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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

What is supposed to happen in Good standup?

The best daily standups I ever had went like this:

Everybody is physically standing up, in a place where there are no computers. Going around the circle, everybody answers three questions:

    1. What did you do yesterday?
    2. What will do you today?
    3. Any blockers?

Any long discussions were tabled until the standup was finished. It took about 5 minutes to get through a team of 6, and was a great way to kick off the workday. On Zoom, you can't get quite the same kind of effect. But you could still keep it short, and you could leave your ticket-board out of the meeting.

I find that the no-Jira standup is better, because it makes people more honest about what they've actually been doing. They don't feel the pressure to fit some kind of Jira narrative, and will instead just talk freely about whatever's on their mind. Much better from a team collaboration perspective.

"Any issues/blockers?" ... "No? ok - chat tomorrow".

“Good standup” also surfaces what people are working on because it might be important for the rest of the team to know for innumerable good reasons. It can serve as an opportunity for many-birds-one-stone, or even as an opportunity to interrupt work that doesn’t need to be done because it’s redundant to other efforts or because other efforts made it moot.

But yeah, you won’t get that from standups where people aren’t invested in what others say they’re working on. That’s just people blabbing for a (hopefully short) ritual time.

But why am I waiting for a standup to raise issues/blockers.

Nearly every company has a team chat now. And even before team chats became popular email lists existed.

And if you’re co-located then you just ask your neighbors.

I never have any issues to raise in standup because I’ve already raised/resolved them.

Exactly this. Why should we wait next day standup to discuss blockers? This is non sense.

In the few cases those need some synchronisation, further discussion and knowledge-sharing across everyone in the team, it's a time set for that to happen.

Anything else can be discussed asynchronous, when the need for some synchronisation happens the stand-up is a good way to tackle it in a iterative way. Everyone knows what to expect.

By the way I'm not disagreeing with you, my current team (and the best teams I've worked with) don't need a daily stand-up, just a recurring time slot available for a synch time when people feel the need. People can show up when they want.

Because everyone may not be available all the time except standup when all hands are on the deck. Or maybe the discussion is better done face to face. Or maybe the issue happened just before standup and the timings aligned with standup. Or any of the myriad reasons. The example also doesn't preclude raising issues outside of standup.

"Anything to bring up on those blockers, any help needed? No, ok, next: anything you want to bring up in the work in progress? Ok. Any further topics? By the way, if these topics are not relevant to you, you're free to go".

That's basically it.

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