Comment by drewmclellan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewmclellan | Hacker News Reader

I used to hate standups when I was at Yahoo. Maybe it's more a sign of how broken Yahoo is than how broken standups are, but the daily process was roughly:

0. 9am, catch up on email, then coast for a while knowing you'll have to stop work at 10am.

1. Find out which meeting room the 10am standup is in

2. Figure out where in the building that room is

3. Travel to the rough part of the building, hunt around for the room.

4. Wait for everyone else to do the same.

It's now 10.20am

5. Stand (OMG the standing!) around for 30 minutes listening to a boring load of status updates from 20 people that have absolutely nothing to do with you.

6. Give your status update (Yesterday I did some work. Today I'll do some more work. What's blocking me is this f'king meeting.)

It's now 10.50am

7. Travel back to the part of the building your desk is in today (if you can find it) and grab a coffee on the way.

That's an hour gone, and it's only another hour to lunch, so no point getting into anything too major. Knock off some smaller to-do items. Lunchtime!

An alien race observing us would conclude that teams were a device used to prevent work getting done.

Wow, that's like a zoo of process pathologies. In order, the things I see:

I like doing the stand-up as early as possible, so that there's minimal slack time before hand. And I prefer to work in ways that are less dependent on the state in one's head, including test-driven development and pair programming.

The standup is always in the team room. Everybody on the same team works in the same room. Generally, you do it in front of the kanban that shows the state of the project.

Because it's right where everybody works, it's pretty easy to be on time. Regardless, it starts on time. No waiting for stragglers; it just encourages them.

You stand for 10 minutes or so.

The team is some reasonable size; I think of 12 as a maximum.

If the people turning up have nothing to do with you, then it's not actually a team. Teams are groups of people that win or lose together. Team members help one another out to achieve shared goals.

If what people say is boring, you should be able to tell them so. They are there to talk to the team; there's no point in them saying things that aren't useful to the team.

Coffee should be in or near the team room. Ditto water, snacks, and other things necessary for humans to do work.

The stand-up should be run in such a way that people leave ready to jump on things.

If I had to guess from your description, I'd say that Yahoo took a top-down culture, pasted on some Agile rituals, and kept right doing the same old bullshit. Which, honestly, is a giant waste of time. If you're going to do waterfall in a command-and-control context, just do that. No sense putting agile lipstick on your waterfall pig.

We use on-line standup meetings. Notice people are meeting in the Teamspace standup room, click in, chat briefly until all are there (about 30 seconds). Then call out your issues and blockers round-robin for a few minutes. Then click backto your home office.

12 minutes, a team of 8. Every time.

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