project running smoothly, with everyone's goals aligned, nobody blocked, etc.

(We work in teams of 4-6 and standup is never more than 10 minutes. I've also had the "30-minute standup" which not really a standup...)

Why does sync matter?

Theoretically stand-up was supposed to be a quick activity taking no more than 15 minutes of your day, and on average taking less than 5 minutes. Teams were supposed to be small, and people were only supposed to talk for about 30 seconds unless there were quick questions to be answered.

That's why it was called stand-up, in order to emphasise that you stand while doing it so the meeting simply can't be long since everyone is psychologically incentivised to get to the point so we can all go to break room, sit down and work, or get coffee.

Of course it didn't work out that way in many places, and now 'stand-up' is a 1 hour long daily meeting complete with minute notes, rules of proceedings, and slide-shows.

I manage two small (5 people) teams where everybody works remotely, and we have daily "stand-ups" using hangouts. They usually last just 10 minutes, and I find them very useful not just because of the info sharing, but because they help getting better team cohesion - which is difficult with remote work. They're well worth the small disruption of development activities.

Standups, when done with discipline, bring in a lot of insight and prove helpful for everybody in the team. I use Assembla at work which offers a standup module, which asks the three customary questions. My problem is getting my team to regularly fill those up. I have personally reminded them several times. I have created an automated bot which checks who hasn't added a standup for the day and reminds them on HipChat. Despite that, people just don't do it with regularity. I should think this is a common enough problem that most teams/organisations face. I'm interested in what they use to tackle it.

Have the bot revoke access to the things people do instead. Reset LDAP credentials or something. As long as it's a very quick and easy process to get access restored.

I find this kind of thing dehumanizing.

Daily, repeated form-filling is hard for creatives. Never heard of Assembla but if you were my manager and you were repeatedly needling me to fill out some form, every day, when I'd rather just give you a few words over chat (or in person)... I would most definitely push back.

I understand what you mean. However, if you personally have to ask every individual every day 1) what they did, 2) what they will do next, 3) and what impediments they have, and you can't get them to do it without your having to ask (in my experience, they'd do it for a few days, slow down, and then stop again), the more efficient way seems to me is to automate it.

Of course, in my case, I didn't wake up on the first day and put this in place. I spent a few months trying to get people to send in their standups every day, but realised that I can't possibly do it everyday with an expanding team and it didn't make for the best use of my time. Because filling in your standup is a quick part (quick because it shouldn't take you longer than five to ten minutes to fill it up) of the process that needs to be followed, the most efficient alternative was to create a bot to remind those who can't remember to do. Plus, the number one reason I got from people who failed to do it was that they simply forgot.

Why do you need to ask everyone about everything everyday? That's called micromanaging. Their non-compliance is a message.

Try trusting them instead.

Signed, Micromanagee

Is it really micro-managing? Isn't it the point of standups in Scrum, to find out what an individual in a team has been working on and what issues they are facing in order to make more efficient use of their time and skills as well as to clear impediments in their way? The end goal is to improve the team's performance.

If I was telling them what to do, what results to expect _and_ how to do it, then I would be micro-managing.

Ideally, what people are doing should be obvious, if they are actually doing work. Check-in messages, issue tracker activity, etc, gives a more real picture of what is actually happening than the copy-pasted no-information answers presented through stand-ups generally.

Don't Lumbergh your way through it - "So, Peter, what's happening? Aahh, now, are you going to go ahead and have those TPS reports for us this afternoon?"

Micromanaging includes closely observing, and not just controlling, an employee.

If the point of standups in scrum are to find out what an individual has been working on, every day, then this could feel like micromanaging to some people.

That is an interesting observation. For me, closely observing would translate to nagging individuals several times a day about what they are doing as well as how they are doing something.

The end goal of standups, the way I understand it, is to figure out what people in your team are doing and what they are stuck at in order to:

* align people towards individual goals in the sprint that require collaboration; * remove impediments that are beyond the control of team members and that may cause delays; * improve task and load distribution, so that some members aren't overburdened while others are slacking off (if you run a short sprint and give team member autonomy to work, tasks that require collaboration from several team members can tend to become bottlenecks, as I have experienced).

I suppose you could well call it micro-managing if these standups were used to manage individuals instead of the process. In my view however, standups help you gather data to manage and improve the process, so as to make things favourable for the team.

I'm very much in agreement with the other posts that you can get most-if-not-all of this information by keeping your ears to the ground (listen to your team's chatter) and paying attention to activity notifications.

If you have to closely observe or repeatedly needle your team for information, something is wrong. Programmers are largely introverts doing high-focus activities; we need to be left alone.

We (as in my team) don't strictly follow formal practice, though we have standups and I try to follow LEAN. Our git server sends email notifications with each push and I find these are wonderful for peering into what other people on my team are up to.

Top line of wikipedia:

"In business management, micromanagement is a management style whereby a manager closely observes or controls the work of subordinates or employees."

If you automate it, it shows you value your time more than than their time.

Sync standup are for teams that lack the self discipline for async. Every team i have been in starts sync and switches to async when the most senior or fearless person decides to stop carving out sync time

I feel like the point of a stand-up isn't just to get people to say what they're doing, it's to get everyone else to listen. That's why it should be as tight as possible, to ensure people stay engaged.

If you replace the standup with written reports, I doubt anyone but the manager will actually read them. I know I wouldn't, regardless of how valuable it seems in the abstract.

OKRs generally last a quarter (or a month) and are higher level than tasks. So weekly is a good timing but referencing them daily is overkill. OTOH if you do scrum type status, weekly isn't frequent enough. So in practice, "virtual" stand-ups and OKR inspired status emails are often distinct.

Apart from blockers, pretty much all of that can be relayed via whatever job/bug/kanboard board you are using.

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