My most successful standups have been like:
“Okay, we’re all here. Anyone wanna take a look at anything together?”
“I need some help with XYZ. Alice, can you take a look?”
“Sure.”
“Anything else? No? Alright, let’s do it.”
Typically less than 2 minutes of whole-team time, at our desks. Really just a reserved pivot point where it’s okay to interrupt each other’s tasks to ask for some pairing time. Sometimes an unofficial second one would happen after lunch.
I find daily stand ups are completely useless because most of the useful communication can just be done by the people involved directly over email, messaging, or just talking to each other. I find it’s useful to have a whole team meeting maybe like once a week just to see where everyone is at and how different parts of the project are going. There’s very little reason to do that every single day.
Standups are ok if they stay fast and they are at the start or end of a day. The forced sync points are also more important in remote settings. This is especially true for new or junior employees.
I don’t find whole team standups have much value aside from being checkpoints. In my experience, it’s best to split up projects into tasks that can be worked on in isolation. People directly working on those tasks can organically figure out how they want to get them done and communicate with each other. The sync points can then be used to check the overall state of the project and to track critical path tasks across teams to make sure nobody is blocked.
That really only works with a mature and experienced team, which is great when you have one.
This stuff is purely for my manager and I’ve recently noticed he’s basically not paying attention. Losing so much time for a ritual lol.
it’s basically this
I’ve lost my shit with people over this lol. Just sucks when you are like 3 hours in on something and then someone just comes along and makes small talk.
I was fired from my last job because I was expected to write features AND do helpdesk support at the same time and just no… I was also fired because I suck at programming but still…
I live at home and my little siblings with ADHD* knock on the door to tell me stuff all the time ughhh
*I have ADHD too which is why it’s extra tragic when I lose my train of thought.
haha yeah writing code while dealing with distractions is effectively impossible
I have meetings from at least 9-12 every day, which are the hours I’m the most focused. So rough
The only scrum i am willing to partake in
About a year ago, I was working with an east coast customer while working remote on the west coast. Scrum was at 7am my time, with the customer on the call.
Probably should have been a stressful situation as they were a tough customer, our largest account in terms of ARR and PS dollars, and they loved to tell us which Data Enginners or PMs they didn’t like, who would promptly get reassigned. But honestly, having that call so early was the least stressful thing ever.
I would roll out of bed at 6:30a and make a cup of coffee, just to get my computer tuned on and ready to join the meeting by about 6:57.
Worked out great, cuz I never spent time thinking about scrum beforehand, and frankly always felt a bit energized afterwards cuz it was now time to start my work day.
Ended up working out well I guess, cuz the customer kept me on the team the entire length of the engagement.
I would react the same way if my scrum meeting was 1 hour long!
I remember working in the office and the customer visited and took part in our task estimation meeting. We’ve spent about 3 hours in one block estimating their tasks because they had so much input.
Why is your scrum 1 hour long?
Because that’s how it often goes. I find there are two types of scrums in practice. First is when it goes fast, and everybody just says they’re working. There’s no time to give any detail or context so the status update is largely meaningless. Second is when people start giving details about what they’re working on, and that quickly explodes to an hour long meeting.
because no one follows the damn guide and “scrum” is done so managers can claim the company can work “agile”, because customers dont want “not agile”, customers also dont want to participate in the way it would be necessary for a project thats supposed to follow the scrum guide. that also sounded good for people looking for a new job so hr wants to put that into job descriptions and now everything is scrum and agile and i still have to sneak in refactorings or have to fight to get time to work on our fricking ci pipeline or need to conspire with QA to get them time to work on test automation, because screw the notion that decisions should be done by the people doing the work.
screw “scrum”, and the word “agile” should never have been taught to anyone claiming to be a “manager”, we don’t need managers we need people helping us getting the tools we need and trust that what we do, we do to deliver better solutions and helping us to fascilate constructive exchanges with customers.
Me when I have a 30 min meeting in the middle of the day where I am the organizer and need to lead the discussion.
How did you get my work schedule
