
A Guide for the Perfect Daily Standup  - polysaturate
http://blog.standupti.me/post/126647667809/perfect-daily-standup
======
Sleaker
While I agree standups can have a use, I find they get pretty useless at my
current place of employment. We have a small dev team where every single
person is working on completely different portions of the software and there
is little collaboration/overlap. The stand-up is pretty much just people
telling what they are working on, so I'm not sure it's an effective tool.

~~~
MCRed
I've never seen a standup be useful.

Last year we built a team that was in constant communication threat the day,
via slack and bug reports/statuses. We had ad-hoc conversations regularly. We
all knew what was going on and what was being worked on.

And yet we were forced to have a standup every morning where we tried to
summarize what we were working on for non-technical "managers" who always
would have the wrong impression- either something that was hard was trivial
and why weren't woe working faster on it, or someone would rattle off a bunch
of trivial things and they would think they were working heard.

Technically competent management would be in the slack and watching the issues
and not need a standup at all. A jira report is all you really need.

Just make a bug status that is "blocked" if your system doesn't already have
one.

Then of course In all the companies I've worked at in the last 10 years that
had standup, invariably there was some sort of management type (you can tell
them because their job is having meetings, not getting things done) who
wouldn't mind droning on for 20 minutes while standing. They don't care that
they are standing.

I think the standup has become some sort of cargo cult relic from the days
before slack and is maintained because it lets managers who don't understand
technology feel like they are making their reports report every day.

Now a sprint meeting, once a week or once every 2 weeks... that's more useful.

------
thearn4
On my team, we've had an evolution from daily in-person standup, to daily
short google hangout, to daily status dump into a dedicated slack channel.
While there's something to be said for face-time, I think this is working for
us pretty well.

------
jumpkick
"You Should be Standing Up." I use a standing desk so during our standup,
while everyone else stands up, I sit down. The part about standing forcing
people to be efficient and succinct doesn't really apply when you're already
standing for 8 hours a day.

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thrwaway3255
I find that the daily standup is frequently a waste of time though often
(maybe 1-2 times a week) issues I hadn't known about are brought to the fore.
On a small team, I figure that if someone really needs something, they will
reach out to the appropriate people to get it. This reduces communication
overhead unless the whole team is required to make a decision.

I can see value in doing a standup somewhere between 1-3 times a week, but 5
times a week, unless everyone needs to work closely together on time sensitive
issues seems excessive. The idea of everyone doing paperwork every day to be
prepared for a low value meeting kind of gives me a headache. It seems like
the opposite of lithe and agile.

~~~
njharman
You seem to be selfishly focusing only on the benefit to you. You are (or
should be) part of a team. Even with your low 1-2 times a week, with 5 person
team that is 5-10/wk. In otherwords every single day.

~~~
eropple
"Selfish" is the wrong word, and to me assumes a certain troubling kind of bad
faith. People respond to incentives. If the performance of a team is not the
primary evaluative factor for a developer (and it often isn't), then it makes
no sense for somebody to focus on anything else. A developer must be
incentivized to view those five to ten times a week as a plus to the point of
not finding it worth complaining about.

------
jebblue
I injured my back in a fall a long time ago, 2 discs are bad. I literally
can't stand for more than a few minutes without taking ibuprofen the rest of
the day. It's time for standups to end and go back to the old fashioned sit
around the table meetings.

~~~
gutnor
Standing Up is a crutch to keep meeting short.

If you can keep the meeting short and effective with everybody sitting why you
make people stand up ? It is not agile to apply practices out of principle,
you apply them with a result in mind, and if the result can be achieved in a
more efficient manner you just do it that way.

For example, my team has never suffered from anchoring. We stopped playing
with the voting cards once it became clear the result we got with or without
them were the same, just faster without the cards. We continued to stand up
because that meant people going away from distractions but not requiring a
trip to a meeting room.

~~~
matthewmacleod
This, I think, is what people so often miss when they are talking about agile.

It's not a magic set of hard-and-fast rules that should be applied to every
situation regardless of how they fit. If you feel you can do without some
parts of the canonical process, then drop them. If you feel you'd benefit from
some different approaches, you can add them.

Standups are no different, and if your team doesn't need them, or has an
alternative that works better for you, then go for it!

~~~
eropple
This is, however, used as a dodge by Agile proponents (okay, more specifically
Scrum proponents, but the other "Agile" options have mostly receded) to avoid
answering to the significant criticisms of the methodologies involved. "Oh,
you changed it because we said it was flexible and could be changed? Now
you're doing it wrong, the methodology(tm) is fine."

------
joesmo
I don't see any reason that a standup is superior to sending an update email
in the morning and many reasons why it's inferior. Mainly, it's a tool for
managers to feel important. That's it. There's no need to optimize that except
to make it go away, for which there is a great need in this industry. If it
was a tool for managers to get updates, they'd use email, chat or something
saner. Standups put developers under pressure unnecessarily and offer nothing
to the development process in return. It's sad that they even exist and
they're a perfect example of managers who don't know how to manage and can't
figure out a proper way to stay updated. They make developers angry and less
productive because now the developers are stressing over what they're going to
say in the standup rather than developing. Yet another terrible idea from the
agile camp that seems to have no shortage of such terrible ideas.

EDIT: Note that all the information available in standups is also available on
a board or ticketing system for a manager's perusal anytime. That to me proves
the uselessness of the standup and its only purpose being to make managers
feel in control.

~~~
eropple
This doesn't reflect my experience at all. I'm not at all a fan of Agile as a
practice, but I am a fan of well-run standups. Update emails can tell a
manager what they want to know, but incentives virtually never align to get
the rest of your team to read them and be up to speed on what everybody else
is doing. And that's why standups work: you get a little face-time with your
entire team, away from the desk, and it's a chance to have everybody's
_undivided_ attention for a minute or so and to get them rummaging around the
attics of their brains for things that might be relevant to you.

You say what you did and what you're planning on doing. If you are worried
about the optics or politics of saying what you did, I would reflect on
whether or not that's an issue, either with the team, its management, or you
personally, separate from the process of a standup meeting itself.

~~~
MCRed
It should be obvious, on an hour by hour basis, what is bing down, what is on
deck and what is a blocker due to where issues are in the workflow. This is
much more detailed and it's already being updated.

You don't need to interrupt your developers and take out 2 hours of
productivity with a daily meeting.

I've never seen that undivided attention used for anything worth a damn- even
the manager ends up giving filler.

It's like 24/7 news channels. There simply isn't enough content to fill a 15
minute (half hour) meeting every day. But they feel like they need to.

------
durzagott
I've pretty much given up on the old Scrum-style standup. It's just another
form of torture that to put devs through. I agree with the ceremony itself,
but for development teams, or even worse operation teams, trying to catalog
and remember all the things you did yesterday, or Friday, is painful.

Since we've moved over to Kanban, I've found it's much more useful to walk the
board. We start on the right and move to the left. The discussion is much
richer and I've found people no longer struggle to remember what they did
yesterday.

What the author suggests at the end, having everything written down in
advance, is just another chore designed correct 'bad' behaviour (people not
sure what to say, lots of 'umm, errs'). Perhaps we should be asking ourselves
if it's the format rather than the people.

Here is a blog post describing something similar to the one we're using now:
[http://brodzinski.com/2011/12/effective-
standups.html](http://brodzinski.com/2011/12/effective-standups.html)

------
TronPaul_
Having a daily short, informal, morning meeting certainly helps us. You don't
need to be standing up to have "standup". Dogma for dogma's sake is the king
of anti-patterns.

~~~
thrwaway3255
For what it's worth, I have noticed that actual stand ups are shorter. When
people settle in and sit they tend to start rambling. It is hard to convince
people to actually stand though without being dictatorial. Here's a study of
undergrads (so take it with a grain of salt) that shows that they are in fact
shorter:

[http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/05/work-smarter-for-
shorte...](http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/05/work-smarter-for-shorter-
meetings-stand-up.html)

~~~
spathi_fwiffo
I think that's true. When I had a local team we stood, and the meetings seemed
shorter. With global or national teams, that's a bit harder.

I have found for phone/web "standup" meetings, that the person running the
show needs to set the pace and keep it moving along. Nice and short, keeps the
team informed and gets help were its needed.

On the other hand, I've had leads who just let people ramble non stop, and
doing that for weeks was just wasteful and demoralizing.

------
moron4hire
You can't use methodology to change what is largely a people-problem. Your
projects are failing not because you didn't have daily status meetings
correctly, they're failing because your organization has a culture of lying to
itself about work. Thinking you can fix that by fixing daily status meetings
is a symptom of that culture.

A daily status meeting is about seeing what is going on, comparing that to
what needs to happen, and changing course if necessary. You don't need a
checklist of how to do that. If you can't figure out how to communicate with
people you see every day on those points, then I don't know if you're clever
enough to figure out how to write code in the first place. You're fired. Pack
up your things and get out.

I've seen way too many organizations use "we're standing up" to mean
"therefore, we're having a productive meeting". I've seen places do 50-person
standup meetings. Yes, they would go two hours. I've seen other places get the
number of people right but do full-status-report standup meetings. Yes, they
would also go two hours. That's a quarter of your work day, probably half of
your productive work day, just wasted on an emotionally draining process.

Last time I had daily status meetings that worked, I had my entire team in one
room, we had a large whiteboard with every task we were working on between us,
and when everyone got in, had their coffee, got through their emails, I would
turn around in my chair, ask if everyone was ready, and we'd just go through
the list. We would scratch things off when they'd get finished, so we always
knew who was getting what done anyway, and everyone had their names next to
what they were working on, so we knew what they were working on already. It
was mostly just a chance for someone to ask for help on something. It took
about 15 minutes. If new tasks didn't fit on the board, they didn't fit in the
team's workload.

I think there is something to be said for not placing the focus on individual
contributors but on the tasks as a whole, on the team as a whole. My meetings
didn't pit people against each other, "oh, Jim got 3 things done yesterday and
has never been blocked on 1 thing for over a week, but Dave has made zero
progress on his task since two days ago. Shame, Dave, shame. Let us not
question whether the task was specified correctly or appropriately broken
down."

------
polysaturate
I know there is a large sentiment at HN that the Daily Standup is dead, or an
anti-pattern. However, the truth is Agile and Scrum are still huge. Plus, most
do not have a say in the methodologies they use at their job. Why not try and
make the most out of it!

~~~
jebblue
Standup was never part of Agile:

[http://www.agilemanifesto.org/principles.html](http://www.agilemanifesto.org/principles.html)

~~~
cdcarter
The standup is obviously one method of applying "The most efficient and
effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is
face-to-face conversation."

Agile also strongly discourages remote work, under the same principle.

------
jkbyc
What if your work consists largely of research and experimentation? No tasks
or stories, mostly many long spikes.

What if research and experimentation happens over a period of time and only
later there is a period of focused prototype development?

Have you experimented with alternatives to daily standups? Standups three
times a week? Changing the routine based on the stage of the work (research
vs. development for example)?

What if standups are misused for micromanagement?

If there are so many ways standups can go wrong maybe its not a good generic
tool after all?

~~~
matthewmacleod
_If there are so many ways standups can go wrong maybe its not a good generic
tool after all?_

I don't think that's a useful conclusion to draw. Standups go wrong if they
are too long, and that's about the only way they can fail.

 _What if your work consists largely of research and experimentation? No tasks
or stories, mostly many long spikes._

"I researched this area yesterday. It seems like a good approach. I noticed we
need to think about how it will scale, but I'm going to look into that further
today."

Or even consider that standups are indeed not for your organisation. That's
fine.

 _Have you experimented with alternatives to daily standups?_

This is something I would encourage every team to do if they don't feel
standups are useful. Try a status email at the end of the day instead, or a
weekly status meeting. I definitely think that a standup had value, but I
imagine it depends on the environment.

 _What if standups are misused for micromanagement?_

Then fix it. If you are in a situation where you are being micromanaged, then
it's not the fault of a standup – it's the fault of a micromanager, and
eliminating a standup isn't going to fix that.

~~~
jkbyc
>> What if standups are misused for micromanagement?

> Then fix it.

That's easier said than done. It assumes that the micromanager has enough
self-awareness and listening skills. If he had, maybe he wouldn't be a
micromanager. I tried to fix it but eventually it was one of the biggest
reason I left the company.

>> If there are so many ways standups can go wrong maybe its not a good
generic tool after all?

> I don't think that's a useful conclusion to draw. Standups go wrong if they
> are too long, and that's about the only way they can fail.

Micromanagement is another way we already mentioned. Fabulating stories about
work done as a means of avoidance is another (as your sibling suggests). I'd
say there are even more ways they can fail in general. In specific cases they
might still be indispensable.

edit: formatting

------
jebblue
Is it just me or does everyone in the picture look younger than 30?

~~~
moron4hire
The one guy in the long-sleeve button-up shirt might be in his 30s or 40s.

------
andrzejkrzywda
Async standups may be a good alternative, you can do them over email or on
Slack/Hipchat/Flowdock.

Different rules apply in async standups than in meeting-like standups. There's
more focus on what your daily status can bring to other people.

I wrote about some tips here:
[http://andrzejonsoftware.blogspot.com/2014/05/async-
standups...](http://andrzejonsoftware.blogspot.com/2014/05/async-
standups.html)

------
fweespeech
I'm still confused why this isn't just handled via email. Send an email at the
end of the day and be done with it.

~~~
recursive
Email is asynchronous. Impediments can't be addressed with the same immediacy.

~~~
fweespeech
Yeah, but do you want to have 10 people go through their 5 minute thing every
day? Its basically a whole hour that could have been better used.

Reading the same thing in email form and replying would maybe take 15min.

~~~
matthewmacleod
_Yeah, but do you want to have 10 people go through their 5 minute thing every
day? Its basically a whole hour that could have been better used._

Every company is different, but in my opinion that's just a meeting rather
than the canonical standup. I wouldn't expect a 10-person standup to take more
than 15 minutes.

~~~
fweespeech
90 seconds per person?

I've never seen any meeting go that fast.

~~~
spathi_fwiffo
Then your "standup" meetings are being run by an incompetent person; I've had
that happen on several teams, as well, and it resulted in some miserable
months; but, when it works well it works well. It is completely up to the
person leading the meeting to set the tone and keep the pace - they should be
interrupting people who take too long and moving it along.

Properly run, people should just be reporting on status and impediments, not
details.

Remember, most people don't have anything to report: "I'm working on my stuff,
no issues, that is all."... that's like 10 seconds tops.

or, "I'm done, moving on to my next task". What's the next task? That's
already been assigned at the start of the sprint, don't need to go over it
here. If someone wants to know, they can look at the task tracker - if someone
needs to change priority "need X done so I can work on Y", they can make a
quick comment, or email after the meeting.

even if it is "I'm done with my last thing, i need something new" \-- you
don't need to get that new thing in the meeting, the boss man knows you need
something, they'll assign you something after the meeting.

... that leaves room for people with issues. And they still shouldn't take
long. "I'm stuck! I need help with Z!" that gives time for a few people to say
"I can help with that" and someone to be picked.

Anything more should be a meeting of its own with just the effected people
(not the entire team). Detailed status should be in nice clear comments in
your task tracker.

------
PopeOfNope
The perfect daily standup is an email.

