Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by nivertech | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

nivertech

> 1. What you worked on yesterday.

everyone can see it on issue tracker

> 2. What you plan on working on today.

everyone can see it on issue tracker / Kanban board / etc.

> 3. Any blockers or risks you have identified.

for any blocker/risks I'll encounter, I'll send an email (and file bug/issue/ticket) immediately - no need to wait until the next morning.

Why do we need to use tools that less (or no longer) technical people can understand, if we still required to duplicate this data in email (or god forbid in actual meeting)?

This only makes sense under SDLCs which don't require detailed task breakdowns, like RUP, mini-waterfall, or Shape Up. But Shape Up provides some good solutions for risk management/status updates (e.g. Hill Charts [1]) without going down to daily standups.

[1] Hill Charts

https://basecamp.com/shapeup/3.4-chapter-13

https://basecamp.com/features/hill-charts

https://3.basecamp-help.com/article/412-hill-charts

View on HN

Not the OP, but I can easily answer.

No matter how often it gets repeated, not everyone bothers to update the board, while for some psycological reason most answer on messaging apps.

Everyone can, but why would anyone do? Our default state is "I don't care what you do, that knowledge is a distraction detrimental to my own work. Ideally I'd want you all to work, if you have to, when I don't". The rituals exist to break down those walls, even if just a little.

It's best illustrated by the author's failure indicator "If the manager or “scrum master” can’t show up, the stand-up doesn’t happen". That's so very telling.

The alternative approach of the chat reminder tries to minimize friction (short writeup is so much easier to consume than trawling The Board) instead of forcing everybody to be present (and presumably listen, which does not necessarily happen)

> "Everyone can, but why would anyone do?"

Some of us do care and see the big picture of things, but that mostly limited to tech/product companies/startups, much less so to enterprise employees, or agency-supplied contractors.

I.e. it boils down to incentive alignment, and to a lesser extent professional curiosity.

> "I don't care what you do, that knowledge is a distraction detrimental to my own work."

Agree, so it doesn't matter whether this distraction is done by issue tracker, email, or an actual meeting.

At least in the issue tracker case it's stored in a structured database which I can easily query (even programmatically via API/bots), and much less distractive than in email/meeting.

> everyone can see it on issue tracker

Only if you have a perfect board, no things ever come up out of order, a be everyone has the same idea of granularity. In practice, no, that information is going to be either unclear or wrong.

> everyone can see it on issue tracker

I don't think this is necessarily true. If an engineer is blocked on a difficult problem for a day they don't have time update issue tracker to say they are blocked.

I personally mostly worked under SDLCs were the developers have autonomy and do task breakdown by themselves, rather than by being assigned by PM/SM (except bugs/support tickets).

If that's a psychological issue, not sure daily standup can help here, unless the PM/SM will try to interrogate that person, or try to guess if somebody is blocked.

If your stand up chat updates in slack are on auto pilot the process is working.

If it's not, there should be something to discuss in retro.

Use it as a signal, not the signal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com