We are all familiar with the Stand-Up meeting, where everyone meets on a pre-determined cadence (every day, 3 times a week, etc...) to answer the 3...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
In my team we sometimes do the classic stand up meeting and sometimes we do the meeting using Slack. What I observed is that, when we do it face to face, there is a significant increase in tangent discussions but also it's easier for us to spot problems and give tips into each other's tasks. So, I'm not really sure if doing this kind of meeting thru text is better or not
Maybe a hybrid approach. Face to face once a week, while the rest of the time through text?
Yeah, I think that's the ideal
100% agree on writing down all the things we shared during Daily Stand-ups.
I've been in so many meetings just trying to remember what we said yesterday or last week and sometimes there are topics that are not directly impacting the work of most of the team; as you said, it might be just human nature.
But wasting other people's time is a sin.
Good and to the point post!
Regards,
As a Scrum Master, I’ve been in a few daily scrums (which, by the way, don’t need to be standups). I tend to bring the time down even further, to maybe 5 minutes, so that it doesn’t feel like waste. An independent facilitator surely helps.
We have tried both, I'm not sure which I prefer. I certainly feel more productive with async standup.
We generally don't type out our dailies in Slack, unless teammates arrive at the office later than face-to-face daily meeting time. When someone misses the daily for whatever reason, we do not schedule for later time to avoid messing with everyone's personal schedules. In this case, the person that missed the daily shares it in Slack for everyone. We adopted this model as we are working for an external client with which we share a Slack for written communication and conference calls. The only downside of this approach is that whoever misses the daily does not get to hear other people's daily. However, it turns out quite alright because all developers are in the same office.
The above was a comment towards point 2. Other comments pretty much summed up what you should do to solve your issues.
I don't understand how you solve this statement: "The only downside of this approach is that whoever misses the daily does not get to hear other people's daily. However, it turns out quite alright because all developers are in the same office." Does the individual just go around asking everyone their daily updates? If that's the case, why do they have to share it on Slack since they are going around talking to each person individually. Also, do you realize how much time is wasted trying to find each teammate?
We're a small team of 6 developers sharing the same office space and we're sitting right next to each other, so finding teammates is not a problem at all. Those who miss the daily meeting share their updates by writing in Slack, most importantly, for our client to be up-to-date on our progress.
Not really. Besides daily absences not being that frequent, we, the devs, generally don't do have to do that because, except for task-specific details, are aware and contextualized with what everyone is doing. Devs missing a daily once in a while never proved to be problematic. However, our client has to be up to speed at all times.
Being physically close to each other enables us to reach out for one another without hassle whenever we have to sync or sort out any issue. As an example, ocasionally, I am tasked with work that has a relationship or dependency on someone's else work. Even if one of us misses the daily, we speak one-on-one throughout the day to check up on each other's work.
Of course, whatever works for us may not work for you or someone else's team.
Our team has had similar thoughts about the typical stand-up recently as well. For us, the problems were related to people but also the format.
We did the Slack-bot stand-up 2 days a week, but those seemed even more ineffective because not everyone filled it out or read the other statuses.
We ended up moving to a format with a documented agenda that roughly stays the same from sprint to sprint. Each "stand-up" (it became more of a sit-down) we review the purpose of the meeting, pull up the sprint board, and document any actions that come out of it. It became a bit more structured and I think we get a lot more out of it. This does require someone putting together the agenda and starting the meeting by reviewing it. Those that like to chat or stroll in late to the meeting may not like this format. We are working on ways to make this a little less rigid.
I'm not sure why this is the go-to format in most information out there on agile, it relies on all people being onboard and working to get the most out of the stand-up. I think that type of scenario is hard to come by. I would say adjusting to meet your team's needs is the way to go.
Thank you for the insight into your team. This just shows that there is no one solution. The traditional Stand-Up is just one form of tool which perhaps was abused or used a little too religiously. I am happy to hear that you found a format that worked for you team, and perhaps everyone should start evaluating how best to make information flow efficiently in their own team.
Very common problem
Scrum is Agile, and Agile is "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". And "we don't need software to solve human problems".
I agree with Martin, Scrum master should work to avoid one-to-one discuss, overtime, useless subjects...
The Yesterday and Today work can be find with Kanban or ticket system, the most important part of Standup is "I need this ressource today", "I need to restart this server" or "I need some help"(dual programming) because exceptions and error should be asked on chat. Face-to-face, eyes away from screen, stand-up position is good for empathy (and health).
The 3 question format seems less than optimal to me. We should know what was done and what is going to be done based on whatever tool/board/etc is being used to manage the work.
For me the real question for the standup is - what is our plan of action for the team for today. This is a team discussion based on the work to be done and involves the "what are the roadblocks" type of questions.
We have tried Slack. Didn't work well for us.
Can you share more about what didn't work?
I actually proposed something similar to my team. We now post our statuses on a slack channel, we’ve been trying a bot which automatically asks people for the status and blockers and forwards answers to the channel. We still do the daily meetings but now it’s mostly focused on discussion that actually needs to happen. We’re a distributed team though so the meeting is via conference call and is time capped. I think that fusion ultimately solves all/most issues mentioned. It is ultimately I think a team norms problem though, regardless of how you do it
I've done that before. It's the only option on snow days. Definitely better for keeping things focused, and easier to spin out side discussion (especially when it requires a URL), but I still prefer the face-to-face because there's things you don't pick up otherwise. The way someone says "I'm almost finished" that makes you think there's a month of work left, for example.
Stand up once a day, but feel free to ask those 3 questions in chat whenever there's a natural cadence - first thing after login, just before lunch, and at the end of the day. It helps hold you accountable for your own plans.
Don't underestimate the positive effects on team cohesion and individual morale gained from random incidental chatter. It doesn't have to happen anywhere in particular, but if you accidentally kill it entirely then you've lost an incredibly valuable resource.