Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by alfonsodev on Monday January 13, 2020 @07:08AM (#22033707)

I agree with this, I found that if you go for the Round Robin format, often, people are just thinking about what are they going to say next, and how to make it sound like actual valuable work rather than listen to the colleagues. It gets akward when some people get a lot done (apparently) and others not, also not everyone knows how to "sell" their work, and IMO it can create weird dynamics.

Walking the board is much more helpful for the team and retrospectives and one to ones can be used to talk about productivity differences, individualities and other issues.

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by andy_boot on Monday January 13, 2020 @07:12AM (#22033733)

I also noticed this.

We came up with a variant to fix this. You have to say what the next person in the circle said they'd do yesterday before your talk.

This forced everyone to pay more attention as you don't know who would be standing next to you tomorrow. It wasn't easy to do but I think it did make people more aware of what was going on.

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by philbarr on Monday January 13, 2020 @07:48AM (#22033946)

This sounds horrendous. It doesn't really feal like it would achieve much either except making standups even harder.

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by Fire-Dragon-DoL on Monday January 13, 2020 @04:21PM (#22038742)

This is a terrible approach for the fact that instead of addressing the problem of people not listening because of stuff not relevant to them said from others, it ensures you must listen to that irrelevant stuff.

So instead of wasting some people time, you are now wasting 2x that time.

Make the meeting relevant to everyone, make it tight (time-wise). Hiding the problem under a tarp ensures it doesn't get any improvements.

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by drewcoo on Monday January 13, 2020 @04:00PM (#22038523)

Why is this voted down? Stand-ups are supposed to be about increased team cohesiveness and this helped their team achieve that.

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by djKianoosh on Monday January 13, 2020 @07:16AM (#22033754)

wow this would suck in a 20 person standup

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by matthewmacleod on Monday January 13, 2020 @07:33AM (#22033858)

Literally everything would suck in a 20 person standup.

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by djKianoosh on Monday January 13, 2020 @09:44AM (#22034827)

can confirm

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by TomMarius on Monday January 13, 2020 @07:21AM (#22033787)

Why would you have 20 person standups?

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by djKianoosh on Monday January 13, 2020 @09:48AM (#22034861)

because government project? although I imagine this happens in non-gov settings too, this is just my experience.

Here's the reason: managers are so spread thin that they don't want to be in 5-10 standups all morning, so they combine around organizational structures rather than product(s)/deliverable(s). Another case of the software delivery matching org structure...

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by TomMarius on Monday January 13, 2020 @10:52AM (#22035475)

Of course the next question in line is "why is a manager involved in the standup?"

> because government project? although I imagine this happens in non-gov settings too, this is just my experience.

Why not split into smaller work groups? What's the advantage of 20 person teams?

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by djKianoosh on Monday January 13, 2020 @12:50PM (#22036753)

organically this is what happens to actually get things done. but mind you, these small work groups are successful despite the large standups. life finds a way...

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by dragonwriter on Monday January 13, 2020 @09:54AM (#22034911)

Well, yes, a 20 person standup is a little more than twice the maximum size conventional wisdom holds is appropriate, so it is going to suck to start with and much advice for normal 5-9 person stand-ups will be counterproductive and make it worse.

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by bmcfeeley on Monday January 13, 2020 @07:24AM (#22033812)

I know we tend to have little control over this as ICs, but I think the party line here is that 20 is too many people to effectively make use of most agile/scrum ceremonies. Do you actually need to know all 19 other persons’ updates?

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Re:Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it? by djKianoosh on Monday January 13, 2020 @09:49AM (#22034869)

Individuals don't, but the managers, who may be well meaning, feel the need to.

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