> Really? There needs to be time set aside in the day for an engineer to announce that something is blocking their work? What were they doing for the rest of the day prior to the status meeting? Twiddling their thumbs? Office chair jousting tournament? When effective engineers get stuck, they ask for assistance immediately. Not tomorrow because PHB solicited that feedback. Immediately. Now.
I have seen standups actually induce that simply because there is an expectation that you did something yesterday. So how do you always ensure that you did something yesterday? You might withold reporting completed work.
Of course one must take immediate action if they encounter a blocking issue.
Of course one always did something yesterday if they were working.
The point of the daily stand-up is to spread the information within the team so that everyone has an idea of what others are working on and of the issues they may be encountering (maybe someone you did not think of asking knows how to fix the issue or has an good idea how to solve it).
> The point of the daily stand-up is to spread the information within the team so that everyone has an idea of what others are working on and of the issues they may be encountering (maybe someone you did not think of asking knows how to fix the issue or has an good idea how to solve it).
Why does this necessarily have to be synchronous?
Why not have, e.g., a tech chat where questions can be asked to the entire team, and those with the knowledge and bandwidth can volunteer their assistance?
There are several potential variations on this that are both more immediate and encourage the asker to provide more context to the people they're asking.
The opportunity with a standup is to exchange this information with your peers and coworkers, who might be in a position to help you solve this problem even though you didn’t know it.
More information, from more sources, and more directions, is better.
Agile advocates face to face communication because it is the most effective and efficient way to discuss. The daily stand-up is aimed at further focusing attention so that everyone pay full attention for a few minutes then return to their work.
In general, chat or email is less effective than face to face discussion, and also suffers from the problem that people may not read them. So Agile is proposing a way to solve those issues.
It's up for each company or team to organize the way they think works best for them. But in any case it is useful to understand what Agile is trying to solve and achieve.
There’s typically no new information presented in a standup. Therefore, what is presented there does not need to be recorded.
It’s more a repetition of information that is already recorded elsewhere, perhaps in a JIRA ticket or in a slack conversation, or whatever. But most people don’t actively go seek out all that information from all their teammates, so it’s still useful to present that information to the whole team.
If you do come up with something new in the standup, it will probably be your responsibility to follow up and document that.
Not a fan of the tone and judgement in this article.
It's great that your team doesn't require getting on a call or meeting in person to coordinate their work. That's not true for every other team that exists though.
There is no single process that works for everyone. Great teams take pieces of different processes and find what works for them. If Daily Stand-ups don't work, that's cool. If they do, that's cool too.
My team still does daily stand-ups. We stay focused and it's nice to see everyone. Other teams don't and produce just as much.
Anyways, if anyone is interested in learning how to make their daily stand-ups better, I wrote this article:
> Not a fan of the tone, judgement, and gatekeeping in this article.
…Gatekeeping? I'm hardly trying to control access to something. I'm preventing developers from having their focus time squandered.
Anyway…
From your article:
> This made me realize that the real value of a daily standup isn’t the meeting itself. It’s the time that comes after it. Considering this, let’s stop trying to optimize the daily standup itself. Instead, use it as a catalyst to get our teammates away from their desks. Use the standup to start a conversation, but trust the team to finish it.
This is oddly contradictory. You concede that daily standups aren't actually valuable. You say you trust your team to terminate the discussion at an appropriate point, but for some reason you don't trust your team to initiate that conversation when they see fit.
How does that work?
> this is a good article
Well… you would say that, wouldn't you? Didn't you write it?
I have seen standups actually induce that simply because there is an expectation that you did something yesterday. So how do you always ensure that you did something yesterday? You might withold reporting completed work.