This is completely false for the majority of places I've worked. Plenty of people don't notice how much they've got stuck, or don't know who the right expert is, or feel self-conscious about interrupting them to ask a question. Having a daily scheduled time where all the experts are available and everyone should check whether they're getting bogged down is a big help.

I've experienced the kind of "standup" you describe too, but it usually coincided with not actually following the rules for what a standup is (e.g. not actually standing up) and a bunch of other fake agile.

Huh? How are people not contacting the experts or reaching out for help? Seems fundamental to being a professional, doesn’t matter what profession.

That seems like a bad culture more than anything else.

I've worked in a range of different cultures, and you're exactly right. It's "bad culture", it's people who are oriented towards individual competition rather than collaboration. It's when your SME's tear down others for not finding their specialized knowledge as "obvious". It's where the pervasive attitude is anti-documentation, anti-code comments ("if it was hard to write, it should be hard to read") - It's when members are not attuned to the possibility that others lack context because they're in a narrow role without exposure to what the broader team is doing. But mostly, it's just people being assholes.

Being "stuck" working in a company like that really sucks. You can spend years spinning your wheels just trying to keep up. Working at a company that fosters collaboration and non-judmental attitudes. . . it's like night and day, and you can grow your skills and get out of a narrow role, and look at the big picture.

These are the kinds of things that every engineer needs to learn to look for when you're doing an interview somewhere.

I consider my job very uninteresting, utterly useless and it really sucks but not because of assholes - thank god.

I understand your take, thanks for the contrast.

Most developers are introverts, everyone has their own pride, and a lot of the time the difference between a getting stuck because you're missing something and getting stuck because what you're doing is just genuinely hard is not at all obvious - especially when you're in the tunnel-vision of trying to solve the problem and in a workplace where you've deliberately eliminated distractions and interruptions (which is a very good thing on the whole, but comes with its own costs).

What?

How is the best situation for a prideful introvert to have a scheduled meeting every morning where they can make it known to the entire team exactly how stuck they are?

If anything those are the exact traits that make devs prefer 1-on-1 communication.

How else to learn humble, team-oriented, potentially uncomfortable honesty but regular practice?

Psychological safety is the biggest factor in overal team performance and morale. That safety comes from trust, and that trust comes from routine demonstration of vulnerability and support.

Lone wolf rockstars can have their own moments of self-defeat and wheelspinning too. But if they haven’t developed a sense of courage and humility to admit it and bring it to the team, then the whole team is now literally bottlenecked on their ego.

>That safety comes from trust, and that trust comes from routine demonstration of vulnerability and support

That's my intuition about what's wrong with these ceremonies: they look like they are trying to foster those things by enforcing the superficial behaviours seen in good teams, but it is just the effect. A team with trust, close bonded and efficient has "standups" and "retros" in an organic way, because that's the effect of a team that work together.

I always felt these methodologies try to turn it around, as in "let's force the superficial behaviours we see in good teams, so it will make other teams as good". But it doesn't work that way and it ends up being a tool for managers.

It’s a nice story about rockstars: when the mythical 10x engineer gets stuck, PMs fucking PANIC.

Lul, you are over-estimating managers capabilities to differentiate a 10x developer from a 0.1x developer.

> How is the best situation for a prideful introvert to have a scheduled meeting every morning where they can make it known to the entire team exactly how stuck they are?

Because the whole team's doing it, because it creates a space where it's ok to have got stuck, and because the once-a-day schedule sets a clear expectation about how long it's ok to be stuck for without at least considering asking for help.

If you were happy getting yourself unstuck asking for help 1-on-1 you can still do that, and you'll never be stuck when it comes to the standup, so it should be no skin off your nose. The standup is for the sake of the people who would previously be stuck quietly for days at a time.

(though if I'm on the receiving end, I'd prefer to nudge you towards asking in standup or at least in an async way, rather than interrupting my own flow by asking me for help)

I empathize with devs that are introverts. They'd rather not be in the stand up in the first place.

Well that is something they will need help in learning to overcome software is a team endeavour.

Stop conflating introversion with whether or not somebody is a 'team player'.

Did I say "team player"

Sometimes you spend all day banging your head against the wall and just forget. The stand up gives you space and a reminder to tell other people you’re stuck.

Ego, experts having no time on their calendar etc. I found that daily scrum created better communication in our team, where there was none before.

Except this is completely anti thetical to the idea of stand ups which are supposed to be peer to peer as opposed to a more expert to non expert relationship.

What you’re really looking for is office hours.

If you’re self conscious about asking questions, how is it easier to do it in the moment with your entire team also listening in, as opposed to a direct IM, or email if you’re worried about disturbing the busy expert?

And how often do people have questions for experts? More often during the beginning of a project, then there’s a lull, then maybe some more questions as you find things you hadn’t thought of, then another lull, and then more questions towards the end where you are trying to close all the loose ends.

Daily standup requires you take up the expert’s valuable time in equal amounts during all those periods. And you have a bunch of people listening in who have no reason to be in that conversation. (A single 15 minute standup with a team of 8 is straight up 2 hours down the drain. And that does not include any of the context switching costs, or the cost of interrupting someone doing deep work).

Wouldn’t it be much bette to setup a 1 hour meeting on day 1 of the project with the expert (doesn’t stand up add a whole role, scrum master, whose only purpose is to direct people to the correct experts, basically? Well, use them if you don’t know who the expert is...prior to scrum we simply went to our team lead for situations like that). A 30 minute follow up at the end of the week.

Then another 30 minute follow up a week later and a 1 hour meeting a week later close to the end of the project.

That’s 3 hours worth of time from the expert in a span of 3 weeks, but the expert gets to hold forth for those entire 3 hours, without having to waste 12 out of 15 mins listening to useless crap. That’s a straight up 20% saving over the stand ups, gets you a full 3 hours from them, as opposed to 20% of the time, gets their attention in decent chunks of times, where you can have a real discussion, interrupts them 4 times over 15 working days as opposed to 15 times, and only includes those who are directly relevant to the discussion as opposed to everybody.

You're not asking 'the expert', you're asking everyone in the team.

'The expert' may turn out to be the junior you just hired.

It's also about flagging issues. Sometimes 'This is not working' is not synonymous with '...because I haven't figured out how to do it.'

It can also mean 'This is actually broken' and the team hasn't realised.

That's a great point. And here is a real example that happened recently at work. One of my teams needs to create the ability for their low-level code to be able to respond to HTTP requests for command and control. So they have all immediately started trying to figure out how to do this. Except I happen to know that another of my teams already did this exact same thing in another project, packaged it up and published it...and the source code is already sitting there on github waiting to be re-used. There is zero overlap between the two teams (two totally different departments) except for me, so in this case I (as a lowly engineering manager whose coding days are long behind me) am able to solve a problem and save time/wasted effort Now, if we didn't do dailies, of course this would come up at some point but we'd have lost a week of productivity or more.

> stand ups which are supposed to be peer to peer as opposed to a more expert to non expert relationship.

Right - I'm taking the assumption that everyone will have their own area of expertise, and "the expert" for a given issue might be any one of your peers.

> If you’re self conscious about asking questions, how is it easier to do it in the moment with your entire team also listening in, as opposed to a direct IM, or email if you’re worried about disturbing the busy expert?

Because there's a specific time at which you're expected to do it. It's very easy to keep putting off an IM/email, thinking you'll just spend a bit more time trying to figure it out yourself first. And the expert has already been disturbed, so there's no need to feel guilty about interrupting them.

> Wouldn’t it be much bette to setup a 1 hour meeting on day 1 of the project with the expert (doesn’t stand up add a whole role, scrum master, whose only purpose is to direct people to the correct experts, basically? Well, use them if you don’t know who the expert is...prior to scrum we simply went to our team lead for situations like that). A 30 minute follow up at the end of the week.

No, having experienced both approaches. You're so much more productive if you have direct, daily access to the expert. On day 1 you don't know what questions to ask; most of what a programmer spends their time doing is exploring the problem space. If you've got a daily iteration cycle where you ask a couple of questions, try things out, and then come back the next day with some follow ups based on what you've learnt, you get a whole lot more done.

> That’s 3 hours worth of time from the expert in a span of 3 weeks, but the expert gets to hold forth for those entire 3 hours, without having to waste 12 out of 15 mins listening to useless crap. That’s a straight up 20% saving over the stand ups, gets you a full 3 hours from them, as opposed to 20% of the time, gets their attention in decent chunks of times, where you can have a real discussion, interrupts them 4 times over 15 working days as opposed to 15 times, and only includes those who are directly relevant to the discussion as opposed to everybody.

It doesn't end up being "useless crap"; everyone is part of the same team delivering the same product, so it's important to have cross-pollination about what's everyone else is doing.

Of course if someone has particular expertise that warrants holding forth for an hour on the subject, it might be worth scheduling a time for them to do that. But there's definitely no substitute for having everyone available every day, at the same time as the rest of the team.

> It doesn't end up being "useless crap"; everyone is part of the same team delivering the same product, so it's important to have cross-pollination about what's everyone else is doing.

And in the same breath, it is a pipe dream to believe this can be achieved in 15-30 minutes every day. That's part of the controversy behind daily scrum: as a status update tool (which, yes I know, it "isn't supposed to be"), it is too long and there are better methods which can be automated. As a tool to actually share things, it is far too short. In both cases, it is incredibly disruptive and goes against most existing theories on flow and productivity. Planning an hour session later is a mitigation tool, though it is arguably an extremely poor one.

>But there's definitely no substitute for having everyone available every day, at the same time as the rest of the team.

And you know that based on an experiment which has been going on in an extremely informal manner for 20 years? Remote work was deemed "impossible" and "no substitute for real work", but many of us seem to do just fine. Let's not count our chickens before they hatch.

> goes against most existing theories on flow and productivity

There's no contradiction; the whole premise is that those are measuring the wrong thing, that the cost of misalignment and building useless things dominates those concerns. That matches my experience.

> Let's not count our chickens before they hatch.

Look, if you've got some magic way to make things work then great. But an hour at the start, thirty minutes each week, and an hour at the end, is absolutely no substitute for having someone in your daily standup; I've done both (or pretty close to it) and it's night and day.

I partially agree but have found it useful to just air my thoughts briefly as there is not always an obvious expert for every subject

"I am not sure about the best way to proceed..." Or "I think I am going to try X not Y..." Or "I got some weird error I don't understand so I am going to be trying to work that out today..."

Often someone will pipe up and say they've had some experience there or faced same issue before and let's talk after the standup or they have a fix in the pipeline for that so don't worry about it until next Tuesday etc etc.

I guess if your colleagues don't listen in meetings though you have a different problem.

I personally find that standups that focus on the outstanding tickets help me to focus on actually working on the tickets themselves :) rather than getting distracted onnbusy work or investigating some curious bug or refactoring something if I have to standup the next day and say "I did nothing on those tickets assigned to me".

But why would you wait to ask until the next day, at a fixed time?

You're looking at this from the long angle. Of course you shouldn't wait.

However, many people, without explicit prompting, will in fact never ask these types of questions at all. That is the value of the daily stand-up: it ensures that everyone is prompted to as these things AT LEAST once every day, rather than holding onto them for who knows how long.

I'd also note that, without dailys, it's rather rare to have the entire team together in the same room, especially now with Covid. Ideally you'd ask this type of thing on email or slack, but lots of people just don't bother unless you give them this explicit time for it.

Is there another way to achieve this objective without a daily standup?

Possibly yes, though I don't know of one which isn't more draconic (e.g. end of day reports) or manipulative (e.g. forcing the team to have coffee/lunch together every day). My point was that dailys are a real solution to a real problem, not that they are utterly indispensable and irreplaceable.

I don't see how a stand up helps. If a person doesn't have the good sense to ask on Slack/room 'Hey, does anyone know how to render a Bezier Curve in OpenGL' (or whatever) and needs to wait 24 hours to do it in a group setting, then it is a problem of communication with that person/team. Now because some people have this problem, the rest of the team has to be interrupted, do a little song and dance ritual and waste their time (and probably lose focus on what they were doing).

I'm sorry, I just can't see it. If people don't bother to do what they are paid to do, then have a chat with them/fire them in the worst case and let the people that act professional and grown ups work in peace.

Firing someone for not asking enough questions seems extreme.

The way I've seen this happen is that someone is assigned a task to render Bezier Curves in OpenGL, they work on it for a few days stumbling through, and 5 days later when they are done with the task that was assigned to them, they try to commit and find out that someone else had been given a task to remove all curves from the display and replace them with octogon segments or whatever.

With a daily scrum, they would say "I'm working on the Bezier Curves feature today" and someone else would be able to quickly tell them there's a problem with that.

In some teams, this kind of communication happens naturally all the time, but in others, people get focused on their own tasks and avoid it, either not paying attention to group chatter or simply not sending out wild questions. 15-30 minutes of lost focus for everyone everyday is really not that big a cost to pay to ensure this happens early. With any luck, a tight knit team would anyway spend that long on coffee together every day, so the daily just formalizes some informal process which already existed - no extra cost.

I didn't mean to suggest firing them if they don't ask questions per se. But lets imagine there is no daily scrum for whatever reason, people are working on their own things, if they don't ask for help and get stuck for 5 days in something without saying a word, I would have a chat with the person asap. If this continued, then yes, probably fire them as they aren't working.

And with the octagon example, there should be some kind of ticket for Bezier Curves and Octogons, if they cancel each other out, who in the hell created those tickets/decided on them? And again, you don't need a daily stand up to have an idea of who is working on what. The ticket board/tracker should give you a good idea if someone is doing Bezier Curves and you pick Octogons.

> 15-30 minutes of lost focus for everyone everyday is really not that big a cost to pay to ensure this happens early.

The problem it isn't 15-30 minutes. It is much more, because unless you are managing with strict work hours, and can make sure the stand up isn't delayed or interrupts someone's work, you are losing a lot more of the developers time. Context and focus is lost if you were in the middle of a task. Time is lost getting back to the place where you were, etc.

It may help with 'bad teams', but if the punishment for good teams is to do that because of the others, then I am sorry, I'm out. Makes no sense.

If it works for you and your team, more power to you. But not for me. (And I would really advise folks to try and understand if the team actually feels stand ups (or any other thing really) are a positive for the people involved, or they are just to 'scared' to raise concerns to not be that guy, as I have seen this happen a lot, going with the flow, but the moment they can speak freely, raise all concerns)

The entire idea of "standups" is one most people get wrong about scrum. There is no such concept as a standup in scrum, but rather, it's called the Daily Scrum: https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#daily-scrum

> The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work.

The Daily Scrum is not a status meeting, nor a place to ask the "3 questions", it's a planning meeting, plain and simple. You don't have to walk the board and not everyone needs to take a turn saying what they're up to. It's a communication tool that provides an opportunity to inspect and adapt. The structure of it is totally up to the team.

Seems overkill since plan is to execute the plan we discussed in the sprint. So, why do we need to remind everyone daily that we're just following the plan?

If I am blocked, I don't need the rest of the team. I will fire an email or document and tag people on Github that its blocked.

Also, why are emails not a thing anymore? Email is amazing. Apparently, its old fashioned now. Whatever is happening in tech companies, we need to stop and evaluate what the hell are we doing. It would be a great experiment (I think Gumroad is doing it? I don't remember) where there are no meetings, no slack, and only email, adhoc 1:1s.

I feel like we're not talking about the elephant in the room here and finding ways to justify stand ups or scrum or whatever.

> Seems overkill since plan is to execute the plan we discussed in the sprint. So, why do we need to remind everyone daily that we're just following the plan?

It's the question whether we can adjust "things" to be able to reach the sprint goal. It's the goal that counts, not the way imho.

> Also, why are emails not a thing anymore?

Emails have their Pro's & Con's - I prefer them, but not everyone is able to be precise and on-point in written language. Also, you need to be able to express your feelings in written language. That's one of the reasons I use emojis even in emails. The ascii-ones, but still...

> I feel like we're not talking about the elephant in the room here and finding ways to justify stand ups or scrum or whatever.

Well, I can see the elephant. But people have different opinions on this topic - something you need to accept.

> Emails have their Pro's & Con's - I prefer them, but not everyone is able to be precise and on-point in written language. Also, you need to be able to express your feelings in written language.

This is exactly the opposite of what professionals do. They should be able to write well. It is not optional, it is an expectation. Feelings should not be part of a technical discussion.

In a few years, we're gonna get emojis in an RFC. Just wait, you!

> Feelings should not be part of a technical discussion.

Looks like we need to agree to disagree here.

;)

Which implies that at least one of you is dishonest or irrational or too lazy to continue the debate. ;)

See: Are Disagreements Honest? by Tyler Cowen & Robin Hanson, 2002

Interesting paper. I guess the biggest problem here lies in the fact that there can only be so much truth seeking. So, with more time and effort, we could come to a conclusion that suits both. But... I don't have that time, to be honest. ;)

The “3 questions” are alluded to in the text you linked (emphasis mine):

>The Developers can select whatever structure and techniques they want, as long as their Daily Scrum focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day of work. This creates focus and improves self-management.

> Daily Scrums improve communications, identify impediments, promote quick decision-making, and consequently eliminate the need for other meetings.

While I agree with your point that the format is flexible, asking the questions is a good way to keep people on topic.

For sure, I agree that if your team finds the 3 questions helpful then definitely do it. I was just trying to remind people that they're not mandated. People like to scream about how annoying "standups" are how going around the room asking everyone the 3 questions is a waste of time and for many teams that is probably true, in which case, change the format to something that is useful.

I admit I often don’t pay attention during standup. But I definitely do save non-urgent questions for standup vs. interrupting team members (and myself) from whatever they are working on.

I've been in a team that didn't let people talk in turns, but instead quickly went through all the unfinished tickets and asked if they were still going well. That worked better.

That's where the retrospectives are good again, having that time every 2 or 3 weeks to ask questions like "Are we getting any value from the stand-ups?" Then could try not having stand-ups for a sprint, or indefinitely, and see if they're missed or not. Or try not having the project manager present at them for a sprint.

If a team has a good culture around knowledge sharing etc then quite possibly its not required, while for other teams that short time all together is better than nothing.

In what percent of real-world scrum situations do you think the team has control over their own processes?

The biggest value is not asking for help, it's about synchronizing work.

Hey guys, in order to complete this library upgrade task today i need to do a major refactoring in common.js, so if you all could avoid tasks in this area until tomorrow so we all can avoid nasty merge conflicts it would be great, thanks.

Or hey, looks like this this test case from nightly is failing? Did anyone change something here recently? Who will take a look at it?

If your standups don't sound like this and only becomes a place to report status and excuses for being stuck (asking for help) to your PO or scrum master, then you have a lot to work on. Unfortunately the later version is very common and often hard to get out of.

This is the truth.

Let’s say you have a stand up that is developer only and has only 5 developers. Well within the 2 pizza box limit and really how much smaller can a team get.

A standup where developers are sharing what they are working on and people are actually paying attention means that as a developer I have to pay attention to 4 different technical discussions in the span of 15 mins.

The context switching and mental energy required to do that is tremendous especially when you may already be in the midst of working on your own complicated and mentally taxing project.

And this is the best case scenario. Throw in larger teams, throw in non devs, etc and it only gets exponentially more complicated from there.

The whole idea behind daily stand ups is broken.

What you want, at most, is a 1-2 per week regular status update, at the end of the day, when you’re already mentally tired so the time wouldn’t be better spent elsewhere, and good enough team relation building that you can approach each other directly when you need something.

Agile/scrum tries to replace team building with status updates. When in reality, what one needs is team members to get familiar enough with each other so they know that Jack really gets the post lunch slowdown, so after lunch is probably the best time to approach him because he may not be actively working on anything, while Jill likes to sort out all her emails and communications first thing in the morning and then focus on her work in long uninterrupted stretches, so that’s when I should reach out to her for questions/discussions.

And you need to build the ability in your teammates to be able to think about the bigger picture, and decide whether the question they need answered by Jill right now while she is in the middle of her deep work is really urgent and important enough that it warrants breaking her flow or not, or if it can wait till the next day or if it’s short and simple enough, till you guys get lunch together today.

The Big Lie is that team building can be replaced by process. And the Big Lie is pushed (with the best intentions) because team building cannot be packaged and sold as a 3 day workshop (well, it is, but that comes across as inauthentic and doesn’t usually work well, and team retreats have lost the majority of their flavor because honestly I don’t want to get to know the vast majority of my colleagues outside of our work lives). What it comes down to is good leadership to build a strong team culture, and that’s harder to find and develop.

So instead of making the effort and learning to accept that you will have failures where the wrong person is made team leader, or they were made team leader too early and building feedback mechanisms to identify such mistakes and hopefully correct them ASAP, we resort tom3 day workshops that teach agile and that you can replace culture with regular stand up meetings.

> The Big Lie is that team building can be replaced by process.

This! They try to do it backwards: instead of building the team that will organically end up having standups over coffee in the morning, forcing the behaviour in the hopes that will build the team.

> have to pay attention to 4 different technical discussions

Seems like a mistake to have actual technical discussions in a stand-up. So yesterday I've worked on X feature, I've gotten pretty far but I'm being blocked because of a dependency on Y feature. I'd like to continue today, developer Z (who is working on Y feature) can we discuss this after the stand-up? Of course, I could've communicated this before - and maybe I've already done that, but the rest of the team doesn't know. What if they want to pick up a new story that has a dependency as well. Should all this communication just happen in emails or slack messages? That's fine I guess but it doesn't hurt to have 15 minutes to get a good view of what the rest of the team is doing.

Once you get into the nitty gritty you should honestly just say hey let's take a subset of this group and discuss it after. Works for us. Non-dev people shouldn't be there, or at least shouldn't get turns unless they're actually working on issues in the sprint.