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Comment by markshead | Hacker News Reader

I haven't ever seen an organization focused on "doing Scrum" that gets good results. However, some teams trying to deliver working software iteratively for their customers do find Scrum lets them deliver better than what they were doing before. But when Scrum becomes the goal and takes precedence over delivering software, it becomes a liability.

Getting everyone together for 15 minutes each day to ask, "How can we coordinate our work to make sure we are all doing our best to deliver the next piece the customer wants?" is valuable. Showing the customer what you built over the last week and asking if it needs any changes is also really valuable. Occasionally taking time as a team to discuss ways you can improve? Again, very valuable.

But the value comes from the collaboration each activity enables. Just because you have a 15-minute meeting you call a standup, a demo, or a retrospective doesn't mean people are actually collaborating in a valuable way.

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> Getting everyone together for 15 minutes each day to ask, "How can we coordinate our work to make sure we are all doing our best to deliver the next piece the customer wants?" is valuable.

But is it more valuable than the work that would have been produced by the e.g. 10 people, working for that hour in the flow every single day, if they hadn't been interrupted by that meeting? (Before/after the 15 minute meeting people are going to go for coffee, read emails, read the news etc., so you're probably losing about an hour of "flow" work by having the meeting.)

That is an excellent point. If everyone knows exactly what the next most important thing is for the customer, and they are already working collaboratively to deliver it, maybe the meeting only takes 5 minutes. Or maybe the coordination happens informally just in the way they are working.

If you are trying to "do Scrum" it doesn't matter. You have a formal standup meeting because Scrum says to. That is how you end up with teams going around answering three questions that have absolutely no impact on anyone's work for the day. If you are trying to deliver the software, then you should be free to mix things up to better deliver.

Now in practice, most teams do benefit by spending a few minutes making sure everyone is on the same page for how they are going to work together efficiently for the day even if it is very short. I've seen some teams where most of their standups take 90 to 300 seconds...but the team felt it was a valuable way to collaborate. If the people in the daily standup don't feel it is a valuable use of their time, then it probably needs to change.

It is not only that, but I have known a lot of developers who simply hate the daily stand-ups, either because they were lead in the wrong way or because it did not match with their introvert personality, and that this added a lot of anxiety that it had a negative effect on their performance. Anxiety is an important factor in procrastination.

Too often a daily standup is really just a way to try to make sure everyone is busy. Asking everyone what they did yesterday, what they are going to today, and if they have any blockers, doesn't usually help the team coordinate their work. As you point out, it just puts people on the spot to try to say something that makes them sound important.

But if you ask the team, "What can we do today to make the most progress delivering this next tiny slice of functionality for the customer?" the discussion is centered around the work. Usually introverted people can participate in that conversation without being uncomfortable.

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