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A comment on The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern. Parent comment

Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by nickbauman on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @01:42AM (#9338961)
The part about the stand up that's "what did you do yesterday? what will you do today?" is the part that is the anti-pattern. In a well functioning team, the only thing that needs to be communicated is "Heads up: you need to know this now..." That's the part of the stand up that really matters.

Many of my best stand ups go like

Mary: "Nothing to report."

Jon: "Nothing to report."

Dyneshwari: "Nothing to report."

Shruthi: "Nothing to report."

Su: "Nothing to report."

Grant: "Oh, we moved all the test databases. You need to get the latest base data in your environment or you won't be able to work."

Joe: "Nothing to report."

It's over in 1 minute.

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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by nostrademons on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @01:54AM (#9338991)
Agree that that's the ideal situation, but I've found that stand-ups can be invaluable in detecting and avoiding wasted effort that's about to happen because not everyone on the team has all the context needed to avoid it. For example:

Mary: I fixed the missing-messages bug, and I'm about to refactor the protocol to support faster logins.

Jon: We should talk afterwards, I'm also touching the protocol to edit the login screen.

Dyneshwari: I did an unrelated UI change that doesn't interfere with anyone.

Shruthi: I just started laying the groundwork for ads in the stream.

Manager: We should talk afterwards, legal has a bunch of new requirements on the format of ads.

Su: Nothing to report.

Grant: Oh, we moved all the test databases. You need to get the latest base data in your environment or you won't be able to work.

Joe: Jon, loop me in when you talk to Mary, I just had to change the protocol for UI widget X and I've got some tips for working with it.

Not quite 1 minute, but it could save several hours of work when Mary, Jon, and Joe coordinate and make sure they aren't stomping on each others' toes, and their little mini-meeting probably won't take more than 20 minutes.

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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by tragic on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @03:20AM (#9339180)
Plus: as soon as you have some people on-site and others remote, simple things like updating the board are done at best inconsistently. Having a standup with your remote devs on hangouts/whatever can save you a whole day's duplicated work.
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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by moe on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @08:48AM (#9340353)
simple things like updating the board are done at best inconsistently

And here you have your real problem.

You're applying an office-tool (the board) to a team that is not sharing an office.

What works much better for distributed teams is to treat them like OSS projects.

Do you know any OSS project that uses a "board", or stand up meetings?

They use the issue-tracker, pull-requests and chat instead.

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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by br3w5 on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @06:23AM (#9339749)
We've switched our standup format to only talk about the tickets on the board and the daily actions needed to move them to the next stage in the process. This avoids pointless status updates and keeps everyone focused on getting the priorities done.
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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by kwhitefoot on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @06:02AM (#9339687)
It also keeps the team together as a team. The team I work on is in three geographically separated locations. Without the standup we would tend to become three separate teams.

I feel that the article is attacking a strawman, or perhaps it is a no true Scotsman where the objections are all or mostly about standups that aren't working rather than about the idea of a short "Let's just make sure we are all on the same page" session.

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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by a3n on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @05:06AM (#9339491)
What happens to Fred, who had an appointment and wasn't at the standup? I suppose in this example he'd notice that he isn't able to work, and ask around, but ...
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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by lmm on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @07:47AM (#9340073)
It's imperfect, but IME a standup is more reliable and usable than any alternative I've seen tried. Emails get lost in the noise (that people get too much email at companies is its own problem). A Slack highlight can be more of an interruption, and non-technical people find it hard to use / won't always be responsive there.
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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by a3n on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @09:43AM (#9340694)
why not an internal blog or wiki? Or a compromise, someone transcribes essentials from the standup to the blog or wiki.
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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by lmm on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @09:47AM (#9340709)
Internal wiki hits the same problem as email (although partly because companies always seem to choose terrible wiki implementations (confluence)). Too much information goes on there, terribly organized, and no-one ends up being able to find anything. Mostly these kind of things are immediate announcements that need to be acted on once and never again, so a semi-permanent store isn't appropriate; also the whole point was that everyone needs to be notified, but people can't watch every wiki change.

Blog I haven't seen tried, but I imagine it would hit the same problems; either you notify everyone and have the same problems as slack, or you don't and have a big risk of someone missing an update.

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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by analog31 on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @08:31AM (#9340282)
I figured out a work-around. Before I go to my appointment (or vacation day, etc.), I go to the meeting board and put a big green check mark next to all of my completed tasks.

This has an amusing side effect: For some reason, even if I attend the stand-up after all, nobody debates my completed tasks with the big green check marks. So I now do this before every stand-up.

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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by usrusr on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @11:11AM (#9341239)
Sounds surprisingly similar to some of the worst meetings. "Nothing to report" is just as meaningful as the assumptions about the knowledge of everybody else it builds on are not entirely wrong.

I guess we are drilling down to the similarly fundamental yet pointless truth about communication: it's easy when it is working well.

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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by cpncrunch on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @11:29AM (#9341378)
Surely if there are any "heads up"s they should be emailed to the team as soon as they happen. What's the point in waiting until the next morning to tell everyone that the test databases have moved?
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Re:The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern by ThrustVectoring on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @02:07AM (#9339026)
"Nothing to report" is both longer and more boring than saying "quack" and having it received as "I have nothing to report."
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