An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings

http://weblog.alexgodin.com/kill-your-standup

by alexgodin • 13 years ago

49 49 13 years ago

weblog.alexgodin.com

rmaccloy• 13 years ago

Everything old is new again. Email status is a check-in method as old as, well, email.

This works great if you have a reasonable number of people working largely on independent areas, or if your pace is slow enough to drive consensus through email.

If you need to reach team consensus regularly and quickly, e.g. on architectural or design decisions, synchronous standups are still better, even virtual ones over IRC or FaceTime or whatever. (If you hear people saying "wait, why/when did we do that?" a lot, you may be in this situation even if you'd rather not be.)

I'm not a standup (or capital-a Agile, bleh) zealot by any means, but if you've got more than two people working closely on an area, and you're going quickly, regular and delineated synchronous communication still beats email threads for efficiency.

mildavw• 13 years ago

Agreed. It depends a lot on the team and the project. Our team of six devs had stand-ups every 90 minutes all day every day for 9 months when were all touching the same app. It was appropriate and we got a lot done. When the nature of our work changed, we switched back to a daily stand-up.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

I dunno... I feel like if I'm totally honest, there's a good chance I would wind up just ignoring 90% of those e-mails, or at least not reading them carefully enough.

For me, I feel like the benefit of a stand-up is exactly that it forces everyone to pay attention and meet for 5 min, not just so that everything important gets communicated, but that everyone knows everyone else heard it. And people can ask important questions and know everyone else heard the concern and answer as well.

donmcc3• 13 years ago

For me, the point of a standup meeting is to spark conversations; the status information everyone reports is really secondary and a convenient excuse to get everyone face-to-face and talking. And this type of interaction happens much more easily when everyone is in the same location at the same time.

philwelch3• 13 years ago

Yes, and those are exactly the rambling 30 minute standups everyone hates.

derefr2• 13 years ago

> but that everyone knows everyone else heard it.

How about simply having a company policy that everyone should MVCC their decisions based on received email "transactions"? I.e., if someone sends out an email, then everyone else MUST (in the RFC sense of MUST) read it and digest it before making any new decisions. It still operates asynchronously--you can finish whatever you were head-down working on before checking your email--but you have to check it before you move on to whatever comes after that.

Or, in more cynical terms: fire everyone who ignores these emails until the problem corrects itself.

reinhardt3• 13 years ago

The problem to correct itself is all this bullshit TPS reporting hidden behind fancy new buzzwords and "methodologies".

My rule is: if something affects my work, put it in my TODO list. If I am a Devops engineer, reading emails or standing up in a circle (jerk) pretending to listen carefully and understand what designer X, mobile developer Y and product manager Z did the day before or plan to do today is a waste of my time and theirs.

anthonyb5• 13 years ago

Now you have 50 status emails and 100 responses to those emails (and 50 responses to those responses...) that you MUST!!1! read and digest each day.

Plus other people have already made (bad) decisions and started working on stuff that (negatively) affects you because you were busy "head-down working".

These are the problems that stand ups are supposed to help fix.

chris_mahan7• 13 years ago

When I notice that people have a habit of ignoring my emails, I instant-message them after I send the email. If that doesn't work, I call them. If that doesn't work I walk over to their desk. If they're not at their desk, or in another building, I email their boss and ask whether the person is taking a day off.

Believe it or not, people stopped ignoring my emails.

skrebbel• 13 years ago

Surprise! You're in 615 Dilbert comics!

benihana• 13 years ago

I'm really glad I don't work with you.

reinhardt3• 13 years ago

Good lord I hope this is sarcasm.

donmcc3• 13 years ago

Why don't you just talk to them face-to-face in the first place?

chris_mahan7• 13 years ago

I give people ample time to respond to email. Sometimes several days. This escalation only happens to people who ignore emails.

If you're going to ignore emails at work, be prepared for the consequences.

If you don't want me to email you, tell me where else to go for the info. If you want to hoard knowledge, and you don't want to answer emails, you're gonna get the escalation.

bguthrie• 13 years ago

For a long time, Agilists recommended that teams colocate as an antidote to the kinds of tepid collaborations that happen at large software teams in large companies. But collaboration tech has gotten better, and modern, nimble teams should be "built to explode" - you should be able to work together in the office, or at Starbucks, or anywhere on Earth, if you have to. Start with distribution as a goal and few physical issues will disrupt you.

This sounds great as long as you keep the spirit of the standup alive - a standup is for the whole team, not management, and should be a quick read.

rufeeooo• 13 years ago

sounds great if your team doesn't really work together

lucisferre2• 13 years ago

> Stand-ups are great but they have some major flaws: they're synchronous, everyone needs to be in the room (or on the phone), and often after the meeting much of the content is lost

That pretty much nails it. I'll admit though I hate standups. Any value it has as a concept is completely lost in its practice.

chris_mahan7• 13 years ago

We do standups several times per day, one on one with the people we need to talk to. It's called conversation.

lucisferre2• 13 years ago

Heh, no kidding.

Edit: Looks like this "conversation" idea may have jumped the shark too. Management consultants are already trying to horn in on this technique (http://www.amazon.ca/The-Art-Conversation-Neglected-Pleasure...). Pretty soon we'll need "conversation masters" and some sort of certification process.

snorkel• 13 years ago

No, no, and no. A 15-minute standing meeting is much more efficient. Mandating daily email check-ins means developer time would be wasted writing these emails, and everyone's time is then wasted reading these emails and then participating in the ensuing off-topic discussion threads spawned from each email.

A scrum-master's job is remove impediments, and thereby allowing developers to concentrate on development. Mandating that developers generate and then participate in a lot of email noise is counterproductive.

philwelch3• 13 years ago

I can read faster than you can speak. I can probably even write faster than I can speak. And most importantly, I can defer both activities to a time when I'm not focusing on something. It's standups that are the impediment.

lenjaffe• 13 years ago

when the daily, morning status meeting started being referred toas 'the stand-up', concepts got blurred.

a meeting is held as a stand-up in order to encourage brevity.

so the poster is looking for alternatives to morning status meetings, not stand-up meetings.

stand-up meetings are just fine. thankyouverymuch

flurdy• 13 years ago

Agree. Stand ups are about syncing up, focus and helping each other, not status reporting to line management. I ranted about it this a few days ago: http://blog.flurdy.com/2013/04/i-dont-care-what-you-did-yest...

chris_mahan7• 13 years ago

Email is absolutely fine. Just learn to write succinctly.

onemorepassword• 13 years ago

Now on the one hand, we do mail-ins as well whenever someone can't make it to the stand-up, especially since any team member can work from home whenever they like. Plus our starting time is loosely defined as "let's all try to be there around 10-ish", so some people are already in the flow since 8:30 by the time the last team member shows up.

However, every time someone proclaims to have found a better alternative for the stand-up, I always go looking for the "you-were-doing-it-wrong" red flag. One thing stand out:

"No need to take notes in a stand-up or bother someone with questions [...]"

Notes? Bothering someone with questions? These are hints that there was a dysfunctional stand-up in place to begin with, in which case it's hard to judge how well the alternative works.

In my experience, mailing in works fine as a workaround for situations where having a physical standup is impossible or disruptive, but certainly no equal alternative to spending a few minutes actually sharing information face to face with all the non-verbal high bandwidth communication that goes with it. One look, one gesture can say more than an entire email.

philwelch3• 13 years ago

"One look, one gesture"? This is engineering, not a fucking love story. Ordinary English should be sufficient to communicate status information.

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

Everyone sending email status updates to everyone else daily is an alternative to stand-up meetings?

I mean, I guess it is.... it's in particular, an alternative that was very common before stand-ups were invented and became popular, which was judged ineffective and inefficient by those who invented stand up meetings. But, sure.

In other news, planning everything out in advance is an alternative to agile development.

gefh• 13 years ago

"Google does weekly emails" Practices at Google vary widely between teams. Nothing as trivial as this is going to standardized across the company...

d0m• 13 years ago

Tired of these self promoting articles.

"An alternative to stand-up meetings" -> We use our product. Oh, shameless plug, try it.

What's even more frustrating is how they game the upvote to reach front-page. So, not only it's a disguised article, but it also hide more interesting ones.

</end-of-grumpy-rant>

mikec3k• 13 years ago

This might be a good alternative for someplace like my company where team members are in different time zones. When I'm getting to work around 9 in SF, it's already evening for the team members in Bulgaria.

DanielBMarkham• 13 years ago

I think people make a mistake when they assume that the stand-up is about an exchange of data. It's not. It's a social construct. Technology development, especially in a team, is a social activity. We need to create social rituals for it to work at maximum efficiency.

The "bugs" he sees in the process, "synchronous, everyone needs to be in the room (or on the phone), and often after the meeting much of the content is lost" -- those are features.

People need to synchronize for social purposes. They need body language to help debug subtle performance issues. They need to have problems shoved in their face to either act on or forget.

That's all great stuff.

johnrob• 13 years ago

There is evidence that stand-up meetings are indeed a social construct: the meetings are functionally useless and the content is redundant (or at least should be redundant - nobody waits until the next morning to address a blocking issue). The only plausible justification must be social.

Macsenour• 13 years ago

I say it over and over: This is not a status meeting, this is a communication meeting. What isn't a blocker for you, might be a blocker for someone else.

reinhardt3• 13 years ago

Thanks for putting into words and explaining so eloquently why stand-ups are the most unpleasant 5-10 minutes of my working day.

anthonyb5• 13 years ago

Thanks for not adding anything meaningful to the conversation.

anthonyb5• 13 years ago

The other thing that a lot of people forget is that a stand up is supposed to be informal.

If you're leaving a paper trail that management can go back through (even in theory), then it will get sanitised, and people will try and make themselves look good. The further you get from reality, the more value your "stand ups" will lose.

There's a good reason for the "pigs and chickens" analogy.

mixmastamyk2• 13 years ago

Tried this with a wiki page once, it worked pretty well.

Once thing I noticed that I have a lot of information at the end of the day, and not the beginning. First thing in the morning I barely know my name, about the worst time to ask me anything. So I've always found the morning fascination a bit odd.

mmattax• 13 years ago

Great post, we (Formstack) built DailyStatus (http://dailystat.us) to ease our standup meeting pain. We're a remote company so dealing with timezones and internet connections for video was always a pain.

therandomguy• 13 years ago

I'm surprised no one mentioned https://idonethis.com/ Is that not as popular as I thought it was?

BoyWizard• 13 years ago

I feel the thing that many people are missing is that 10 minutes 'stand-up' meetings every morning are important because they encourage 'accidental communication'. You might be debugging something that just broke, and remember, 'Oh John said this morning that his main priority today was to add some code to XYZ, which affects this, so I'll just check with him'.

Contrary to popular opinion on HN, regular communication is important for most (if not all) business activities.

An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings

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