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My most successful standups have been like:
“Okay, we’re all here. Anyone wanna take a look at anything together?”
“I need some help with XYZ. Alice, can you take a look?”
“Sure.”
“Anything else? No? Alright, let’s do it.”
Typically less than 2 minutes of whole-team time, at our desks. Really just a reserved pivot point where it’s okay to interrupt each other’s tasks to ask for some pairing time. Sometimes an unofficial second one would happen after lunch.
I find daily stand ups are completely useless because most of the useful communication can just be done by the people involved directly over email, messaging, or just talking to each other. I find it’s useful to have a whole team meeting maybe like once a week just to see where everyone is at and how different parts of the project are going. There’s very little reason to do that every single day.
Standups are ok if they stay fast and they are at the start or end of a day. The forced sync points are also more important in remote settings. This is especially true for new or junior employees.
I don’t find whole team standups have much value aside from being checkpoints. In my experience, it’s best to split up projects into tasks that can be worked on in isolation. People directly working on those tasks can organically figure out how they want to get them done and communicate with each other. The sync points can then be used to check the overall state of the project and to track critical path tasks across teams to make sure nobody is blocked.
That really only works with a mature and experienced team, which is great when you have one.
I find you need to have at least a few experienced people on any effective team otherwise it’s just blind leading the blind. Pairing junior people with seniors to act as mentors tends to work well. It also lets senior developers grow. I find this works well because people tend to enjoy having ownership of their tasks.
I see some value in this fairly common interaction:
- Person 1: So for bug-1234 I did XYZ and saw ABC
- Person 2: ABC? I see ABC when I do XYZ for bug-1235! They must have the same root cause, I’ll mark mine as a dupe of yours and move on to bug-1236
I would react the same way if my scrum meeting was 1 hour long!
Been there, done that. Everyday would start with a 2 hour session of meetings. Daily for 30mins and then 1.5h of refinement. Day by day, for 2 years of me being there.
It, without an ounce of irony, leaves a fucking scar on you and makes you despise having meeting for the rest of your life.
I remember working in the office and the customer visited and took part in our task estimation meeting. We’ve spent about 3 hours in one block estimating their tasks because they had so much input.
This stuff is purely for my manager and I’ve recently noticed he’s basically not paying attention. Losing so much time for a ritual lol.
it’s basically this
I’ve lost my shit with people over this lol. Just sucks when you are like 3 hours in on something and then someone just comes along and makes small talk.
I was fired from my last job because I was expected to write features AND do helpdesk support at the same time and just no… I was also fired because I suck at programming but still…
haha yeah writing code while dealing with distractions is effectively impossible
It’s funny because after I got fired my production went through the roof because I was able to work on my own stuff without dealing with other people’s bullshit.
it does help a lot when you enjoy what you’re doing
It really does lol. Now if people would just pay me to make them websites… I am making a freebie for some friends and hoping I can get some traffic from that though.
I’ve never been good at finding work through freelancing, some of my friends to it and seem to like it.
I live at home and my little siblings with ADHD* knock on the door to tell me stuff all the time ughhh
*I have ADHD too which is why it’s extra tragic when I lose my train of thought.
I have ASD so once I get into that hyperfocus flowstate, and get pulled out of it, it’s like everything around me just shatters lol. My partner and oldest kid have ADHD so when either or both are around I mostly don’t even bother with code. I was able to get a tiny bit of stuff done this morning but it was mostly stuff I have on mental autopilot like git stuff.
Learn to document more. It gets a little better with age once you must resign yourself to the fact that you will be interrupted at any point. If you document, you can resume easier and there’s less mind shift inertia.
Why is your scrum 1 hour long?
Because that’s how it often goes. I find there are two types of scrums in practice. First is when it goes fast, and everybody just says they’re working. There’s no time to give any detail or context so the status update is largely meaningless. Second is when people start giving details about what they’re working on, and that quickly explodes to an hour long meeting.
because no one follows the damn guide and “scrum” is done so managers can claim the company can work “agile”, because customers dont want “not agile”, customers also dont want to participate in the way it would be necessary for a project thats supposed to follow the scrum guide. that also sounded good for people looking for a new job so hr wants to put that into job descriptions and now everything is scrum and agile and i still have to sneak in refactorings or have to fight to get time to work on our fricking ci pipeline or need to conspire with QA to get them time to work on test automation, because screw the notion that decisions should be done by the people doing the work.
screw “scrum”, and the word “agile” should never have been taught to anyone claiming to be a “manager”, we don’t need managers we need people helping us getting the tools we need and trust that what we do, we do to deliver better solutions and helping us to fascilate constructive exchanges with customers.
About a year ago, I was working with an east coast customer while working remote on the west coast. Scrum was at 7am my time, with the customer on the call.
Probably should have been a stressful situation as they were a tough customer, our largest account in terms of ARR and PS dollars, and they loved to tell us which Data Enginners or PMs they didn’t like, who would promptly get reassigned. But honestly, having that call so early was the least stressful thing ever.
I would roll out of bed at 6:30a and make a cup of coffee, just to get my computer tuned on and ready to join the meeting by about 6:57.
Worked out great, cuz I never spent time thinking about scrum beforehand, and frankly always felt a bit energized afterwards cuz it was now time to start my work day.
Ended up working out well I guess, cuz the customer kept me on the team the entire length of the engagement.
I normally go “what the fuck did I even do yesterday?” five minutes before daily standup and look at my git commits and calendar for the day before to piece together a plausible version of my workday (I do my timesheets the same way as well btw). Very little serious information gets passed on but somehow it makes my boss happy and he has told me that he likes the way I do standups.
I work at a small company where most projects only have one or two developers so standup meetings are usually a lot of completely irrelevant information. It’s very boring. “Yesterday I worked on the thing on the project you barely know what does.”
10:00: programming
11:00: quick meeting
12:00: #### getting back into the zone
13:00: ####
14:00: ####
