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Comment by alfonsodev | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this, I found that if you go for the Round Robin format, often, people are just thinking about what are they going to say next, and how to make it sound like actual valuable work rather than listen to the colleagues. It gets akward when some people get a lot done (apparently) and others not, also not everyone knows how to "sell" their work, and IMO it can create weird dynamics.

Walking the board is much more helpful for the team and retrospectives and one to ones can be used to talk about productivity differences, individualities and other issues.

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I also noticed this.

We came up with a variant to fix this. You have to say what the next person in the circle said they'd do yesterday before your talk.

This forced everyone to pay more attention as you don't know who would be standing next to you tomorrow. It wasn't easy to do but I think it did make people more aware of what was going on.

wow this would suck in a 20 person standup

Why would you have 20 person standups?

because government project? although I imagine this happens in non-gov settings too, this is just my experience.

Here's the reason: managers are so spread thin that they don't want to be in 5-10 standups all morning, so they combine around organizational structures rather than product(s)/deliverable(s). Another case of the software delivery matching org structure...

Of course the next question in line is "why is a manager involved in the standup?"

> because government project? although I imagine this happens in non-gov settings too, this is just my experience.

Why not split into smaller work groups? What's the advantage of 20 person teams?

organically this is what happens to actually get things done. but mind you, these small work groups are successful despite the large standups. life finds a way...

I know we tend to have little control over this as ICs, but I think the party line here is that 20 is too many people to effectively make use of most agile/scrum ceremonies. Do you actually need to know all 19 other persons’ updates?

Individuals don't, but the managers, who may be well meaning, feel the need to.

Literally everything would suck in a 20 person standup.

can confirm

Well, yes, a 20 person standup is a little more than twice the maximum size conventional wisdom holds is appropriate, so it is going to suck to start with and much advice for normal 5-9 person stand-ups will be counterproductive and make it worse.

This sounds horrendous. It doesn't really feal like it would achieve much either except making standups even harder.

Why is this voted down? Stand-ups are supposed to be about increased team cohesiveness and this helped their team achieve that.

This is a terrible approach for the fact that instead of addressing the problem of people not listening because of stuff not relevant to them said from others, it ensures you must listen to that irrelevant stuff.

So instead of wasting some people time, you are now wasting 2x that time.

Make the meeting relevant to everyone, make it tight (time-wise). Hiding the problem under a tarp ensures it doesn't get any improvements.

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