
Standup Antipatterns - ylhert
https://medium.com/@yanismydj/standup-antipatterns-1e9db0d497da
======
mullingitover
My team ditched the standups, and now we just post our stuff in a slack
channel: \- What we're working on (jira ticket numbers, titles) \- Yesterday's
unplanned work \- Blockers

It's wonderful. I worked on teams with standups for years, and they were
utterly mind-numbing and worthless unless you're collaborating with someone,
in which case they're just redundant.

~~~
aaron-santos
My team has been using jell[1] for posting slack standup messages for the last
several months. It's a bit odd since we've continued our normal standup
tradition and still pay the small interruption cost.

However, it's made our standups much faster (5-7mins) because everyone has put
into words yesterday's work, today's work, and their blockers. I know there's
an argument to switching over to text-based async updates entirely - why do
things twice, right? But even so it's an improvement over the traditional
standup where most of the content is ad-libbed and can tend toward rambling.

[1] - [http://jell.com](http://jell.com) \- no affiliation, just like how it
works.

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AndrewKemendo
Sounds like a bad standup.

We're a remote team so it's important for us to communicate in person everyday
in a more intimate way than just Slack, which is why we do it. It also helps
me get a really loose gauge (audibly) how everyone is doing mentally (aside
from one on ones) because I can't be there in person. You can hear/see
frustration 1000x faster than you can read it in text.

We set the ground rules early on what would be in our standup:

\- No longer that 10 minutes

\- If you can't be there just let the team know ahead of time, no penalties
for absence

\- Specialists only call in once a week

\- Talk about what you are working on that day even if it's just "Still
debugging image sequencing"

\- Ask for one-on-ones with other teammates to deep dive, don't do it at
standup

It's really been effective at keeping the team moving in the same direction,
because even minor audible/visual communication keeps the ship on course
better than text.

~~~
riffraff
I've been working remotely for many years, and I second everything here.

Standups are presumably less important if everyone works in the same place,
but for remote people it's very useful, and I believe it also helps with
feeling part of the team, i.e. you have those few minutes of chit chat,
hearing each other talk or seeing some faces. It's good for the team's
mental/moral health.

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msluyter
Another antipattern, not specific to standups: everyone sitting around
absorbed in their laptops not paying attention to anything until their turn
comes around. (Another reason to actually stand during standups, I suppose.)

Another mentioned in this thread -- if you have distinct groups within a team
who are working on mostly separate projects, don't combine their standups.
Otherwise, you just encourage half of the attendees to tune out (exacerbating
the situation above.)

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adrianggg
Great article, I like the bit about

"Many organizations misuse the daily standup in order to accomplish ulterior
motives. A big one that comes to mind is having a ‘start time’ for the work
day."

My thoughts exactly. This to me indicates poor management style and a control
mechanism for insecure tech managers. It's been a great way for me to quickly
avoid joining terrible teams that use weird metrics to measure performance.

Why is there so much resistance to common sense approach to knowledge sharing?
I always feel much resistance from the force in the move away from 9am stand-
up.

~~~
eric_h
At my last job, the 10:30am daily standup was very clearly intended to enforce
the start time of the work day. Further, the company provided both lunch and
dinner every day, and we were expected to be there for both, every day.

Needless to say, the founders of this company were previously finance guys
(the startup itself had nothing to do with finance. honestly it didn't even
really have a business plan other than raise VC money and improve vanity
metrics to raise more VC money) and were very fond of the ass-in-chair metric
of employee productivity.

I could write pages about all the things that were wrong with the culture at
my last place of employment, but I won't. I do owe that job for actually
plugging me into the network of startups and tech in NYC, so while it was a
shitty 2 years, it was worth it (especially since I now know which companies
and management styles to avoid).

I am very happy to have moved on from there to my current job, where the only
metric that matters is the get-shit-done-whenever-wherever-however metric.

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madrax
Maybe we need a standup-twitter where you have your 140 characters worth of
input, and if you realize you need more than 140 characters then your standup
should be "Severely blocked by X, need help from Y on how to move forward"
(~70 characters)

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btbuildem
Worst is when a problem comes up and ppl dive right into trying to figure out
a solution right there and then.

~~~
DarkTree
I lol'd at how true this is. And working on a team with multiple sub-groups
means that only 2 or 3 out of the 8 person team knows the problem intimately,
and it just becomes a problem-solving colloquium right there at standup until
someone eventually says, "ok save that for after standup".

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fragola
I was on a team with tedious, competitive standups. It was horrible and I
dreaded it every day. If I kept my contribution to about 1 minute (as it is
supposed to be), I would be interrogated. Oh the memories.

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maxxxxx
To me worst participants are folks who like hearing themselves talk. Most
people finish their part in 30 seconds and then you have people who give a 10
minute monologue.

~~~
madrax
In those cases where is the Scrum Master to cut/drive this? (Let's take it
offline has been told to me more than once, being one of those people that
tend to rant without realizing)

~~~
maxxxxx
I have been scrum master and even if you cut them off it's still disruptive.
You need to listen for a while to see if anything relevant is transmitted or
not. So you end up with the pattern "1 minute irrelevant blabla/ Let's take
this offline". It's still annoying to other participants and destroys the
rhythm of the meeting.

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20yrs_no_equity
A daily meeting where you force everyone to be in the office, and interrupt
their work with irrelevant status updates that have to be too short to
communicate anything useful is itself an anti-pattern.

I have never seen them be useful. Not once. And people are addicted to them,
always for "management ulterior motives". Once had someone say "we need to
make sure people are actually working".

Personally, I would like to make it a requirement of my next job search that
if the company does a standup, I'm not taking their offer.

~~~
fragola
>Personally, I would like to make it a requirement of my next job search that
if the company does a standup, I'm not taking their offer.

I think that's a bit extreme. My current team has a standup that is quite
useful. It's a few minutes, and we often end up canceling other meetings as a
result of it. Standup, like any other meeting, is not evil by itself. But I
would have agreed with you one year ago when I'd only been in Evil Standup.

~~~
20yrs_no_equity
An alternative would be to stay for one of the teams standup. Or maybe in the
interview I can ask "How long is your average standup? Do people have to stand
up for it?"

TBH, if you won't let me sit down for a standup (Even 10 minutes) then I'm not
working there. Even if its a 10 minute standup, I'm only talking for 1 minute.
Having to stand for 9 while other people say irrelevant things (in my
experience) is just jerk behavior.

Now, I'm sure they are wonderful at your company. But it's like religion. YOU
may love your christian god, but I don't get it, and Its never worked for me.
Fine for you... but a problem when people say that everyone should be doing
it, and if it isn't working then you're doing it wrong.

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vikiomega9
I don't think I've ever been in a situation where a daily standup adds value
if everybody is not working on the same thing and not focused on the same
project/codebase.

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zabuni
I like the idea of an 11:50 standup. It gives people an obvious incentive to
stop talking.

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krick
Is this really so popular? I kind of thought these stand-ups are something out
of the books on management, that is never used in reality by people who do the
actual work.

Seriously, I don't see why my team would need this. We just have an IM-chat,
if you want to notify others on the team about the problem we have — here you
go. If there is something a bit less open for discussion and involvind a
greater number of people — write an email. Besides that, if you are working in
the same office at the same time and need a discussion — why not just speak of
a problem, when it arises?

~~~
ylhert
In startups they are pretty common. They've been in place at every job/company
I've been at (~9 companies)

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natosaichek
There's a fair amount of hostility to standups here. I'm surprised. At my
current job we didn't have standups, so I made a slack channel and just posted
what I was working on for the day in there. I find it useful to have as a
specific driver for myself - regardless of what other folks are doing. I think
the idea of condensing the current tasks into a few sentences and saying
_that_ is what I'm doing is valuable, both to myself and any others who are on
the same team.

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toufka
Anyone care to explain what a 'standup' is for those of us (lucky enough?) to
not have heard the term outside of the context of a comedy club?

~~~
T0T0R0
It's when the people stealing the precious moments of your life, take five or
sixty minutes out of their busy schedule of not actually working (see:
_meetings_ ), and dunk your head in the baptismal toilet of despair, and force
you at knife point to pledge undying fealty to your own enslavement.

Then they make you recite the tickets you have worked on, are working on, and
shall work on, in reverse chronological order, with an alphabetical sub-sort,
and then clap and praise Martin Fowler, after exclaiming each ticket number.

Then, while you're waiting on the other drones to complete their turn, you
stick a finger in your nose, and a finger up your butt, and each time a worker
drone finishes their roll call, you switch.

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icedchai
I do standups twice a week. Though it is a violation of true agile principles,
it's pretty tolerable.

