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Comment by ohduran | Hacker News Reader

The whole purpose of daily standups is to be short, to the point, and force developers to discuss blockers.

That can't be async, because I need the other members of the team to answer.

The issue the author is addressing is that for some, this is wasted time. But a) that's why these meetings are short, thus the standing up part, and b) Usually it isn't but an opportunity for more seniors to chime in with suggestions.

Plus, stop with the "here's why" in your titles. I know you're going to tell me what you think, but that doesn't mean that you know THE TRUTH ABOUT WHY something important should be the way you think.

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Blockers usually take longer than ~15 minutes to discuss & resolve, though, and because those discussions are definitely not relevant for the rest of the group, they're not meant to be had in the standup. Instead, we think blockers should be discussed and resolved as they happen, instead of waiting for the standup the next day to report on them.

and point taken on the "here's why"!

The OP confused the issue significantly, IMO, by suggesting that “let’s take this offline” was a bad thing. NO it’s half the point! Identify the blockers, identify who can help, and take the solutionising elsewhere. Also, as you say, solve the blocks as they happen. You still need the stand-up to replan now you’ve used up X amount of unplanned time unblocking something. This might impact delivery.

Am I the only one who raises a flag immediately when there is a blocker? Why would I wait until the next day?

Communicating blockers in stand up should be for heads up purposes. Just to let everyone else adjust expectations on your work. If you’re waiting for a stand up to kick off resolving a blocker, that doesn’t seem right.

> Am I the only one who raises a flag immediately when there is a blocker? Why would I wait until the next day?

You can.

Saying it in the standup is a formal way of putting the burden on the team. Like "I'm blocked by this. I sent out an email yesterday but no one helped." is useful.

And when you have a scrum master external to the team, it's his responsibility to ask on the next day "X was blocked by this yesterday. Did anyone help?" If no one did, there will be a discussion on why not.

As others have mentioned, it only really works if people are motivated to listen during the standup. If they're not, the team is dysfunctional anyway (regardless of whether you have a standup or not).

Also, it's fairly useless if people are working on fairly different things.

They're not mutually exclusive. Especially at a time when everyone is remote and it's easy to miss emails/slack messages, etc., having a dedicated time to say "Hey all, I'm still waiting on X" is helpful.

This comes up a lot on the teams I've worked on.

But ultimately, the entire reason you have to go to standup and remind people to do their job is because they are not doing their job. It's surprising the number of people that can't be assed to make a simple to-do list and follow through on it and the number of meetings that are necessary to remind them of this fact.

I mean... what is the failure here? Is this not what Jira and the hundreds of other project management systems is designed to do? It's baffling, to say the least.

In my experience, the "blockers" that standups help with are not so clear cut. Of course if I reach a point where I clearly can't proceed without X, I'll email/slack/async-request the person who might be able to get me X, and work on something else until that resolves.

What standups help with (IMexperience) are situations where you're spending a lot of time on something but it's not really clear whether you're making progress. Maybe someone has dealt with that API before on a previous project and knows you're doomed, or how to help. Maybe someone has a dusty old CS memory that will turn your O(n!) to O(n). Or maybe — and I don't think we should discount the usefulness of this — it just provides reassurance that yes this is a thorny problem, there isn't an obvious alternative you've missed, you're not wasting your time or being stupid. That makes a big difference in morale, and morale makes a big difference in productivity.

Sure, there's some benefit in having a daily status report to your manager who is presumably also at the standup, but that's not the main benefit of a daily standup, IMHO. If that is the only benefit you're getting from it, then sure, cancel the standup.

I think about it like this — if I ask a question, someone needs to be interrupted to make that happen. Even if they were on slack anyway, or between tasks, if it’s not something they are otherwise working on, it may take them off their task. If my thing is critical or blocking others, I raise a flag. If it can wait, I wait too. Disruptions are probably one of the most costly time investments of our trade.

If I have a blocker, and I wait until the next day to bring it up in standup instead of actually doing something about it at the time directly with the parties involved, I'm either working in a massively bureaucratic place, the decision makers are inaccessible, or I'm wasting everyone's time with shyness.

TBH the only time I'd really think it'd be useful to bring up a blocker in standup is if I was throwing someone under the bus for not helping and I wanted to be like "not my fault!". I don't do that, but it seems like the only purpose.

>That can't be async, because I need the other members of the team to answer.

Why can't the answer be async?

yeah, I don't get it. If you need someone's attention, make it your task to get their attention. In my experience, I'm rarely blocked by someone else on my team, so saying I'm blocked in standup is like complaining about work at the bar- maybe it feels good but it's kinda useless.

So maybe there's a scrum master who then takes my "I'm blocked" thing to whomever is blocking me. But... why can't I just ping the person blocking me and escalate as needed?

The whole thing just feels like corporate babysitting to me.

This makes sense for developers, but what about BAs and product owners that then have to attend 3-4 stand-ups a day? This seems like a nice way to give them a high-level view of what's going on, as well as for the rest of the team.

Exactly, my words in the last paragraph.

> the best teams actually unblock problems as they come up

Sure, but that‘s (usually) not how the world works and that‘s why we have daily stand-ups.

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