
Daily standups should be async - mdu96
https://www.cadencework.com/blog/async-standups.html
======
hyperpape
I think if your standup can be async, then it's ineffective, and you should
get rid of it. And to be clear, that's fine! Not every team needs standups.

The only value in a standup is when team members actually share ideas about
what they're working on. The detailed conversation happens outside the
standup, but the purpose of the standup is just to get that moment of "I know
about that, let's talk".

In that case, having everyone in a room (real or virtual) at the same time is
more efficient than asynchronous updates. With asynchronous updates, people
are in meetings, in the bathroom, not online yet, etc, and you have higher
coordination costs.

I've been on teams that have effective standups, and teams that have worthless
ones. I know what each one looks like. But for the life of me, what I can't
figure out is why some teams have good ones, and some don't.

~~~
protonimitate
Agreed. Async stand ups are an agile smell.

If you can successfully get unblocked async over slack/email/whatever, there
isn't a need a for standups. That just means you have a functioning line of
communication for your team.

Stand ups should solve the problem of "I need to get unblocked and I can't get
my teams attention effectively". If async "standups" solve that, great. But
it's not a one size fits all solution, and imo, shouldn't even be called a
standup.

>But for the life of me, what I can't figure out is why some teams have good
ones, and some don't.

IME it's the level of interaction of product/management/scrum-masters that
make the difference. Good standups consist of just engineer focused
updates/requests. Bad ones are progress reports and have participation of
anyone not actively contributing to the sprint.

~~~
mrkurt
Agile is smelly. People getting blocked in a team small enough for a standup
is a concerning smell. Bad standups are a smell, and also seem to be the norm.

~~~
waheoo
I suspect all these smelly meetings might be an agile smell itself.

Maybe agile doesnt quite actually support our needs. Maybe some frequent
socialising is a need. Maybe sucking every last second out of our day in the
name of productivity while having zero benefit on the true goal is just one
huge smell.

------
alexbanks
In my experience, async standups mean everyone posts their status and does not
read any other status.

Counterpoint: In my experience, at synchronous standups, people totally ignore
everyone until its their time to speak, and then share an update, and then go
back to not listening.

~~~
PragmaticPulp
> In my experience, async standups mean everyone posts their status and does
> not read any other status.

That has been my experience, too.

Going async sends a message that people don't need to care about what their
team members are working on. That's a dream come true for the people who just
want to pull Jira tickets out of the queue, finish them in isolation, and then
collect a paycheck.

However, it doesn't make for great team cohesion and knowledge sharing. Teams
end up compensating with extra meetings and coordination overhead, which
starts to defeat the point of async standups.

~~~
alexbanks
I'm _very_ disillusioned by blaming lots of software process as a bailout for
bad devs. I dislike most software process (agile), but I think some of the
processes defined by agile are mostly just branded common sense.

Talk to your team. Give a shit about what they're doing. Care about your work.
Care about your project.

Sometimes heavily scrutinized, reasonable process doesn't need to be modified.
Sometimes the devs do.

~~~
mrkurt
I think it's more frequently a bailout for bad management. Either because a
manager sucks, or a team can't self manage.

~~~
alexbanks
Maybe I'm taking "Bad management" to literally mean "Bad managers", when
people mean "the process of management"? Is a team that cannot self manage not
(for software teams) a dev problem?

~~~
mrkurt
I definitely mean "the process of management". A team that can't self manage
is just a bad team. You can have a lot of great people on a bad team, so I
don't think it's exactly a dev problem. It's a "whoever puts teams together"
problem.

There are lots of people who benefit from a named manager. Expecting people to
self manage who don't really want to is as bad as micro managing people. I
know because I f'd this up at least 3 times building my last company. ;)

~~~
alexbanks
Ahhhhh - yes, totally agree with you.

------
stephc_int13
In my opinion, standups are useless - asynchronous or not.

Waiting until the next standup to resolve blockers is clearly not efficient.

What I've observed during standups is mostly people staring at the void
waiting their turn and a few obnoxious nerds trying to bullshit their way up
the hierarchy by talking way too much for their own good.

The best communication I've seen was during brainstorm meetings.

~~~
jeffbee
Standups ensure your team cannot achieve anything meaningful. Imagine having a
standup at the caltech physics department with Feynman et al. "What did you do
since yesterday, Dick?" "Well I sat at my desk and pondered the nature of
matter." "Anything blocking you?" "We don't understand the nature of matter."
"What are you going to do today?" "Go down to the titty bar and ponder the
nature of matter".

~~~
the_other
That’s not how you do stand-up.

It should more like: I’m struggling to imagine how so-and-so particle gets the
energy to reach the next quantum state. Anyone want to share a blackboard?
This is gonna take us about six pots of coffee to solve I reckon.

~~~
tspike
Next day: well, I drank too much coffee, and I'm burned out on socializing
from brainstorming all day. I still don't know how so-and-so particle gets the
energy to reach the next quantum state, and honestly I just want my coworkers
to shut the fuck up for a few days so I can focus.

Boss: Mr. Feynman, can I see you in my office?

------
jameshart
Standups as status-updates is an awful antipattern that turns so many people
off agile - and specifically Scrum.

Standups where each person takes their turn and recites the mantra:
'Yesterday, worked on ticket HN-1234. Today, I'll still be working on it. No
blockers.' Sure - if that's all you do, do it asynchronously. Please.
Preferably by just updating the Jira ticket, not posting it in Slack. Or...
just, don't, because apparently this has _no impact on what you do_.

If all that happens in the standup is everyone shares what they did yesterday,
what they're going to do today, and what's blocking them, then... then what?
We shared a bunch of information across the team. What are we going to _do_
about it? Is Dave going to change his plan for the day to instead help unblock
Karen? Is Peter, now he has heard what Rachel did yesterday, going to do
anything different than he just said he was going to do?

Daily standups are best when they are really daily _replanning_ meetings. As a
team - look at the goal for the sprint. Is it still the right goal? Are we
going to get it done? Did anyone do anything that gets us closer yesterday?
Does the plan for what we do today still seem like the right thing to do to
get us there? Is anything interfering with our chances of getting there?

Everyone leaves knowing what everyone else on the team plans to do to move
things forward today.

------
ohduran
The whole purpose of daily standups is to be short, to the point, and force
developers to discuss blockers.

That can't be async, because I need the other members of the team to answer.

The issue the author is addressing is that for some, this is wasted time. But
a) that's why these meetings are short, thus the standing up part, and b)
Usually it isn't but an opportunity for more seniors to chime in with
suggestions.

Plus, stop with the "here's why" in your titles. I know you're going to tell
me what you think, but that doesn't mean that you know THE TRUTH ABOUT WHY
something important should be the way you think.

~~~
jmondi
Am I the only one who raises a flag immediately when there is a blocker? Why
would I wait until the next day?

~~~
jkingsbery
They're not mutually exclusive. Especially at a time when everyone is remote
and it's easy to miss emails/slack messages, etc., having a dedicated time to
say "Hey all, I'm still waiting on X" is helpful.

~~~
deckard1
This comes up a lot on the teams I've worked on.

But ultimately, the entire reason you have to go to standup and remind people
to do their job is because they are not doing their job. It's surprising the
number of people that can't be assed to make a simple to-do list and follow
through on it and the number of meetings that are necessary to remind them of
this fact.

I mean... what is the failure here? Is this not what Jira and the hundreds of
other project management systems is designed to do? It's baffling, to say the
least.

------
jkingsbery
It's true that most daily standups revolve around "The Three Questions," but
that's not the point of stand-ups. The point is, every day the team has a
forum where it can potentially change course. It's an opportunity to identify
whether my plan for the next 24 hours is still valid, in a similar way to how
sprint planning lets the team change course for the next 2 weeks. It doesn't
solve blockers, true, but it does allow triaging blockers, and helps to ensure
that if someone is blocked you don't have no one jumping in to help (or
everyone jumping in to help, which is also disruptive).

Most teams I've been on with ineffective standups are usually a group of
engineers working on independent work streams, who if they had to help each
other wouldn't know how. The teams that have effective standups have a clear
team goal, and engineers are willing to stop what they're working on in order
to ensure that the most important work is getting finished.

------
remmargorp64
Our team does our stand-ups in Slack, in a separate channel called "#daily-
status".

Every morning, each team member posts a short bullet list of the items they
are planning on working on that day, along with details about any things they
are blocked by. This happens asynchronously as people start working every day,
so one person might post their message at 7 am, while another person posts at
10 am.

Any conversation that needs to happen about someone's daily status message
happens in a thread under their message. This gives the team and management an
easy way to see what each other's intentions are for the day, without a bunch
of distractions or bullshit meetings or people's eyes glazing over while
someone goes on a side tangent rant for 10 minutes. Instead, the information
is quick and to the point.

It's also very common for people to post a summary message at the end of the
day to let everyone know what they actually got done (or didn't get done).

Our whole team is remote, and this method seems to work really well for us.

~~~
eblanshey
I personally like seeing everybody else on the call and talking face to face.
As a manager I get a feel for how the others are doing. I feel chats-only will
get rid of that aspect and make things more impersonal. Do you not have face
to face calls at all?

~~~
remmargorp64
There are still a lot of zoom/tuple/phone calls going on between people (in an
asynchronous manner, as needed). We also do weekly retros as a team on a group
call.

------
y-c-o-m-b
At my last remote job we had stand-up twice a week. It was a small team and we
rarely had a reason to care what anyone else was working on. We didn't need
stand-up at all.

At my current remote job we have DSU, but the format is simplified. Nobody has
to say what they're working on because that's info you can lookup yourself on
the JIRA board. The team lead/PM shares any important company info if
applicable (usually 2 minutes long) then anyone that has blocking issues is
free to speak up if they need help. That's it.

Sometimes we go over by 15 minutes or so if someone raises something complex.
As the author pointed out this can lead to people not listening, but for me
personally that is a good thing. It gives me time to catch up on daily news or
disengage from my work for a little bit. It's even better that my DSU starts
first thing in the morning, so I get to use that time to let my brain slowly
warm-up and get ready for real productive work.

------
ojosilva
Working intensively remote during this pandemic, we rediscovered an old
practice of ours we call "comm-work". Basically we share screens (on Zoom)
while talking about whatever is going on at work. It's sorta of a "open-space"
equivalent but online and with a mute button.

Comm-work is more about showing than telling. A screen is always shared (or a
whiteboard). We share emails on screen and sometimes write them together, we
hear in into a customer call (like through Teams whilst we remain connected
through Zoom), or we just tune out into our thing. It's an impromptu that can
last anywhere from 20 to 90 minutes.

It's not scheduled, it's not a standup, you don't have to report status
(yuck!) or say anything. Just keep working if you feel like it. You can mute
yourself or others. Most of our teammates (not all teams are the same) feel
like sharing something, be it a milestone, a cool widget they found or a piece
of code they feel are blocking. This works great because it just naturally
surfaces issues _before_ they are issues.

The bad part, if anything, is that it is run by a manager who knows how to
improvise, when to call one up (and call it off if someone has to take their
kid to the doctor) or how to dig into the team's mind and create the meeting
narrative. It also requires some degree of direct speak ("Hey you, whats up
with that task?") which also does not work with every ego around. So this is
not something that I think can be taught at seminars as it's not very
scientific. It's just natural and basically arises whenever a chat room
becomes to chatty. I personally believe comm-work is deeply more effective
than any agile standup or kanban, which never ever worked for us. Being such
an improv keeps people on their feet. They never know when the team is going
to meet, what the next customer email will say. Your code editor becomes not
so much of a secret place. I know it sounds almighty corny, but screen sharing
is the ultimate sharing at a workplace.

~~~
mrkurt
We do something almost exactly like this to generate draft content. People get
on Zoom, screenshare, and then we get notes down for what we can create from
it. It's a little less improvisational because we start with an idea for an
article and see where it goes.

It's wonderful.

------
modo_
My team has been testing out a hybrid of the two-- we use a slackbot to gather
our answers to the three questions before standup begins. Then we use the
meeting time to discuss anything that might have come up as a result of the
slack posts.

We've really liked it so far. It cuts out a lot of the bad parts of
synchronous standup like trying to remember what you did yesterday on the
spot, but still leaves us with the opportunity to share ideas in depth when it
makes sense.

I think completely going to an async standup right now wouldn't be good at all
for our team dynamic. With the whole team remote, standup is the one time a
day we're all on a call together. There's a lot of value that comes out of
that even if it's inefficient at times.

~~~
mdu96
that's super interesting! would you be open to chatting more? i'd love to ask
you some questions about your workflow and hear your feedback on cadence,
seems like you've got some great opinions. my email is melissa@cadencework.com

------
high_derivative
You know who likes standups?

Program managers, project managers, and useless middle-managers. What do they
have in common? They get to exercise power and justify their existence through
calling extra meetings like new project-specific standups.

Who hates standups? Everyone else, basically.

Really makes you think..

~~~
schoolornot
Yes, in my 10 year career I've so far encountered 0 competent "agile coaches"
and two solid project managers. What made them solid? Their ability to put
forth a minimal amount of effort to understand the work and actively remove
political BS that prevented projects from being completed. Besides them two, I
find the Technical PM field to be a colossal waste. During most meetings I
often think, "Why do we pay this guy 100k to manage a Jira board and play
planning poker? Where is he when I need him?"

A wise colleague reminded me of this quote: "There's two kinds of people in
this world when you boil it all down. You got your talkers and you got your
doers. Most people are just talkers, all they do is talk. But when it is all
said and done, it's the doers that change this world." Unfortunately, in this
COVID age where Zoom after Zoom is accepted and everyone wants to "show their
face" as to not get laid off, it's now prime time for the talkers.

Every time I'm involved in a stand-up I feel everyone is pressured to blurt
out randomness. Why not allow people to collect their thoughts for the week
ahead and put it on paper/Slack/IRC?

------
graton
When I was doing daily standups it could be useful for people to say what they
are blocked on and then for someone else to say that they could try to help
them. Where it wasn't useful was if the two people tried to solve the issue
during the standup while 10 other people were standing around.

My other pet peeve for our standups was that they would not start on time.
This was very common when I started on the team. After awhile I would just
force the standup to start on time no matter how many people were there, even
if I was the only one there :) After awhile everyone started getting there on
time. I understood why people would arrive late since we were always starting
late. An unvirtuous cycle so to speak.

~~~
lonelappde
Vicious cycle

------
rahulpyd1
I have come to believe that Agile is a hoax and Scrum too is a hoax. Standup
meeting is a bigger hoax. Anyways, long before I understood this I wrote about
why the hoaxes should happen towards the end of the day.
[http://www.rahul.ws/on-daily-meetings.html](http://www.rahul.ws/on-daily-
meetings.html)

~~~
Clubber
Yes, they're both ways for consultants to make money. Essentially a marketing
gimmick for managers who don't know how to run a development department
because they were never developers to begin with and they don't trust
developers to manage themselves. It's been going strong for 20 years and is
probably a billion dollar industry. Just another part of the US scam economy.

------
JJMcJ
I have yet to be in a standup where I felt safe admitting I was blocked.

The manager and project manager are there to glare at anyone who isn't
"maintaining velocity".

~~~
karatestomp
I'm thinking about asking to sit (haha) in or call into a standup, next place
I look at, after I have an offer but before I take it. If there's even a hint
of this kind of toxic shit I'll know to run, fast. If the manager I'm talking
to is like "well I guess we can arrange that, but they're usually under five
minutes so there's not much to hear, and I'm not in them so I'll put you in
touch with [team lead or maybe project manager] who runs them" then that'll
tell me what I need to know without even bothering.

I'm increasingly convinced that if you 1) have standups, and they're 2) more
than the _teensiest_ bit dysfunctional, you've probably got some badly fucked-
up processes and attitudes in general. I mean it _does not_ get simpler than a
standup, so if you've decided to have them but can't get them mostly-right,
then that's not a good sign. Sadly, this may describe most businesses.

------
adrianmonk
I think that relatively often part of the real motivation for standups is to
put people on the spot a little bit to create pressure and/or accountability.

You can ask whether that's a good thing or true to the original vision, but if
that's part of what someone aims to get out of standups, then that probably
requires them to be face-to-face.

I'm not a big fan of seeing negative emotions (shame, guilt, fear, envy) used
to motivate employees (especially if it's the only thing in a manager's bag of
tricks) but in small doses it can be OK. So maybe it's not ridiculous if part
of the value of the standup is the threat of feeling like an ass if you have
to say, "Sorry, I basically got nothing done since the last standup."

------
lukey_q
I totally agree with the idea that teams should remove blockers as they come
up. If someone on my team runs into a blocker 10 minutes after the standup, I
hope for everyone's sake that they don't wait until tomorrow's standup to say
something, if only because being blocked for a whole day is not really what
you'd call "morale boosting".

I'm not a huge fan of in-person standups, but if you're going to do them
really make sure they're useful and efficient. I worked at a small startup
once where the entire company (~12 people) did a daily standup, which meant
listening to what the salespeople were doing every day, and then telling them
which bugs I was fixing. Overall pretty useless.

~~~
polishdude20
What's this thing with blockers? I'm not in software and it seems like they're
just problems you encounter that need to be resolved before you can continue
working? Why not go to your co-workers desk or message them and deal with it
on the spot?

~~~
lukey_q
You've got it exactly right. It's something you need someone else's help with,
and ideally you can just go ask them for help.

------
kitotik
s/Daily Standups/Status Reporting to Management/

Standups must rank in the top 10 most used cargo cult practices in the tech
world.

Amazing to watch a good, collaborative idea that was used amongst people who
actually like working together on something they sort of care about be
distorted into some dystopian mandatory process that literally no one likes or
gets value from.

~~~
neatze
Additionally such mandatory process's in most if not all cases are boringly
repetitive.

------
kostarelo
I read a lot of comments say standups are for developers to discuss, for
developers to raise blockers, etc.

In my experience, standups are not only for developers. In my current
environment, there is always the product manager of the team who is usually
updating us with the information he got from the upper levers of the company.
There are also QA testers that discuss their progress. We keep it freakishly
short. ~15mins for a team of 10.

While I do find my self looking at the void sometimes, other times I'm forcing
my self to pay attention to everyone and to be as helpful as possible. What
everyone does that, is what makes a team get it right.

------
mharroun
I perfer async standup over slack.

\- It makes it easier to parse information, reread, and catch things like hey
2 people are working on the same thing.

\- Helps catch people stuck/avoiding work as you can see someone on the same
task for 5 days, or rotating between 2 to 3 tasks when none are done.

In terms of discussions, questions or post standup followup, a thread tends to
get started per checkin which could lead to a meeting. This also creates a
good historical trail for when issues come up.

Though I am a huge slack fan, having a channel per project/epic and any
conversation had or meeting gets summarized and put back into the chat

------
jbergstroem
I like (<20min) sync standups for two reasons:

1: Social. By seeing my coworkers over video I remind myself that I work with
people, not pull requests or comments. Perhaps more relevant these times.

2: Discovery. 2.1: A minute or two to just touch on overall goals can instill
team spirit. Sales target hit? No angry customers? Perhaps a complaint. It
helps with team alignment 2.2: A quick rundown on how each persons day is
looking / what people are working on. Perhaps not for blocking but sometimes
it is useful to connect two people and let them follow up post-meeting.

------
mrkurt
We use Cadence for Fly.io, mostly because standups are useless for us. We're
small enough that we don't have external blockers, and we expect people
without external blockers to just ... not get blocked.

We also don't really give two shits about status updates. We care more about
what people have actually done, which is what we use Cadence for. Most of our
updates are something like "pushed a draft PR for X purpose" and not "still
working on the same thing _yawn_ ".

------
pengaru
Slightly off-topic:

At my last office gig employing daily standups they quickly devolved into a
thinly veiled attendance check combined with a passive aggressive attempt to
shame unproductive team members on a daily basis.

It became just another reason for me to never come to the office. At the time
I was in a very head-down overworking phase of life and the leadership would
turn my participation at standup into a major component in that shaming tool,
because I always had a disproportionate amount of things to discuss.

~~~
overgard
Ugh, similarly, in one of my previous jobs we had a guy that was
underperforming (I don't know why, he seemed smart, but it wasn't working
out). Every day the standup turned into like 10 minutes of management and
management lacky's bullying the guy and treating him like a child. It must
have been awful for him (one day he just quit with no notice), but it was
incredibly uncomfortable for the rest of us too -- I definitely didn't want to
start my day every day with a long conversation about how this guy wasn't
getting his work done.

I would honestly be more ok with standups if there was a bit more honesty
about what it's for. If management just said "we need some visibility", I
totally get that, I just hate how it's being marketed as if it's for my
benefit.

I've been a professional developer for about 15 years, so if you multiply it
by 15*261 (workdays in a year approximately), then I've been to about 3915
standup meetings. I can't recall a single one where I thought "glad we did
that, we might have missed something huge if we didn't have a standup"

------
reggieband
IME (both as an IC and as a Manager), daily standup is the tech worker
equivalent of a time clock. Most developers won't be in office until 1 minute
before the daily standup.

------
pnako
Alice: Yesterday I looked at ticket ABC123, to fix the database. I had some
issue with the network so I'm following up with IT. Today I'll look at ticket
XYZ385.

Bob: Yesterday I was working on the migration to the Kokomalta framework. I'll
keep doing it today.

Charlie: Yesterday I looked at fixing the printing bugs. Today I'll do more
bug fixing.

I've worked in different companies, industries, countries and it's always the
same stupid thing, some sort of cargo cult practice that achieves absolutely
nothing and wastes everyone's time. As a manager if I want to know the status
of some project I ask the person, I don't wait until 10am the next day. And if
someone is blocked, reach out when you're blocked to whoever can unblock you.
That's it. That is actually agile, not that stupid daily ceremony.

The IT world is full of those dumb cargo cultish practices. One I've started
noticing is to prefix everything with "as a user" when writing "stories and
epics". "As a user, when I click there I want to have a window with that input
box and this text written here". Super useful! I know there's a proper way to
do it ("as a senior compliance officer, I want a daily report about ABC"), but
no one does it in practice.

------
sourcaustic
The one thing that I like about daily "standups" (daily meetings rather) is to
see my teammate's mug every morning for a brief moment, while taking my first
sip of coffee, and that scintilla of a moment when we wish each other a good
day, all smiling, as our heart fills with hope that today is gonna be that
lovely day where we'll finally experience the _flow_ , the apocryphal stream
of uninterrupted productivity. That's what a perfect daily "standup" looks
like to me. But sadly, someone always feels the need to tell us what they had
to do yesterday in great details and what their plan is for today, as I nod
mechanically and cluelessly zone out.

At some point I noticed that my teammates, including my manager, often are at
least as clueless as me, especially when the verbiage becomes a bit too
technical. I thought I'd do everyone a favor by simplifying things. So some
time ago, shortly after the start of a sprint I tried a format that
corresponds pretty much with what is generally understood from our little
speeches, but said more directly: "well, I made some progress on that thing
yesterday and I'll work a bit more on it today. That's about it." On the
second standup of this, my manager asked that we have an impromptu demo that
afternoon, which was really inconvenient, since instead of working on my
branch, I now had to spend the morning preparing a presentation that he could
understand. That's when I realized that daily standups aren't really designed
to boost developers' productivity, but another tool that is easily misused by
managers to give themselves the illusion of control.

Don't ask me what I think of scrum, it would rhyme.

------
brianpursley
Best standup process I ever had was just a slack channel called standups, and
everyone just posted a couple sentences sometime during the morning: what they
did yesterday, and what they plan to do today.

It was great because first of all there is a history everyone can look back
on, which can save some unnecessary communication and coordination. But most
importantly it avoids the dreaded sidetrack conversation that turns your
standup into a 20 minute meeting.

------
julienb_sea
This article is monumentally pointless. For one thing it ignores how unlikely
it is that your team is actually going to read through everyone's async
standup update. Remote standup zooms kinda suck, and certainly make it easy to
not pay attention. But there is value in having the team come together, having
an open line of communication about what work is getting done, and a forum for
updates.

------
city41
Our stand up is a daily thread in slack. Totally painless and useful. Very
often they lead to better collaboration and cutting off duplicate work before
it really starts. FWIW I work on a small team at a very large company.
Possibly that’s the sweet spot for stand ups like this. As typically someone
on our team will make someone else aware of work another team has done we can
leverage.

------
deevin9
If you're using Slack, the Scrum Police is a great way to organize async
standups:
[https://github.com/coveord/scrumpolice](https://github.com/coveord/scrumpolice)

Because of the confinement my team has switched to async standups to account
for our varied work hours (people on kid duty, etc)

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kube-system
> In an ideal world, daily stand-ups are meant to unblock problems and help
> teams ship product faster. In reality, there's actually no space in the
> standup to dive deeper into actual issues. The second you do, everyone else
> tunes you out, your standup drags on much longer than it needs to, and
> you're asked by your manager to "take it offline".

There is an ideal balance between fully async and going down a rabbit hole. A
good standup will have feedback from others in the group, but it is important
for everyone to know and respect time boundaries. One or two sentence
interjections usually work great.

When you're giving updates as frequently as daily, a synchronous feedback loop
is necessary for the information to be relevant. If I post in a slack channel
that I am debugging issue X, and 2 hours later, someone posts that they dealt
with X last week and has a solution for it, I've just wasted 2 hours of time.

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turdnagel
> Having a regularly scheduled, synchronous meeting is incredibly disruptive

> In fact, the best teams actually unblock problems as they come up

Maybe I'm reading them wrong, but it seems to me like these two lines are in
direct contradiction. Obviously if a problem is a "fire" then yeah, you want
to solve it immediately.

But if the problem isn't urgent and can be worked around, why _disrupt_
someone on your team? Overall I think the framework / pattern presented in
this post doesn't take urgency or team experience into account -- in my
experience, synchronous standups are great and useful for quick discussions of
non-urgent blockers, especially when the team is more junior and could benefit
from exposure and shared understanding.

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alexellisuk
This quote at the end sealed it for me:

> “It’s clear how even though all companies say they “do agile”, in fact most
> don’t; they just do random meetings while standing up, which produces bad
> results that I consider right-out offensive towards developers."

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birdyrooster
Stand ups mostly exist to remind you that you need to be present at work at an
early time of day during a core part of the week. It's an efficient tactic of
making sure people get their asses into chairs week in and week out.

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hogu
We’re a team of 10 and we’ve also found that Cadence replaces our need for
stand up meetings. In general, I’ve found that trusting my team to get their
work done and unblock themselves has resulted in fewer synchronous meetings

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overgard
I always think the argument that it should be used to resolve "blockers" is
weird. As a professional, you need to be able to resolve "blockers" on your
own -- you have to track down people and work with them, it's not always the
PMs job. In all my years of experience if I was dealing with a "blocker", then
either everyone involved already knew about it way ahead of the standup, or I
didn't think the standup was a good way to resolve it.

So really the daily standup is about progress reports. Which is totally fine,
but, yeah, async is just as effective.

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zachware
One thing I always find frustrating about posts like this is that they
identify a problem but make no attempt to help articulate a path to a
solution.

It's reasonable to suggest standups and other meetings be async. What would be
better is to take the time to design a proposed solution for solving the
problem standups solve, even if it ends up being a messy or bad one.

That's a much more effective way to complain about a problem than simply
spending words trying to convince people that something is bad.

Offer an alternative. Create debate. Put in the work to solve it.

~~~
mdu96
The product we're building, Cadence, is actually our solution to the daily
standup problem.

Let me know if you'd be interested in trying our product out -- seems like
you'd give great feedback. My email is melissa@cadencework.com

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sethammons
I enjoy the daily stand up. Sometimes single digit minutes, sometimes it goes
on for half an hour. It is the opportunity to sync with the team. Questions
get asked, priorities may be revisited, any new concerns can be voiced, and we
all leave with the shared knowledge of what we are all working on today and if
there is room for us to help one another. The live aspect of it allows a check
point where things can be pivoted live. "Oh, I missed your question in slack,
let's talk about it right after this meeting."

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mateo411
Yes, I agree. We just post our stand up to a slack channel. I think it's
worthwhile process. It doesn't take very much effort, and it keeps everyone
loosely in the loop.

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mytailorisrich
If what you call a 'daily standup' is a status meeting where each dev reports
to the team lead/manager then sure it can be async and that would indeed be
more practical.

But that's not what a 'daily standup' is supposed to be and the point is to
get people together.

> _" It’s clear how even though all companies say they “do agile”, in fact
> most don’t"_

Well, indeed. That's why everything is called a 'daily standup' these days.

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waheoo
Async stand ups arent stand ups.

I do a form of async stand up at work.

Its mostly progress tracking for my boss.

Never get any feedback. Never share any woth others. (Itried in the beginning)

The real time nature of a standup a d implied time pressure has all kinds of
effects that cant be duplicated in a lole for like way.

Im not fully of the belief it cant be adequately substituted im just saying
dont call it async standup. It just sounds like youve never used one.

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leakleek
The daily standup is a smell. The effective daily standup is a myth. The
virtual daily standup is an abomination.

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thatfrenchguy
What about no standup ?

~~~
mdu96
yes :)

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sigfubar
For me the daily standup is a chance to be debriefed by the project manager so
that they can convert my updates to actions in JIRA. It's what liberates me
from having to personally interact with JIRA. In that sense the standup is
worth its weight in gold no matter the format.

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prepperpotts
I've definitely spent a lot of time in standups that are effectively pure
micromanage-y accountability plays — what are you working on today. Those were
a huge waste of time. In the instances where people could actually help me
out, though, they've been very helpful.

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deeblering4
I’m of the opinion that the updates should be async but with the option to
highlight an issue or blocker that justifies a meeting about that context.

It’s important to strike a workable balance between putting everyone to sleep
and unblocking issues quickly.

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SergeAx
Oh, that's just mean. "Your team is suck, here's why. How to improve it? I'll
tell you somewhere later, don't know when exactly". Are we reading a soap
opera here? Hitchcockian cliffhangers, anyone?

~~~
SergeAx
Oh, wait, I got it! "Buy our product", right?

------
maitredusoi
That was also one of my side project idea. But the concept should go further:
with a time limit !

My idea was that you should not be allowed to speak about your daily task more
than 42 second on a video record shared to all you team mates.

~~~
mdu96
interesting! why 42 seconds? did you ever end up building this?

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the-pigeon
What?

> In reality, there's actually no space in the standup to dive deeper into
> actual issues.

I've never heard of a standup without a parking lot. The entire point of
parking lot (and the main value of standup) is to discuss issues with the
entire team engaged.

> In fact, the best teams actually unblock problems as they come up, instead
> of waiting for a regularly scheduled standup to report on a blocker.

So, instead of having a scheduled time when everyone is available. You want to
make decisions disrupting everyone in the middle of their day and not having
their full focus?

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tonymet
benefit is raising blockers, ideally resolving them or holding people to
follow up, and reducing finger pointing (e.g. I'd have my UI done if jane just
finished the API -- ok let's grab jane and ask her what's up).

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GoToRO
If the managers don't know what the team is working on, daily, change
managers.

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rleahy22
This is just an ad.

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sneeuwpopsneeuw
wow some people sad that cadence looks like slack. But I just discovered it is
really a 1 on 1 look a like. DAMN

------
PanosJee
Use Geekbot.io I swear by it

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vkaku
async is not great for productive teams.

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syngrog66
ie. status email

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ubermonkey
Yeah, this misses part of the point of a standup.

