
An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings - alexgodin
http://weblog.alexgodin.com/kill-your-standup
======
crazygringo
I dunno... I feel like if I'm totally honest, there's a good chance I would
wind up just ignoring 90% of those e-mails, or at least not reading them
carefully enough.

For me, I feel like the benefit of a stand-up is exactly that it forces
everyone to pay attention and meet for 5 min, not just so that everything
important gets communicated, but that everyone knows _everyone else_ heard it.
And people can ask important questions and know everyone else heard the
concern and answer as well.

~~~
chris_mahan
When I notice that people have a habit of ignoring my emails, I instant-
message them after I send the email. If that doesn't work, I call them. If
that doesn't work I walk over to their desk. If they're not at their desk, or
in another building, I email their boss and ask whether the person is taking a
day off.

Believe it or not, people stopped ignoring my emails.

~~~
skrebbel
Surprise! You're in 615 Dilbert comics!

~~~
chris_mahan
I totally know!

------
DanielBMarkham
I think people make a mistake when they assume that the stand-up is about an
exchange of data. It's not. It's a social construct. Technology development,
especially in a team, is a social activity. We need to create social rituals
for it to work at maximum efficiency.

The "bugs" he sees in the process, "synchronous, everyone needs to be in the
room (or on the phone), and often after the meeting much of the content is
lost" -- those are features.

People need to synchronize for social purposes. They need body language to
help debug subtle performance issues. They need to have problems shoved in
their face to either act on or forget.

That's all great stuff.

~~~
reinhardt
Thanks for putting into words and explaining so eloquently why stand-ups are
the most unpleasant 5-10 minutes of my working day.

~~~
anthonyb
Thanks for not adding anything meaningful to the conversation.

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rmaccloy
Everything old is new again. Email status is a check-in method as old as,
well, email.

This works great if you have a reasonable number of people working largely on
independent areas, or if your pace is slow enough to drive consensus through
email.

If you need to reach team consensus regularly and quickly, e.g. on
architectural or design decisions, synchronous standups are still better, even
virtual ones over IRC or FaceTime or whatever. (If you hear people saying
"wait, why/when did we do that?" a lot, you may be in this situation even if
you'd rather not be.)

I'm not a standup (or capital-a Agile, bleh) zealot by any means, but if
you've got more than two people working closely on an area, and you're going
quickly, regular and delineated synchronous communication still beats email
threads for efficiency.

~~~
mildavw
Agreed. It depends a lot on the team and the project. Our team of six devs had
stand-ups every 90 minutes all day every day for 9 months when were all
touching the same app. It was appropriate and we got a lot done. When the
nature of our work changed, we switched back to a daily stand-up.

------
d0m
Tired of these self promoting articles.

"An alternative to stand-up meetings" -> We use our product. Oh, shameless
plug, try it.

What's even more frustrating is how they game the upvote to reach front-page.
So, not only it's a disguised article, but it also hide more interesting ones.

</end-of-grumpy-rant>

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onemorepassword
Now on the one hand, we do mail-ins as well whenever someone can't make it to
the stand-up, especially since any team member can work from home whenever
they like. Plus our starting time is loosely defined as "let's all try to be
there around 10-ish", so some people are already in the flow since 8:30 by the
time the last team member shows up.

However, every time someone proclaims to have found a better alternative for
the stand-up, I always go looking for the "you-were-doing-it-wrong" red flag.
One thing stand out:

 _"No need to take notes in a stand-up or bother someone with questions
[...]"_

Notes? Bothering someone with questions? These are hints that there was a
dysfunctional stand-up in place to begin with, in which case it's hard to
judge how well the alternative works.

In my experience, mailing in works fine as a workaround for situations where
having a physical standup is impossible or disruptive, but certainly no equal
alternative to spending a few minutes actually sharing information face to
face with all the non-verbal high bandwidth communication that goes with it.
One look, one gesture can say more than an entire email.

~~~
philwelch
"One look, one gesture"? This is engineering, not a fucking love story.
Ordinary English should be sufficient to communicate status information.

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lucisferre
> Stand-ups are great but they have some major flaws: they're synchronous,
> everyone needs to be in the room (or on the phone), and often after the
> meeting much of the content is lost

That pretty much nails it. I'll admit though I _hate_ standups. Any value it
has as a concept is completely lost in its practice.

~~~
chris_mahan
We do standups several times per day, one on one with the people we need to
talk to. It's called conversation.

~~~
lucisferre
Heh, no kidding.

Edit: Looks like this "conversation" idea may have jumped the shark too.
Management consultants are already trying to horn in on this technique
([http://www.amazon.ca/The-Art-Conversation-Neglected-
Pleasure...](http://www.amazon.ca/The-Art-Conversation-Neglected-
Pleasure/dp/1592404197)). Pretty soon we'll need "conversation masters" and
some sort of certification process.

~~~
chris_mahan
Homo Sapiens already has already mastered conversation.

------
bguthrie
For a long time, Agilists recommended that teams colocate as an antidote to
the kinds of tepid collaborations that happen at large software teams in large
companies. But collaboration tech has gotten better, and modern, nimble teams
should be "built to explode" - you should be able to work together in the
office, or at Starbucks, or anywhere on Earth, if you have to. Start with
distribution as a goal and few physical issues will disrupt you.

This sounds great as long as you keep the spirit of the standup alive - a
standup is for the whole team, not management, and should be a quick read.

------
snorkel
No, no, and no. A 15-minute standing meeting is much more efficient. Mandating
daily email check-ins means developer time would be wasted writing these
emails, and everyone's time is then wasted reading these emails and then
participating in the ensuing off-topic discussion threads spawned from each
email.

A scrum-master's job is remove impediments, and thereby allowing developers to
concentrate on development. Mandating that developers generate and then
participate in a lot of email noise is counterproductive.

~~~
philwelch
I can read faster than you can speak. I can probably even write faster than I
can speak. And most importantly, I can defer both activities to a time when
I'm not focusing on something. It's standups that are the impediment.

------
mixmastamyk
Tried this with a wiki page once, it worked pretty well.

Once thing I noticed that I have a lot of information at the _end_ of the day,
and not the beginning. First thing in the morning I barely know my name, about
the worst time to ask me anything. So I've always found the morning
fascination a bit odd.

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BoyWizard
I feel the thing that many people are missing is that 10 minutes 'stand-up'
meetings every morning are important because they encourage 'accidental
communication'. You might be debugging something that just broke, and
remember, 'Oh John said this morning that his main priority today was to add
some code to XYZ, which affects this, so I'll just check with him'.

Contrary to popular opinion on HN, regular communication is _important_ for
most (if not all) business activities.

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jrochkind1
Everyone sending email status updates to everyone else daily is an alternative
to stand-up meetings?

I mean, I guess it is.... it's in particular, an alternative that was very
common before stand-ups were invented and became popular, which was judged
ineffective and inefficient by those who invented stand up meetings. But,
sure.

In other news, planning everything out in advance is an alternative to agile
development.

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mmattax
Great post, we (Formstack) built DailyStatus (<http://dailystat.us>) to ease
our standup meeting pain. We're a remote company so dealing with timezones and
internet connections for video was always a pain.

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mikec3k
This might be a good alternative for someplace like my company where team
members are in different time zones. When I'm getting to work around 9 in SF,
it's already evening for the team members in Bulgaria.

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therandomguy
I'm surprised no one mentioned <https://idonethis.com/> Is that not as popular
as I thought it was?

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gefh
"Google does weekly emails" Practices at Google vary widely between teams.
Nothing as trivial as this is going to standardized across the company...

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lenjaffe
when the daily, morning status meeting started being referred toas 'the stand-
up', concepts got blurred.

a meeting is held as a stand-up in order to encourage brevity.

so the poster is looking for alternatives to morning status meetings, not
stand-up meetings.

stand-up meetings are just fine. thankyouverymuch

~~~
flurdy
Agree. Stand ups are about syncing up, focus and helping each other, not
status reporting to line management. I ranted about it this a few days ago:
[http://blog.flurdy.com/2013/04/i-dont-care-what-you-did-
yest...](http://blog.flurdy.com/2013/04/i-dont-care-what-you-did-
yesterday-i.html)

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chris_mahan
Email is absolutely fine. Just learn to write succinctly.

------
rufeeooo
sounds great if your team doesn't really work together

