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Comment by chrismeller | Hacker News Reader

No, the point of standups is to go around in a circle and make sure that everyone has everything they need to keep working (that there are no “blockers” in the parlance of agile). That’s why they’re called standups - you’re supposed to stand so that everyone gets annoyed if it takes more than a handful of minutes.

If you’re discussing what you did yesterday, what you’re going to do today, when you think x is going to be completed, what is blocking you (other than that so-and-so owes you such-and-such), or anything else other than nodding that you’re good you’re missing the point and that’s where the slippery slope of pointlessness begins.

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But if something is blocking you, you should not wait for the standup to bring it up, what a strange way of working is that. Just ask someone who can help you. That's one thing that works well in my company.

Still people also want standups, basically to hear what others are doing and feel like a team.

And so we circle back around to the pointlessness of all meetings.

If it is as-needed to hash out an idea or determine the best way to fix something or to scope and point... that’s fine.

If it’s every day, twice a week, every MWF, etc. there is absolutely no way it’s actually necessary every one of those times and everyone is going to eventually defer to human nature and wait for the meeting to bring things up.

Part of that is natural and well intentioned - I’ve got the meeting in an hour, I won’t bother them yet, I’ll wait for it.

Part of that is natural and self-defeatist - if we already discussed everything then what will we discuss in the meeting?

The actual solution is to get rid of the meeting. The real solution is to just wait and discuss it all there. It’s like why I don’t call my mother the day before I go over to have dinner with her - we’re going to cover it all in the phone call and it’s going to be awkward silence while we eat.

And finally, if a standup is the best way you’ve found to make everyone feel like a team... there is no hope. That’s a really, really crappy way to make people feel included. Though that is what passes for team building at more places than not...

I know. I wanted to get rid of our standup as it has no real point. The rest of the team wanted to hear what people were doing, so it stayed.

I find a good replacement for a traditional agile standup is a board based one. Rather than going through each person where it feels like you're being put on the spot individually, you go through each card on the board and ask what needs to happen for it to move to the next step. 90% of the time it's going to be one person putting their hand up and saying "I'm working on it" then you move on, and the other 10% of the time you might actually have a productive conversation in a meeting, which IMO never happens in a standard stand-up.

I'm surprised more companies haven't moved to this model. I don't really give a fuck what Jim is working on today, I just care whether his card that I have a dependency on is ready or not, or if we need to collaborate on it in some way. If the team is finding they don't know what's going on, or the board isn't being kept up to date, then this style stand-up will actually help with that, rather than just blowing 15 of my most productive minutes listening to everyone spin some bullshit story about how much work they crammed into 8 hours yesterday and why it didn't perfectly align with what they projected in standup the day before.

The thing is that we are ~11 people working on ~20 projects (the largest has about 2-5 people working on it at any moment, the smallest is worked on a couple of times per year, all the rest is in between). So without keeping each other informed there is a lot that goes unnoticed just because your work doesn't depend on it.

Going through all tickets would take a lot longer than having an update of all people so I don't think that will be popular, but I like to look at the tickets that aren't assigned to anybody yet at the end of most standups so that we don't lose sight of them.

The point of standup isn't to report status or get unblocked. Even in a large team or for x-team blockage, you can just talk to the PM.

The point is to keep social pressure on weak performers.

One of the main points of Agile (as implemented) is to push the team to perform. Otherwise natural habits of slack creep in. One or 2 people failing to deliver destroys all the good work of the strong performers. This is the real reason for standups.

Yes, that sounds about right.

The point of mentioning blockers at the meeting is to put pressure on the person who is the source of the blockage.

In an ideal world this isnt needed, but many people need public reminders or prodding to unblock.

Just like everything, there are levels to this.

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