Ask Slashdot: Are Daily Stand-Up Meetings More Productive? 445
__roo writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that an increasing number of companies are replacing traditional meetings with daily stand-ups. The article points out that stand-up meetings date back to at least World War I, and that in some place, late employees 'sometimes must sing a song like "I'm a Little Teapot," do a lap around the office building or pay a small fine.' Do Slashdot readers feel that stand-up meetings are useful? Do they make a difference? Are they a gimmick?"
sure they're helpful (Score:5, Insightful)
You go outside with your boss and have a smoke and tell him what's really going on..
Re:Curious (Score:5, Insightful)
In the civilian world, if you have meetings every day, it's because your boss or some other important idiot is a bottleneck in the process and they need daily reinforcement of common sense, at the expense of department productivity.
Alternatively, it's a great way for a manager to enforce office hours on their should-be-flexible-schedule programmers if they set it early in the morning, but then that just bottles down again to "a manager who insists on micromanaging everything, and being a bottleneck".
I'm sorry, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm late to a meeting, for whatever reason, and you are asking me to do what now? No. I don't think so.
But by all means, try it. Not only will it undermine your authority ( which can't be all that strong to begin with, if you have to rely on silly shit like this ), but it will create some seriously awkward moments ( which I have trained myself to be immune from, for just such a situation ).
Their great if done right. (Score:5, Insightful)
We run an end of the day 5 minute run down meeting. It is a great way for managers to catch patterns, problems, and just generally keep a finger on the pulse of how things are running. The key is the 5 minute time limit.
It makes it easy to pass information up and down the chain and maintain the focus.
-Lifyre
wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Standups can be extremely useful. (Score:5, Insightful)
When used properly.
If they are kept short, if folks give status, indicate plans and lay out blockers, without drilling down during the meeting (you can always schedule another meeting after standup, but standup is not the time for deep discussions).
In general, when used correctly, agile is just the fitting of good work habits and practices to the reality. No matter what the approach, an individual should have reachable short term daily goals, weekly goals, sprint level goals, etc. Forming the process around good work habits can indeed massively increase productivity.
With that said, no management/team approach will in and of itself fix a broken team.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me that if folks have to use public shame as a whip, the team has more problems than simple standups will fix.
On the other hand, the pride of being able to come in every day and announce the accomplishments is a positive motivator.
Only works with respect (Score:5, Insightful)
When I first brought daily 10-minute meetings to my programming team, they were skeptical. They hated meetings because they had been long and unproductive. But recently, after three years, I gave the team the option to reduce the number of meetings to, say, twice a week. Unanimously, they wanted to continue the daily meetings. Each of them said they got a lot out of them. They felt they knew what was going on, and many problems were caught before they grew.
The thing is, I respect my team members. I treat them like they are the professionals they are. In return, they give me everything they've got.
Daily meetings done right can be highly valuable. Done wrong, they can be torture.
I'd rather not stand (Score:5, Insightful)
I might be lucky and through many stops have it always work for me. But overall a process development is simple. Get me good requirements. Do a good design. Develop with good practices and patterns. Test it. Deploy. More than that is a solution looking for a problem IMO.
I've had several developers come in early and stay late and not do as much work as someone that always sneaks out a little early. What's the big deal unless their pay levels are off? The stand up's just seem childish and are a fad. I hope!
Re:of course! (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, except at my company I noticed a curious trend. Meeting invited employees have developed a spontaneous order of arriving to meetings in inverse order of seniority. The highest seniority employees often don't even arrive at work till a half to full hour after they declared the meeting to start.
Re:Curious (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, what does this have to do with anything?
I've read and reread it several times and it makes absolutely no sense. How are being a scrum master and knowing Dijkstra's algorithm connected in any way?
Not too often (Score:5, Insightful)
When people stick to the idea, previous days targets, any issues, todays targets, and move on. It fine, but when others start whining or manager wantabee start say "don't be so negative..." it turns to be a pain.
At another place I worked we had morning meeting (sit down) with all who were at work. Meeting was set a one hour max. Manger made any annoucements and floor open to issues and questions, very informal. Those ended up being good meetings very informative and some morning only 15 minutes long.
No magic bullet (Score:1, Insightful)
OTOH, mandating a daily standup w/o also implementing an Agile framework is a waste of time...All you get is people standing in a circle wondering why they're their and what they should be doing.
P.S. I count at least 25 people in the photo from the WSJ article. Agile teams are 7 +/- 2 people. No way their meeting is gonna take only 15 minutes!
Re:No meetings are even better (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd rather not stand (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Curious (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a better way to go would be to stop inviting everyone from the top down to meetings that could be better served via email, or even IM. I find a don't pay attention to meetings that have little to no affect on my daily work yet they continue to invite me regardless, 'just in case' or because it's a major announcement for some VP who is changing departments, or some tweak to benefits, etc. I also get invited to technical meetings for various topics on projects I am only peripherally working on yet I'm on the invite list for every meeting regardless. They would be better served inviting key folks and let the disperse the info as needed rather than inviting people who's time is better spent getting work done.
As to the 'gimmick', yes it might wake people up, but it will also make them irritable, rebellious, and take them out of the proper productive frame of mind that often generates good ideas.
Re:Curious (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I did a computer engineering degree and I don't know Dijkstra's algorithm inside out. Of course, we spent our time actually learning and solving problems, not memorizing algorithms.
They are a gimmick (Score:4, Insightful)
I have done standups both as a teamlead and as a developer and in both cases they suck. I like to think of myself as a pretty good teamlead but I work by adjusting my monitoring to the skills of the individual develop and their current task. Some people work great if you just let them be and others need to be "unstuck" if they are working on something complex or be kept on track as they tend to wander off. One size of leadership definitely does not suit all.
So, as a team lead I KNOW already what the fuck everyone else is doing and during standups, especially in this companies that like to share and get everyone from cross-projects to come join the circle I find myself listening to stuff I already know or don't give a rats ass about.
As a developer, this is even worse, I know what I did, I know what I am going to do, I know what my issues are... why do I need to know this for a dozen or more other people as well? And if I get an issue, I deal with it then and there not wait for a standup where I can only speak for a short time and not have any papers or screenshots handy. Do people ever get an issue resolved from a standup they didn't already address before it? Then get you to a class on communication ASAP.
But what if you got some problem that someone else might know a solution too... THIS NEVER HAPPENS. In some dweebs fantasy land this daily standups should result in brainstorms where one guys problem is solved by someone else by magic... the rules of the standup (short) prohibit anyone detailing a problem they are having and inviting others to think about a better way to solve it... and basic nature of the adult male does the rest. Have you EVER said during a meeting or standup "gosh, I have this project and it asks me to do X and I wondered if any of you could think with me on this"? Yes, you did? Then hand over you man card right now, you balls will be collected later.
Standups only have room for blocks, not requests for brainstorms. Brainstorms should be done while comfortable and with plenty of data available and a place to write things down (another fucking idiotic thing about standing up, how are you supposed to make good readable notes, oh wait most never bother with that, so everything is forgotten and you got to mention it again after the standup).
Management often feels the need to be kept informed the problem is that they want all the information without all the information. Either a meeting only contains abstract monkey babble that confuses developers, or it becomes techno babble that confuses anyone who ever had a date. Often "when will it be finished" really means "I want it finished yesterday and don't bother me about the laws of causality".
Ideally, a good team lead can solve all this. In Dutch the term is "meewerkend voorman" basically the person on a shopfloor who both works and manages it. It is most common in blue collar type jobs but that is just because white collar jobs tend to require anyone doing management to loose any other usable set of skills.
He doesn't have to be the best coder, and with this I mean that he can code fairly well but he is not a die hard code monkey like a John Carmack from Id, but he knows the job and has done it himself. He does know about management but is not a manager rather he is a coder who then became a developer (a coder writes code, a developer creates an application) and has then learned how to do the development part of coding for other people. The talking to management, the assignment of priorities, the overview of the entire project, the dangers of regression, why security is an issue, etc etc. He then sits as a barrier and a filter between management (the customer) and his team.
Think of it as building a brick house. A foreman doesn't need to be the best brick layer ever and a brick layer he is managing might well be far better then him but if he can lay a good wall himself then he is all the better at supervising this. Because he knows about the job at hand, he can alter the amount of supervising depending
Re:Curious (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realise that scrum teams are cross-functional, right? As in, your backend developers, UI developers, DBAs and testers are all part of the Scrum team, and any one of them can be the ScrumMaster? And the entire role of the ScrumMaster is to facilitate the team with the Scrum/Agile process, and to help clear any road blocks in place?
That, and the fact that your snobbish arbitrary litmus test is complete bullshit, and would only ever be performed by a basement coder desperate to prove his worth with meaningless, idiotic technical buzzwords. It's the kind of test a startup company asks in a job interview, in order to really ensure that no developer worth his salt would want to work there.
So basically, you suck at communicating (Score:2, Insightful)
If people need daily standups to know what is going on, then your communication sucks. But hey, you first forced them to do this then when they realized that the person doing their performance review thinks that these wastes of their time are a good idea, they don't say "yes sir, your ideas suck and you are a moron sir!" but agree with your forced policy.
Good anecdote.
Really, if you need standups to get problems solved... you got far far bigger issues. One reason I often hear for bringing up blockers during a standup is that it is faster to get a reply that way... THINK (if your feeble mind can) about that... isn't that a RED FLAG that the communication in your company is messed up because if you do NOT expose a problem in front of everyone, it doesn't get solved?
I have seen this happen, the only way to get things done was to air them in front off everyone so the slacker had no option not to do it... that is great. That is like saying "going over someone's head" is a good policy to get things done as well. Have experienced this too, the only way to get a sysadmin to do anything is to go straight to the boss and get him to lean on him... is that going to be part of your management style too?
FIX you goddamn internal communication so that problems can be reported WHEN they occur and not hours if not a day later and are dealt with ASAP not hours or a day later.
Daily standups are a fix for bad management, fix management and you don't need them anymore.
Re:Curious (Score:4, Insightful)
Nonsense. If you were spending a lot of time on an algorithm that can be learned in 10 minutes on wikipedia then your education was progressing at an interminably slow rate.
Re:I'm sorry, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are late. Have a good reason? No? FIRED!
You are talking like good engineers are growing on trees. In reality they are very hard to find, and they *will* quit on the spot if you pull a stunt like that.
Besides, what is a good reason? A car broken down? A traffic jam? A child who was sick all night? A family problem? A developer who read an important technical book all night and overslept in the morning? A cell phone with a bad battery? Who is there to decide?
Performance of employees is a multi-edged graph, of course. One employee may be rude; another is always late; another's code is not even refactorable, let alone compilable. There could be all kinds of problems. Manager's job is quite messy. He has to deal with "human factor" more than he deals with hardware. Engineers will take care of the hardware; the manager's duty is to take care of engineers. Firing them left and right for disrespecting your meeting times will leave you all alone in the department. Who is going to do the job? You will be fired on the next day, and your fame in the industry will be far worse.
What a prick (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a CS degree. If you had asked me how find the shortest path across a graph with positive edge values, I could have given you that algorithm. I even did an implementation in code.
But I didn't remember it being called "Dijkstra's", though I must have heard the term used. I've always had a rough time remembering names, and isn't the algorithm way more important than the name given it?
Furthermore why WOULD a scrum master necessarily be a CS name-dropper like yourself? I'll bet he could ask some question about SCRUM that would have you shitting your own pants.
I hope (for the sake of your team) you were fired and that your ego someday cools down to somewhere below supernova level. I can't imagine working with that level of prickery, I'll bet at that company you didn't even do anything involving graphs in code...
You strike me just like the Design Pattern guys that can recite chapter and verse every single pattern from Gamma-Helm but produce a mess of nonsense code in real life that is utterly un-maintainble because you have glued together every possible pattern (and probably a graph or two for a problem that required none!) into spaghetti code.
All of those things are great ways to learn lots of techniques for solving problems but the important thing isn't knowing any one algorithm, it's knowing how to put together software that WORKS. I don't even like Scrum exactly but I admire what them and the Agile guys are trying to accomplish in producing higher quality software faster, and you should have way more respect for the attempt than you do.
Re:Curious (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but no.
Dijkstra's algorithm is an important notion in computer science, but it's not used on a day-to-day basis in day-to-day programming tasks in the software industry. Using that as a dick-measuring stick is inaccurate because it emphasizes stuff-college-students-were-told-was-important versus real-world-software-development knowledge. If you asked me who I'd rather have as a "Scrum Leader," I'd choose someone with solid, real world software development leadership any day over someone who could recite Dijkstr's algorithm off the top of their head.
I think that the fact that you used a phrase like "scrum master" says a lot about the type of software developer you are.
Re:Curious (Score:5, Insightful)
Dijkstra's algorithm is a good litmus test of somebody's programming and software development knowledge and experience.
BZZZT. Wrong. It is a litmus test to see how recent of a graduate you are of a computer science course and whether your training focused on memorizing search algorithms or honing your problems solving skills.
Anyone with any formal computer science, computer engineering, or software engineering education will know it inside out. Even many people who studied mathematics or physics will be familiar with it. It's a relatively simple algorithm that's easy to explain quickly, but it also touches on a variety of important concepts, and is quite applicable in the so-called "Real World".
Sorry, but computer science does not alway prepare you to be a proficient software developer as the course material can vary considerably from institution to institution.
Many software development professionals see it as a not-so-secret secret handshake, so to speak. If you know what you're doing, you'll find explaining it trivial. If you don't know what you're doing, you won't be able to. It's a fast way to separate those who can do from those who just talk the talk.
Sorry but you don't seem to have a clue about how modern software development functions and how it differs from pure computer science.
To be a scrum master, you should have at least this minimum level of knowledge of the field. That's where the connection comes in. Seeing if somebody knows Dijkstra's algorithm is one of the most basic and effective ways of seeing if somebody is qualified to be involved with software development.
Sorry but you do not understand what the function of the scrum master is. The main function of the scrum master is management of the team's velocity in an iteration. The contents of an iteration is determined by a combination of end user priority, estimation points on the stories which were candidates for consideration and the estimated potential velocity/throughput of the team involved. In essence, a scrum master is an imbedded team lead/manager/product architect.
Knowledge of how to implement a search algorithm is pretty much useless in most real world applications in businesses especially when most people would just leverage what is already present in a framework like .NET's linq or use the power of a RDMS to sift through data. There is often no need to "reinvent" the wheel and even if there was such a need, chances are, someone on the team would have already written a generic common library function for the most efficient search algorithm if you happen to be using a framework poor language such as C/C++.
Re:Curious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Curious (Score:4, Insightful)
But you could do the same thing for sit down meetings too. If the chairperson is focused and has the authority, the meeting can be effective and short, whether it is stand up or sit down.
People have written plenty of stuff about holding effective meetings, and reasons to hold meetings. Some even suggest writing down the rough cost of the meeting on the whiteboard as the first thing, to help get people focused ;).
As for:
* I did this yesterday
* I'm doing this today
* Here are my impediments (if any).
If you try and fix problems (impediments) in the stand-up - you're doing it wrong.
If that's all you're doing then it seems a waste of time. That's the sort of thing that would be better off done by getting people to email updates or do something similar. Why you are forcing this to be serialized, when it can be done in parallel? Then that person who rambles on, can ramble on in an email and not waste everybody's time. And the project manager can tell that person privately to not ramble so much, without her losing face in front of team members, OR let her ramble, if she appears to be able to still get her stuff done anyway, the extra information might come in handy (assuming project manager can read fast).
Even if there's no rambling, if there are 15 people in a team, you're forcing 15 people to stand around for a minimum of 7 minutes (not including synchronization (waiting for everyone to arrive), initialization and clean-up time - which can be significant). Just to hear each other talk for 30 seconds, one after another. What's the point?
I can understand holding physical meetings where the boss can look everyone in the eye, do the "General motivating the troops" or "General announcing major defeat" speech. And also 1 to 1 meetings where a manager meets with a team member to try to fix/workaround any potential problems before they blow up. If you're physically in front of the person, it is easier to gauge the emotional state and know that a rant is about to begin, so that you can shut up and let the person let it all out, and just nod acknowledgement or stuff like that. Rather than type *nods* every now and then ;).
But it seems a waste of time to hold a meeting just to share status updates.
Re:Curious (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fundamentally impossible for any process to defeat a bad employee with the authority to subvert it. This is why hiring is the single most important meta-function that occurs in any organization, and if you don't put a LOT of energy into it you are screwed.
Re:Curious (Score:2, Insightful)
Dijkstra's algorithm is a good litmus test of somebody's programming and software development knowledge and experience.
When hiring real world programmers, instead of stuff like "Dijkstra's algorithm" being the top stuff in their minds, I'd rather them be more aware of stuff like:
Source/version control.
"Code/SQL injection" and how to avoid it in the programming language/framework of choice.
Internationalization, handling UTF-8 and similar stuff without corruption or security issues.
Buffer overflows and how to avoid them (not applicable for some environments).
How to handle exceptions.
How to log messages.
How to handle passwords and other secrets.
How to do access control (esp on a website - just disabling/hiding the links on a page doesn't cut it!).
Last but not least: someone/something out there will try to break your stuff, so please make your stuff hard to break/break into!
Many of the annoying and major problems I've had to deal with are more to do with people not knowing the above, I have not encountered a single problem that's due to people not knowing Dijkstra's algorithm. So
can anyone show a strong correlation between knowing Dijkstra's algorithm and knowing the above stuff? Is there also a strong correlation between not knowing Dijkstra's algorithm and not knowing the above stuff?
Fragile development (Score:4, Insightful)
That explains it all. Agile development is never the solution, and always the problem. It is sad that so many people think that you can play code Jenga [slashdot.org], and ship it when it is "good enough", which will be on Friday, BTW. If I could change one thing about the industry it is that so few people understand this simple reality of code development. The answer to the question "When will it be done?" is: When it works properly, passes all tests and a thorough code review for security and maintainability, and is checked in to a well managed software repository for final SQA, and not a moment before., and the answer to the question "how long is that going to take?" is: nobody knows; it's a mystery".
This is why the Linux kernel is such a solid project even with thousands of disparate developers and being cross platform on an almost ridiculous number of architectures [wikipedia.org]. Not understanding this is why so much code is bloated garbage that should never be considered acceptable.
Re:Curious (Score:4, Insightful)
We called them "Power Meettings". The time you do it depends on the goal of your meeting. Do you want to inform how you did? End of the week. What you want to do? Begin of the week. And no, no 9:00 meetings.
Unless they officially contain coffee and breakfast.