That's useless because everybody else tunes out. Nobody cares what debugging methods you tried on some project they've never touched. If you need help you can just ask somebody.
If a clear majority of the audience isn't interested in your status then you're just burning hours.
Also a standup with 40 or 50 people is just plain silly. I worked in gaming a few years ago and our standup was a full game team, the artists, designers, QA, server-devs, client-devs and our stats guy all spoke. It was a bit interesting to see what artists were doing but totally unnecessary for me to hear anything anyone said except the two other people I worked with, and we communicated well outside of the standup anyways.
From my understanding stand ups are not supposed to be status reports. They tend to turn into them though as it seems the most common format is 1) what did you work on yesterday, 2) what are you working on today, 3) what's blocking you?
I prefer daily stand ups (near the onset of the day) for small teams to be 1) what's our goal for today? 2) what might block us or slow us down? 3) how are we going to tackle our goal?
When stand ups start feeling like justifying your existence then morale drops, [looking] busy work increases, and too much time is spent on CYA. Focus on solving problems not explaining them.
The same as it was yesterday or whenever the last planning session happened.
Like TFA said, the team, as a whole, shouldn’t be changing priorities like socks.
Tried that once as a team. Then it became a derogatory joke word, haven't sprinted since. Well only in real life when playing tag with my kids.
Estimating, delivering on time, working together, can be hard. Someone deciding to rename it with a new label, doesn't usually solve the problem, though now everyone has a new label to make fun of.
If your standup can be replaced with everyone posting on a slack channel, then it's just a status update as there's no discussion and alignment happening, which are the valuable parts.
Most teams should experiment with their process more.
Blockers - hopefully blockers are identified and communicated right away vs waiting for standups.
How to get stuff done - less unnecessary meetings and processes. Async communication.
This would be better solved by hosting specific IRC channels for those roles and having occasional role-specific meets/lunches to introduce new people.
I thought that was the kind of situation he meant, where people zone out because they don't work on that project, but who knows.
You shouldn't assume too much about the environment other people work in.
Now, I'm not totally defending standups here, I've been on teams where daily standups are a stuffy formality, and they are miserable. I've also had the pleasure of being on teams where weekly standups were implemented, and they were an absolute delight and completely useful.
I will qualify all of my opinions with the fact that the best teams I've worked with implement Kanban, so there is no sprint planning. We just pull off backlog and work with weekly standups. There's way way less overhead, with some tradeoffs.
I also definitely think that certain team cultures are completely incompatible with standups, to the point that you receive negative benefit from implementing them. If you have a lot of people who are of the type "my responsibility ends where my story points end", I am pretty sure you will end up have a bad time doing standups.
Too well perhaps, their small talk was on super minor or even unrelated stuff that they saw the previous day.
They were doing mainly exploratory work, and it made no sense to bring on board other people before they settled on a direction themselves.
I think ultimately a one size fits them all approach only “works” when the people on the fringe also play the game and bullshit (in a good light) their way around.
I likely will never understand the great minds behind management.
However, if only some people speak that can create divisions in the team, or make it look like the speakers are the leading members when that may or may not be true. So to prevent that dynamic everyone says something, and people can help the team function better by coming up with a nifty one minute oration.
Ultimately making software is a human endeavor. Sometimes a little small talk prevents the humans from feeling bad and not making software. Sometimes it has the opposite effect.
The best managers figure out which case is true at a specific time and place and adapt. Good managers just have to pick what risks to take and live with the outcome.
2. Aren't most people, at least the developers/designers in the same standup, supposed to be working on the same project?
I'm also confused why OP is having standup eith people who havent even heard of the project he's working on. Doesn't sound like he's working on the same product as the other developers.
The standup should be the place of last resort for bringing up barriers impeding a task. The more resourceful you can be at solving a problem/brainstorming outside of the standup the better ime
I didn't mean to imply that, but one of the purposes of stand-up is to give a place for that to happen.
I'm glad I haven't lived through that hell.