Comment by bgro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bgro | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably doing standups wrong, but I find it useful for devs to (briefly) talk about what they're working on. Bring up something you're struggling on and maybe I can jump in and help. Let people know you're working on a hotfix today, so try to not bother you. Get early feedback on priorities from the PM if you're going down the wrong path or a customer changed their mind on something you didn't hear about.

I also like to have a casual dev text chat going throughout the day so you can post things like "Why isn't customer history appearing on this page?" "That page uses a one-off modified version of that query that doesn't grab history because we don't need to display it there. It used to increase load time by 30%."

Sometimes the flow of this is just easier in person, and a dedicated short meeting where everyone speaks up about their own work doesn't feel as much like backseat accusations.

It does require people actually feel comfortable asking for help, and it requires people to volunteer their guidance.

As I see more and more devs and different work places, I can't believe how common it is to just sit in your corner and struggle while refusing to ask for help and refusing to speak up when someone on your team is actually asking for help.

Is this communication failure the norm at your places of work? What's the deal?

You are not doing it wrong.

Standups can be traced back to the Scrum practice Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is a short (max 15 minute) synchronisation meeting for developers. It is explicitly not a status meeting for PMs. It eventually became known as a standup because people figured out that it was easier to keep the meeting short when you were not sitting down.

Scrum became popular, but it didn’t really make room for traditional project managers. So what to do with all the PMs? Teach them to be Scrum Masters.

This is where things started to go downhill. Most PMs just kept doing what they had always done, just using different names.

And so standups became hour long status meetings, inspect and adapt, sustainable pace and other good things were replaced with micromanagement and death marches. Dark Scrum was born.

This is of course greatly simplified. Agile Consultants and certification peddlers are also to blame.

> I'm probably doing standups wrong, but I find it useful for devs to (briefly) talk about what they're working on.

I agree, regular communication within a team is healthy, but the way stand ups tend to manifest themselves is a meeting every single day where people feel compelled to share a status update. It would be rare for an individual to be blocked every single day, and thus this becomes a wasteful ceremony of going through the motions of giving status updates.

If team communication is healthy, there really isn't a need of daily stand ups. Individual team members will know when to escalate being blocked, and loop in the right people at the right time. If you are inheriting a dysfunctional team, daily stand ups can be a way to get the team back on track. For new members of the team, having a mentor to do frequent, even twice daily check ins, can be helpful on getting them up to speed.

But for high performance teams who have been operating together for years, daily stand ups are often a waste of time, and a needless addition to the calendar.

I'm probably doing standups wrong...

And then you describe some of the healthiest standup culture I've seen...

Are you getting value from those meetings? Are you willing to try new things if someone has a suggestion that might make it better? If so you are doing it right..regardless of what anyone else says.

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