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Comment by ratsbane | Hacker News Reader

It also can solve the problem of helping team members know what each other are doing. If standup were only what this essay describes, it would be a waste of time, but it's a lot more than that. It's also a chance for team members to describe problems they're having and benefit from the collective experience. I'm a big fan of morning standup, but I suppose there are good standups and bad standups.

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You can use Slack. If you have a problem, raise it in the relevant channel or reach out to the relevant expert. There's no reason to make that something that has to be done once a day.

If you want to know who is working on what, again there are tools for that (Trello, Jira, whatever).

If you need to reach out to a manager/team lead to escalate an issue, then reach out to the manager.

Morning standups quickly devolve into "I'll say what I'm up to while everyone else checks their email". I fail to see what problem they solve, really.

We have a standup channel and its very easy to track and timezone insensitive. "Here's what I did, this didn't get done, blocked on this, planning to tackle Y next".

We still do just kind of general 1h meetings couple of times a week because it's just easy to dive into a few tricky problems we have that week with the stakeholders and all devs present. These could probably be removed if someone did messaging between the devs and stakeholders as a full time job.

In my experience, there’s rarely a reason why an entire team needs to know what everyone is doing. Tasks are decomposed. You may need an update from a single person, but you never need an update from eight people.

Encourage people to communicate directly. Share noteworthy progress and problems in the weekly meeting. Just make sure the meeting doesn’t devolve into a dramatic reading of the status reports.

Many times, you don't know a team mate is working on something that you would like to know about, or indirectly concerns you, or that you have an insight your team mate never would have thought to ask you about, if not for the stand up.

The point of it isn't to know what everyone is doing, it's to know when someone is hung up on something that you can help them with.

1) This is not a daily occurrence. If it, your team has more serious issues.

2) They can ask in slack. Encouraging people to reach out proactively is a skill and culture the team needs to develop.

I'm not sure why that would have to be a process though. When I worked in a bigger team, if anyone needed help they'd just ask a deskmate if they didn't look too deep in flow, or drop a message in slack.

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