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Ask Slashdot: Are Daily Stand-Up Meetings More Productive?
__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?"
just like going to class is the only way to learn ...
It's curious that they mention the military first doing stand-up meetings - when i was in the military, you stood up only when you were about to fall asleep, but that's all that needs to be said about that.
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.
Our daily 15 minute stand up meetings turned into daily 1 hour sit downs.....
I guess there are lots of ways to get people laughing at you, which is what would happen if you tried to institute this at my workplace.
add another
Then we got a new manager. Meeting times went down to 2 per week, productivity went up... correlation? You tell me...
That depends if your co-workers can get to the point and not drag the meeting on to where you have the usual meeting length everyday. If so, then it might. Otherwise, it's just more pointless meetings.
You go outside with your boss and have a smoke and tell him what's really going on..
Get up!
No two-way pagers (how I started), no phones, no laptops.
Come in, complete your agenda, manage the meeting so if participants need to cover something in detail, go off and do it and give a quick report at the next meeting, or send it to the project manager to distribute to the group.
If you are to busy to focus, then don't attend.
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 ).
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Email should suffice for the _majority_ of many many person meetings. (Sure, problem solving requires in person cooperation, but that's not what I would call a "meeting".)
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
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
That article reads like a list of every stupid idea a project manager has ever had. Here's an idea: keep the status meetings to once a week major changes in the project, keep individuals informed of changes that affect them as they happen, and let the workers do the work. When we're done, we'll update the feature/bug tracking system to indicate that we're done and move on. The tracking system will then notify the next person down the line (QA, build, PM, whoever) that something is ready for them, and if they have questions they can come talk to us directly, one on one. Go back to the agile manifesto, and screw off with all the buzzword-laden process crap.
I find some of the jokes a little bit unfinished, but overall, bringing a comedy routine in the workplace is a great trend. I just wish people would stop trying to rip-off other comedians... Who do they think they are? Dane Cook?
They are a good way to break people who think they need daily meetings of the need. Doing it standing up prevents the kind of bloviating that the daily meeting types need, so that the only things you say are the things you need to say. It's basically the least wasteful way of doing a meeting where all you are really doing is exchanging status updates. For meeting where you actually need to work over issues and discuss things in depth, it's not appropriate.
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.
Check your premises.
What it does is force everyone into line... they have to report measurable progress on the boss' priorities. No skunk works.
My company has gone to stand-up meetings as part of its switch to Agile/Scrum. The intention of the stand-up I think is to keep the meeting short and focused. Well, or at least that is the idea. However, the reality is that you cannot get real work done when standing, as you cannot use a laptop, nor can you easily take notes. The result is that these stand-up meeting have become fluff social calls that completely waste time.
With that said, I might be a bit jaded. One of my recent stand-up meetings was in a teleconference when the remote group started berating me for not standing like all the others. Eventually, I had to publicly inform the ass hat that I would love to join them in standing if it were not for the fact that I am in a wheelchair. Jaded or not, I still think these stand-up meetings are nothing more than desperate grasp by companies loosing money trying to find a magic bullet to improve efficiency.
We the rank and file had to stand, but the manager stayed sitting down. And those "5 minute meetings" frequently turned into half hour or longer sessions where he grilled us at length about what he perceived to be our inadequacies. You know, like not being able to make dead computers come back to life because management was too cheap to buy new hardware.
At least that beat working at another place. There we had to do a "brag" where each of us had to thank somebody else at the meeting for some wonderful thing they'd done for us in the past day or week. Straight out of a Dilbert cartoon.
Our sales organization had some interesting rules:
1) Walk in late--hand the current speaker a $20 bill. Stop at the ATM on the way (you are already late) and get the money. No IOU's.
2) Cell phone rings during meeting... $50 to the current speaker.
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'm sure Scott Adams will greatly benefit from these fads. Just think about Wally participating in stand up meeting!
I've run development projects for about 15 years now. I've always considered development a creative process. And as such I've always avoided too much structure in developers time. I'm not going to say to anyone, "Every day at 9:30 we're going to spend 15 minutes talking about yellow post-it notes". There will be meetings. But overall I treat developers as professionals, I'm not monitoring their time. I'd rather have 35 hours of productive time then 50 hours on the clock of which 10 is spent avoiding work and another 10 not giving their all. And I'd rather they stay until is needed without needing to be asked when the time comes because they appreciate the freedom they get normally. Basically, I measure productivity and not timesheets. I have no problem approving a timesheet that is "short" on hours as long as I feel the production was there. Some people like working late and come in late. Some early and leave early. Some like to skip out after 37 hours a week, but if they're productive why do I care?
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!
The purpose of meetings is to facilitate realtime communication among a group of people. The question is how often you really need to do this.
In organizations where the timeline for work is very short, daily meetings might make sense. In IT this is generally limited to O&M organizations. Ten or fifteen minutes at shift changes help to bring everybody up to speed on standing issues and to quickly task out work.
I see people try to bring the daily standup meeting into engineering and development organizations and it's a terrible waste of time. Most real work gets done by individuals or very small teams where informal conversation is sufficient. When more people need to be involved, a TEM is arranged. Every manager I know who did daily standup meetings was unqualified for their job. Typically they did not have an intimate knowledge of the work their teams did and used the standup as a way to collect information to share with their manager.
I personally feel engineering and development teams should have weekly meetings. Enough changes in a week that it's worth bringing everyone back together.
They always produce a new pile of management initiatives which I scoop up and deliver to the suggestion box in the park.
I tried to get my team to do daily stand up meetings, but everyone quickly ran out of fresh material and no one was funny anymore.
The funniest thing I've heard recently is that I'm doing it wrong. That was a kick.
Jesus effin christ... MEETINGS...
one big stroke off for the idiots running the place, to tell the
people that are really making them the money, that they aren't
making enough of it.
That, is why I'm out of the corporate bullshit circle jerk.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
But usually when we hold them Dane Cook crashes them and does a 45 minute set bumping everyone else off the agenda.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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.
It is in my not so humble experience that in offices where management has no clue what they are doing, should be doing, have done or need to do; meetings of any duration are a complete waste of time for everyone involved. I have sat, stood and crouched in meetings about meetings concerning meetings so that we may better understand that this meeting is to decide what we will have for snacks at the next meeting.
The idea that management (always with a little m) is not to blame is foolishness at best of times and disingenuous for all other times. If you make the policy and you call the meeting; if you set the standard and measure your success by how many meetings you have; you are most assuredly to blame. I have never met a manager who wasn't just tickled about having a meeting about the dumbest crap you can imagine.
There are two types of people who inhabit any given office: The ones who get things done by doing what needs to be done; correctly, timely, legally and safely and then there is everyone else. If you are a non-doer then you either browse teh interwebs and garbage like that or you are a manager. Sit down, shut up and let those of us who can or will, do our jobs. Go have a meeting with the rest of the people who aren't doing anything.
Lastly, when I am on a job interview (Contracting is always preferred as far as I am concerned); some of the questions I ask is how many meetings do they have, how often, what is discussed, how much work gets down when the largest meeting holders are on vacation etc etc.
In this day and age, regardless of the nationality of the company's HQ, you would think they would be busy getting rid of most corporations top heavy selection of idiots and morons and increase profits by letting those who actually earn their checks; earn their checks.
Wow...that was a lot more snarly than I had intended. But, so very spot on!
You can't just pick a tactical tool as the magic bullet for success. Done correctly, the daily standup is an integral part of an iterative, incremental development process (Agile) which focuses team members on the work much must be completed within the current iteration (sprint). The PM and the Product Owner get a quick snapshot of progress and the team members get to request assistance on any blocked deliverables (user stories). This is a good thing.
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!
You're saying meetings are more effective if everyone smokes?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It depends... More productive than what? Than sitting ina two hour meeting listening to your manager bloviate? Probably. Than actuallly doing work? Probably not.
But it's the wrong question anyhow... "If you have to have meetings, is this the most efficient way?" is a better question. And the most efficient way will vary on your organizational needs, your team, and what you all happen to be doing. Sorry - there are no easy answers.
That is all.
Are they done while standing at the urinal in the men's room? That would always keep the meetings short.. and to the point.
Where I work we don't do stand up meetings, mainly because our team is all over the US, consist of IT, outsourced developers, and functional process owners. It is simply called a "priority" call - it takes up an hour on our calendars, but we rarely ever use the full hour unless there is a significant issue. In most cases when the meeting ends early, it is actually kind of nice to have around 40-50 minutes every morning that is "blocked" with a meeting, but can be used to get work done.
So what is my point? It is that we are taking the concept of stand up meeting and using the parts that work for us. It is important because the team is fairly large (~5 person core IT team, 10 developers, 6 "core" functional owners, and a bunch of others who are affected by this project - but don't have to attend). Communication is key - because there is so much running in parallel and we need to mitigate the risk of someone "not knowing" what someone is doing.
Now, if you just a meeting to have a meeting - then your doing it wrong. If you are going to punish folks to being late to a meeting, or not attending a meeting - your doing it wrong. If you need someone's time and aren't getting it, go to their manager - if you don't have their manager's buy in (through either pitching out your idea to them or the "power of hierarchy") then your doing it wrong.
Yes they're important and helpful.
Ours are scheduled to the impact to work is minimal, And they beat the hell out of the weekly hour long bullshit meeting, that always take up the full hour, no matter what.
...they are very productive. A half hour is all it takes to get 15 people all on the same page, form a plan, and act. Early morning for hot topics and action plans, and a 15 minute standup in the afternoon to get a feel for how it's all coming together. Of course, if we did that all the time, we'd burn out.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
(Dang. Wish I'd gotten in on this thread earlier because I'm just gonna repeat elements from the best posts.)
Yes I have daily meeting with my team; Monday and Thursday 10-10:20 Mountain.
Yes it's productive. Younger hands call roadblocks and the elders speak up with, "I'll help you on that".
Someone's stalled for a couple of weeks or three without calling roadblock and I start to ask about things in our weekly 1-1 (burnout; too proud to ask for help; "Nailing top tier in my guild's PvP rankings but I'll be back in the saddle next week").
Meetings run long with dirt-diving, carping, gossip about execs then my canary just died.
I was a unix sysadmin for six years, manager for three, developer for four and now I'm back in the manager slot. In that time I had a manager that held a daily hour meeting and a project manager that held once weeklies that I would trade my teeth to get as much out of my team as they did out of us but I'm not them and my team isn't the one they worked with and my dailys held twice a week work for me.
Dailys are the answer for everything. (Except when they aren't.)
-CZ
The battle-confrontation scenes in Holy Grail were about behind-the-scenes Corporate Warfare between managers and exployees.
Stand-Up meetings are much fun and informative when the CEO gets his legs blown off.
No mod points at the moment, all I can do is furiously agree with you.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Sadly, the word has lost it's original meeting because so-called consultants and trainers have turned "agile" into the buzzword du jour. It has been turned into a rigid set of must follow ceremonies, mostly coming from Scrum, which totally violate the original principles of the agile manifesto. If you feel daily meetings are useful do them. Personally, in my 30+ years of experience, the best way to ensure good communication (for after all that is a key agile principle) is to have the whole project team work in the same room and to use a good tracking system. As the manager/leader I half listen to the conversations going around the room and intervene when I think my input is useful or necessary or make sure people who arent in the conversation who need to be, join in. The tracking system keeps everyone focused and informed on what's important. That, along with the whip hand of a good QA manager who ensures things don't fall between the cracks. Formal meetings are important at iteration kickoffs and to discuss complex issues with customers. A strong leader will ensure meetings are short and to the point whether they take place standing or sitting.
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
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
my work insists on squatting during meetings
The only project I've worked on where they got even close to right had a weekly meeting that took about as long as your average daily standup does in a company with inept management. Their managers trusted us to know the product, know our job and be getting shit done.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I was a product manager for both tech co in CA and a non-profit in the Midwest. For the latter, we were inundated with meetings everyday: individual, virtual, group,etc.. At these meetings, we always started with a lame icebreaker, followed by a bunch of BS: team building, "management issues," and of course weather and politics. There were 35 of us altogether and 25 of us are in some sort of "managerial" position. The VP of engineering did not know what a Gantt chart is. The CFO was a small minded bigot who could not figure out the most elementary accounting issues. In order to mask their incompetence and insecurities, they mandated all of these imbecilic meetings ad nauseum. What were these meetings for? They did them for control and assert their positions. Consequently, projects that would ordinarily take 2 weeks to complete would take over a year! It's almost as if I experienced "Dilbert" in real life. In my instances, whether it's stand-up or sit down is moot. They had meetings to talk about meetings!
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A few years ago, my team decided that everyone should pay a small fine of $5 into a jar whenever they failed to arrive by 9 AM. As soon as this was decided, I picked up the jar and contributed $50 for 10 days worth of sleeping in as much as I wanted. The only flaw in my plan was stuffing the cash in the jar in front of everyone, because on seeing that the new policy was immediately cancelled by management.
http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2008-04-15/
But it's just the director and his subordinate managers.
I've come to appreciate the pros and cons:
Pros:
I'm not the only group leader with "challenges"
The two days a week that we don't meet are SO MUCH MORE PRODUCTIVE!
Cons:
The other 3 days of the week...
On a more serious note:
The managers talk throughout the day and the individual contributors do the same. Those who have ANY REASON to need to know about others' daily activities are ALREADY collaborating with them on a moment-by-moment basis. Think of it this way: If someone in the team didn't bother to inform you of something that affected you UNTIL the daily meeting, how would you feel? You know my email. You know my phone. You know my face. WTH makes you feel you need to wait until we're STANDING UP to communicate with me?
Bah! I'm too old for this shit....
Exactly. Meetings are the PROBLEM. Avoid meetings if at all possible.
Having faddish meetings (everyone must be standing / whatever) does nothing to deal with the fact that meetings are the problem.
If you're stuck in a meeting, it is probably because management has failed to manage the project that you're working on. Probably because management does not understand the project.
And the "informal and no notes" part? WTF?!?
I amazed my manager at one job simply by keeping accurate notes of what happened in the meeting and following up on the items. By the time the next weekly meeting came around, all the items had been completed. Apparently this was a new concept.
Which brings me to my original point of meetings being the problem.
It seems that meetings are held to re-establish / re-enforce the hierarchy. The more people you can force to your meeting, the more important you are. Ego-gratification does NOT result in more productive teams.
Still not convinced? Look at Linus and the Linux kernel. How often does Linus demand that the coders all show up at his house for a meeting?
Your company has bigger problems than unproductive meetings.
Having an "end of day" meeting is only good for making sure no one is leaving early.
If you're waiting until the END OF THE WORK DAY to communicate a problem ... what the fuck were you doing the rest of the day? Why didn't you communicate it before then?
No. Rather it is an attempt at a safety net for those managers. They should already know where the problems are. They should spot the patterns during their daily non-meeting interactions with everyone.
Good managers understand the patterns and problems and can take pro-active measures to deal with them. That way you can keep doing your work.
Taking time away from your work (and everyone else's), on a recurring basis, to directly inform management of problems is just inefficient.
At the company where I work (mobile phones and software engineering), they have formally adopted agile methods across the entire enterprise (100,000 employees world-wide). Every day there is a short stand-up meeting (scrum - this must have originated in the UK) where everyone in a team reports what they did the day before, what they are working on that day, and makes some indication of problems that may require input/cooperation with other team members to resolve. These meetings are a maximum of 15 minutes in length (usually about 10), and from my short experience there (I started at the first of the year), it seems to provide a valid means to get everyone thinking about what the others are doing, and suggest how we can solve difficult problems by presenting another perspective. Each team is made up of 4-10 people, so you don't get into big free-for-all conversations. People are encouraged to be short, succinct, and clear in their presentations. Of course, this is sometimes a problem (the clarity) given all the nationalities we represent. My team of 10 represents 6 different nations, languages, and accents - some of which you have to listen to very carefully to understand what they are saying! What are the nationalities we represent? USA, Ukraine, Russia, China, India, and Vietnam. Ages? From mid 20's to mid 60's.
The question asks are they more productive? More productive than what?
Instead ask: are they effective? Then the answer is clearer: in some cases, yes. Like almost any process (or piece of a process: stand ups are typically one part of a larger agile process) you can get them wrong. There are many ways to screw up agile, just as there are many ways to screw up waterfall, or XP. You'll hear disaster stories for each. But done right, it can work, and it can be very effective.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
...in a meeting, can go fuck itself. I don't care about the job market, I'm not doing something demeaning like that.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
I worked for Bechtel Corporation in a construction project for a big copper mine in the late 90's. I was in the team in charge of configuring and testing all the control systems through the plant and we started the day with a 10-15 minutes stand-up meeting with the subcontractors so we all were in the same page about the day's work.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Well as long as it's not lap dances I'm OK with it (our IT guy is not what you'd call a small chap).
The British Queen has daily meetings where she's the only one sitting. It's not for any formal reason but rather to make the meeting as short and to the point as possible. From what former PM's say, it works really well.
Code first, think later.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Not daily, that's too often (at least for the more senior folks). If you're doing something hard, you can't really finish a cohesive unit of work in a day. Here's how I do it in the project I run. We have a planning meeting every Monday. It lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. During this meeting we discuss what was accomplished over the past week, and plan out the next one or two weeks (usually one). That's it. During the week we just, you know, talk to one another and resolve issues as they come up, and not stress about what we are going to say at our next standup meeting. Works great!
Are either unemployed people who are bitter about being fired for not being willing to learn new ways of doing things or work on a team in a silo with no dependencies on other teams.
We find our meetings to be invaluable as we can discover if someone was away for a day and is still working on a dead initiative or voice any road blocks created by changes by other teams. The latter is often brought up by one of our QA engineers if they discover a problem while doing integration testing.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
From my experience I only know it wasn't harmful. It may have been helpful. If it were not for the standup, we might have been at the whim of any manager who had the authority to "call a meeting" and direct us in a mind-numbing 3 hour session. I didn't get exposed every day though because it was a remote situation and our interface to the other team was via protocols and APIs that were fairly clean cut. Many times I listened for half an hour and my only input was something like "I'm working on ticket 483 today. You know, the one that causes images to disappear sometimes". A half hour mostly wasted? Perhaps, but when you consider the potential for a random day-killing coffee klatch, it's a good trade.
You need discipline to make it work. The manager in charge has to keep it short, and he has to have the authority to tell other managers that they need to join the standup if they want to meet with the whole team.
In a work environment that has email, web and other stuff, daily meetings were becoming a drag, so now we only meet when there is actually something to discuss.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Britain's highest-level meeting, the 'Privy Council', has for centuries been stand-up only. All HM Queen ever says there is "assent", and that certainly keeps it quick too.
There's nothing much wrong with a 10-15 stand-up meeting, if that's all the time you're going to be spending in meetings and if it suffices to manage your projects. The point of doing meetings as stand-up meeting supposedly is to keep them short, but you'll be surprised how often they're not being time boxed.
I'm sure your stand-up meetings are being done in the name of "agile". And let me guess, you're suddenly buried with additional procedures, processes and tools, right? Read the original agile manifesto. It's likely that what you're currently doing isn't agile. In fact, if it is what I think, It's the exact opposite of agile. But you might want to be careful in pointing that out.
Sounds like the school assembly we used to have every morning
We would say the Lords Prayer, and sing the school song:
The huia black and the scarlet band
The urgent word and the stern command
Symbols all of a proud old school
Proud in strength and mild in rule
Lift up you voices and sing once more
Akina
NO
in my experience usually meetings fail for basic fundamental reasons...
1) no agenda
2) no agenda sent in advance so people can come prepared to speak to and understand issue(s) and goal of meeting
3) due to #2 most of the meeting becomes a learning session of Q&A to understand the issues at hand
4) no review of previous meeting action items -or- progress to complete them so the wheels start spinning
5) meeting minutes aren't recorded by someone
6) action items aren't put into meeting minutes
goto #1
It really is like Dilbert.
In my experience of developing for clients that want daily updates on progress is that you just end up answering the same questions over and over. Also, such micro-management of large projects can lead to a distorted view of progress. Development is like sculpting; you start off quickly and get large chunks in place, that almost fit properly. Then, you spend ten times longer than this adding and removing tiny portions to make the overall product ready. Figuring out when this product will be ready when asked daily "how much longer?" is nigh-on impossible, and ultimately wasteful.
I am sure that these meetings have their place and can be productive, just not where I work.
While I won't go so far as to say I "like" daily stand ups, in my position, they are beneficial. They let me get exposed to what other team members are doing, and this not only allows me to give my input or assistance, but provides the team a consistent context should end-users contact us directly.
If you want to ensure meetings are fast and don't run overly long, just schedule them for 4:30. Everyone will STFU because they want to go home.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Stand-up meetings make big, tall people look big, and short, small people( women included) look small. In sit-down meetings everyone is the same size, more or less. You can say sit-down meetings were the great equalizer in corporate America. Stand-up meetings bring us back to a jungle dynamic.
[konohitowa@localhost ~]$ I would also in favor of voting
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
How time flies.
Stand up meetings are terrible, they always felt to me like a bad version of an homage paid either towards communism or fascism. The feeling is akin to that of a komsomol meeting, and that's probably what hitlerjugend must have felt like, especially those, who weren't devoted followers, but those who only attended it out of sense of self-preservation.
Maybe this comparison is a bit too strong, but that's the first thing that comes to mind.
As to the merits of such meetings - these are always denigrating, and totally worthless, nothing of any value can really be discussed in them because they are not aimed at solving any particular problem, just a reminder that the ant-farm is still in operation for some ridiculous reason.
You can't handle the truth.
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, 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. Not understanding this is why so much code is bloated garbage that should never be considered acceptable.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Okay, for 20+ years, I was an IT analyst, project manager, and division manager. I hated having meeting so I kept them to a minimum (once a week). I would have informal chats with team leads and project managers either at their desk or in my cubicle. Anything else could be handled with IM or email. I didn't do a daily stand-up because it wasn't necessary.
Now, two years ago I switched jobs to begin taking over my family's manufacturing business. We're a small business with about 30 employees. I now do daily standups with the entire team. It's a two-three minute meeting to go over the priorities for the day and week, check on progress, tell the staff about things going on in the company (we're going through an ISO registration), and other information. Then I have a once a week meeting with my product leads. And no, my people don't have email or IM. They work at product benches.
The stand-ups work well for getting out general information and address corporate issues. But to plan in depth activities? No.
We (private/public utility company) recently decided to implement a company wide application of the SCRUMM stuff our Dev department has been working with for the last 2 years. Mind you, this came down the pipe just before we decided that we were going to LEAN out our organization. So the top level guys are left trying to show off in director meetings as having met 2 sets of goals, the middle level guys are scheduling a crap-ton of meetings and have passed much of the PMO work down to the "foot troops" (most of us being Tier 4 or higher professionals) and we have to try to shoehorn our workflows (infrastructure, operations, even maintenance) into the SCRUMM mold. Seriously, I saw half a dozen engineers (the pipe laying kind, not the computer kind) in their standup last week, conforming to the expectations passed down from on top. Daily standups are awful for anyone outside of the traditional development group organization - they allow poor middle managers to micromanage and to offload large chunks of their responsibility. It's sad that in a reasonably sized organization (1200ish) there are people who can now justify their existence with a quarter's worth of daily meeting minutes and nothing else to show for it.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
We are a community of motherfucking programmers who have been humiliated by software development methodologies for years.
We are tired of XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Software Craftsmanship (aka XP-Lite) and anything else getting in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.
We are tired of being told we're autistic idiots who need to be manipulated to work in a Forced Pair Programming chain gang without any time to be creative because none of the 10 managers on the project can do... Programming, Motherfucker.
We must destroy these methodologies that get in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.
-http://programming-motherfucker.com/
My group finds them useful, because we are always interacting with many external groups - testing groups, program/project mgmnt., internal clients, other development groups. It would be a burden for me to schedule a meeting every time I need to coordinate a task with more than one other person.
I never thought such practices that are described in the original article are crazy stupid. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for keeping brief and productive meetings, but the best recipe for doing that is to talk about stuff that matters, deal with real issues, and when it's all done, then it's done, don't keep people longer than necessary.
But tossing rubber chicken, medicine balls, making them run around, or going to some cold stairway - this all is just dumb and idiotic.
If you treat your people like stupid children who need punishment and control such as the above, then you simply are a very bad boss and a very bad manager and your work environment s*cks big time.
I'm just guessing you don't tell these things to the people applying to your jobs at interviews, since otherwise - hopefully - the more decent ones would just walk right out through the door. I would, and I will, if I would ever find myself in such situation. Thankfully, didn't happen up to now.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Seeing some the posts here are really kind of sad. We have a daily standup meeting, it usually lasts 15-30 minutes with 8 people. It's basically "what am i up to today" kind of meeting and letting anyone know about any problems we're seeing. But more importantly, it's a time to build relationships and it can be very cathartic. It's the safe place to complain about that annoying user, and to have someone remind you that they're just human and they don't work in IT and we're here to help them. It's really sad to see so many people dismiss standup meetings, maybe I'm just lucky to have a group of people who get along relatively well?
Stand ups:
Interruptions cause 15 minutes of wasted time while you get back to your original work. These are interruptions. They seldom impart useful knowledge that I couldn't have gotten more effectively some other way.
Pair programming:
Great for the company and the junior programmers. They get free training at the expense of the senior programmer. Since nobody actually really does cross training it's a waste. Studies prove two people cannot do a task as fast as a single person.
Summary:
You guys drank the cool aid. If you're persuasive and persistent then you can convince anyone of anything. Our political system proves it.
The meetings at my job start at 5AM. They typically go 2 hours... Why? Micro-management from the top down. I once had to delve into wide band interference in a room full of non-techie people because the manager wanted to know how all this "wee-fee" shit worked.
Needless to say, I stopped showing up to those meetings...
Have a meeting, get announcements done, pull aside anyone you have to check progress on and get to work. Only so many hours in a day to get shit done..
... to beat no meeting at all.
I run a small development firm and we've had about 5 meetings in 2 *years*. All of us developers come from companies where there was some sort of set, regular meeting (be it a standup or a some other regularly scheduled status/planning meeting), and since leaving that madness we've never been more productive.
Most companies seem to wildly underestimate the true cost of a meeting - take the interruption in work, the prep time, the time after the meeting, and multiply it by the number of attendees and most meetings end up costing *days* of productivity. I don't care if the meeting is scheduled for 15m, it's true cost is far higher. Sometimes a meeting might be useful, but it has to provide more benefit than that cost in order to be truly effective, so they should be used with care.
If you have any sort of recurring meeting scheduled, you are wasting a ton of time. The fact that you might get some benefit from a meeting != that meeting being *worth* the time, when looking at it from a costs vs benefits perspective.
What do we do? We talk to each other. Emails, IMs, the occasional skype call, and very rarely a face-to-face so we can whiteboard. It's all ad hoc, entirely as needed, and only the people who need to be present are invited.
Some of our clients have asked us to join in their daily standups and we flat out tell them no, even if it means losing their business.
Oh, yeah, Agile. I was taught by a guy who was a certified SCRUM master and he informed us all about the joy of agile development.
He shit his pants when I called him on Dijkstra's algorithm and he didn't know, so I had to go to the whiteboard and draw it out to the class because he couldn't.
It was a software engineering class, and I was the only one who turned in an actual project, and not some Microsoft Paint mockup.
Could you post a link to your resume? I'd like to make sure that you are put on that "VIP list" they have in HR, where the resume of people who are better than the rest of the class and make teachers shit their pants receive a special treatment. My company is very mature and we know exactly what is the value of such candidates.
I think there is a bright future for you in IT; after a few false starts in companies having a suboptimal hiring process, the BestBuy branch where you'll end up working will be lucky to have you.
lucm, indeed.
I've been pushing my department of developers from using the corporate approved modified waterfall method, which has lead to massive budget overruns since corporate pushed it down on us, to an Agile-like process (You do know you are allowed to modify Agile to your environment?). The last two projects we did that way came in under budget and only slipped the original schedule due to client-introduced requirement changes.
One of the things we did was the 2-minute stand-up meeting (there were only 3 people for that project). Kept it focused to: What I did yesterday, what I will do today and what problems I'm having. When we had the weekly meetings, we usually found out about roadblocks a week after they happened. Now, the project manager found out things within 24 hours and could fix them quickly. "Yeah, the users aren't available for testing so they're going to put it off--" "I'll talk to [their manager] and get it fixed."
So when I read all these skeptics and haters, I'm shocked. For those of us who used stand-up meetings, they are so much better than the old sit-down 1-hour meetings. Then I dug into the criticism and I think I know what's the problem: cargo cult management. That's where clueless managers follow the form without understanding the motivation or why it works. So the punishments, like singing and running a lap, makes my skin crawl. The agile manifesto explicitly says People over Process. Just a simple "You're late!" is sufficient. I've read other Agile horror stories on Slashdot over the last two years, and it seems like those shops followed the motions without understanding the why. One guy complained that he saw a bug but wasn't allowed to fix it because of some bullcrap like "You don't have the token to work on that". WTF? That's not Agile! If something's broken, anyone is allowed to jump in and fix it. But that shop seemed more interested in following the liturgy than actually being Agile. Remember the first rule of Agile:
The Agile horror stories I'm hearing are teams choosing processes and tools over people.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
A friend who managed an IT team insisted that if one of his team members was required at a morning meeting, and the meeting "had to start before 10 am" that the meeting must be scheduled for 7 am. If they were going to make HIS team members come in early, they could darn well get themselves out of bed and into the office early as well. Otherwise, they could schedule the meetings for 10 am or later. Fair's fair.
"I'd much rather be mistaken as a lesbian by a bigot than be mistaken as a bigot by a lesbian."
I don't think the word suggest means what you think it does.
You may also need to look up the word assurance. Agile doesn't assure delivery by a certain date, it ensures it. As I said, assurance (I believe it will be) is completely different from ensurance (it will be released on this date, quality be damned if necessary.)
So your saying is that what you do isn't rocket science ... it's more complicated than that! ROTFLMAO
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You have me confused with someone else. I never even mentioned documentation. That is, to paraphrase you in total agreement with your point, an exercise left for the reader ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Many years ago I was working on a project where five or so large bureaucratic tech companies teamed together to bid on a NASA project. The project had lots of moving parts, and within a week or two we found that we had more than 40 hours a week of scheduled meetings. It turned out to be very liberating, because it was obvious to everybody that if everybody went to all the meetings then nobody would get any work done. So you showed up for the 8am status meeting to know what was going on for the day, and were expected to blow off any meetings you didn't really need to be at. The 8am wasn't strictly a standup, but there weren't enough chairs in the biggest room so half the people ended up standing, and it usually only lasted about 10-15 minutes.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No more thank 10 people and no longer than 15 minutes. Only status updates to see if people are working. If someone is blocked you know quickly. If someone is working on a simplev task and taking forever you know quickly.
Only 'flamers' flame!
It's a fantastic way for managers to feel as if something has been accomplished. Workers, can get paid to enjoy a cup of coffee. What I enjoy most about daily standup meetings, is telling my boss, and co-workers what I'm working on so that later on in the day, they have a reason to stop by my desk and ask what I'm working on. My working theory is that if engineers are paid for 8 hours of work each day and spend four hours talking about the, they should be able to get 16 hours worth of work accomplished. So far, the data I've collected reveals the following over a ten year period. Daily standup meetings are usually scheduled to last 10-15 minutes. My data shows that they last 30-60 minutes. The amount of time spent doing my weekly reports, has decreased from 1 hour twenty minutes to 1 hour. My frustration with doing weekly reports has increased from "meh" to "why-the-hell-do-we-have-daily-standup-meetings". My data also shows that I spend an average of thirty minutes each day (after the standup meeting) still explaining to managers and co-workers what I'm working on. In their defense, I attribute that to the fact that they typically miss about 45% of the daily stand up meetings. I think the most beneficial part of daily standup meetings is that it gives everyone in the group a chance to solve other people problems, and therefore minimize the level of group incompetence. It might appear that with daily standup meetings I now spend three to four times as much time talking about work, as opposed to actually doing work. In reality when this balanced against other factors, such as being able to share my education (for which I paid a princely sum) with other co-workers (for free) far exceeds the cost and frustration levels that go along with the daily stand up meetings. My employer is able to save thousands of dollars by hiring people with a college education, at the same pay scale as myself, and is able to submit weekly reports to his boss that justify his salary. Oh, I should mention in closing that my productivity and that of my educated peers, has fallen substantially. But we feel so much more rewarded about getting paid to drink coffee, educate people for free, and make our bosses feel important. At the end of the day. That's why businesses exists anyway. Producing quality products, and products that people want or need isn't important, because if your company can't turn a profit, the government will either give it grant, or nearly-zero interest loan, even if Warren Buffet and George Soros don't need it.
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We have daily meetings which are supposed to take 5 minutes, they actually take 15-20 minutes each which over the week loses us nearly an hour and a half's work time per week.
There is nothing worse than being half way through an important job when somebody says "ok meeting time" every morning. It's not like you can plan for it either as, even thought it's at the same time every morning, it's not like you can sit around for 20 minutes before the meeting knowing that if you started it now you'd be half way through the job when meeting time comes. So you get interrupted every time, lose your place and waste more time.
Frankly i (and everyone i work with) would rather just have an hour's meeting on friday.
We waste an hour and a half of working time per week yet we get moaned at every week for not working fast enough...just leave us alone and let us do our job.
Captcha: supreme - as in management are 'supreme' idiots.
I remember these stand up meetings when I was a kid: http://duquesnehunky.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/rotor-5.jpg
I worked at a place that did this before. It is highly demotivational, makes people hate going to work, the annoying ass-kisser always went on longer then needed, etc. It was a great way for employees to hate management even further and as others mentioned, many in management never showed up or were late, further wasting time as those who aspired to be in-charge usually took it as an opportunity to live out a role very similar to Dwight from the office. I was in the military, an electronic maintenance group and we didn't even do this. In the military this may make sense, in the civilian world, there needs to be a clear distinction that people (the vast majority) are there to get a job done and get paid, not live out some pointy-haired cluster fuck such as daily stand-up meetings. As a matter of fact there should not be daily meetings unless you are a computer programmer and benefit from such things as daily ~scrums, etc. The fact that a place has daily meetings tells me that they are likely highly inefficient and/or management is out of touch and likely very much hated.
If a stand-up meeting is just explaining what the status is, _you're doing it wrong._
In a way I shouldn't be surprised to read so many of my fellow engineers complain about what is perceived to be even the tiniest sliver of management's (or god forbid, business') encroachment on the sanctity of their right to go off into an isolation chamber and deliver whatever they want whenever they feel like it. But, as much as it pains me to say it, life doesn't work that way. If you truly want creative freedom in software development, I suggest you start your own project -- open source, or perhaps even your own for-profit company.
That rude reality aside, let's remember that Agile as a whole is a set of ideas and ideals that some people and organizations strive toward, but not necessarily getting it "right". Nobody "does" Agile. If an organization purports to "do" Agile, they likely don't understand it. You can really only "try" Agile or "be learning" Agile, etc. By its very nature, Agile is a philosophy the entire company must adopt, not just as a way of getting engineers or team members in synch during stand-up meetings. There are much bigger ideas that must be adopted by everyone. These ideas include the fact that the organization and the work it does are living, evolving things and must be looked after continuously, including the very Agile process or however it's adopted. Product road maps must be devised with proper flexibility for iterative changes -- to feedback from within and without the organization. What we, as engineers, must understand, is that with the responsibility of delivering on your commitments within a sprint, also comes that wonderful freedom you're all crying about: freedom to be left alone and actually do your job without undue interruptions. Having to show up to a pre-agreed-upon meeting and pay attention for 15 minutes is not management running rampant, it's there for YOUR benefit, because as smart as you may be, you can't always know if there are impediments heading your way, or if -- imagine this -- your team mate might need your help.
Certainly there are ways to screw this up and turn it into a dysfunctional mess that doesn't serve its intended purpose. But even then, don't throw out the baby with the bath water. Instead of merely complaining, educate yourself on what's actually wrong, how it could be better, attempt to make a change, and/or get out if you can't enact improvements. Most importantly, do not fall into the self-entitlement trap, as the reality will bite you in the end.
At a former job we had weekly standup meetings of no more than 45 minutes' duration, and generally they were only 30 minutes. They were invaluable. No one got enough time to preach or argue; we just had time to update the group on the state of current projects, issues, etc. They were better than two-hour monthly meetings could have been.
Daily, now, that's pretty hard-core. But if it's focused and brief, it could be a good thing. You need that group mind sometimes if you're going to work as a group.
How all decisions aught to be made.
The last person to show up for our stand-up meetings gets assigned trivia for the next day (or treats in lieu of trivia, which people do occasionally). They have to come up with a short but interesting bit of trivia to share. It calls them out for being late, but not with any real punishment or stigma. And we're all actually interested in hearing the day's trivia.
Our stand-ups are at 10AM, giving people ample time to deal with kids and missed alarms or whatever. They're 15 minutes, but we have the room booked for 30 so we can sit down and follow up with each other afterward if needed. Quick status, upcoming items, blockers and announcements. No managers, except the occasional visit from a project manager. It's effective for us. Critical, even, during tough or overlapping projects.
If managers were thrown in, it would probably be a mess. As it is, project managers gum things up because anytime we start talking about technical blockers, they don't know if it's on the level of Godzilla or a fly, and they start freaking out. We don't usually even have enough info to bring it to them yet when it comes up in the standup, and often these things turn out to be non-issues that the PMs never need to hear about. I much prefer stand-ups to generally not include managers/PMs because of it.
Daily stand-up meetings are a huge productivity drain compared to communication via e-mail where high bandwidth is not required with ad-hoc meetings scheduled as needed with defined agendas structured to require as few people as possible. I like to add my agenda to the white board with any other issues that come up which aren't on the list discussed later with just the people who are required and interested.
You have the direct costs (12 engineers * .25 hours / day * 5 days/week * ( 52 weeks - 10 company holidays) * $100/hour fully burdened costs = $75K/year), the impact on work happening about that time (it can take another 20 minutes to get back into a flow state so to over-simplify that meeting is costing you a full-time employee), and what you loose due to employee morale (nearly all of a scrum group I worked with left within a minute or two of eight hours after the morning meeting).
Some of the things which go with scrum are good, like feedback on progress against the schedule, visibility into what other people are working on and their blocking issues but can be handled in other ways without being a scheduled interruption for the entire group (there are plugins for Trac and JIRA, you can e-mail summaries out to your group with whatever frequency works, you probably should be talking to anyone you're blocked on before tomorrow's standing meeting)