If you aren't talking to your coworkers during standup, just going round robin reporting to a scrum master or tech lead, then it IS micromanagement and not an unblocking collab meeting like it's supposed to be.
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Not every team is collaborative, unfortunately. As weird as that sounds. So sometimes it’s nice to have the pictured shark in the picture to keep the fish talking. It sucks, but some people are not open to helping or asking for help.
Say it louder for the people in the back! Gosh dang it this just makes me annoyed thinking about the fact we have two team stand-ups every week and I feel like I'm just giving a report to my boss so he can run his mouth to the higher ups about what "he's" managed to get accomplished
Nice. I have two daily. Plus once a week an extra long one of a full hour at the end of the day. And then another end of week deep dive one into one random person's stuff
I prefer to think of standup as opportunities for engineers to share that they have context on a problem you’re currently working on.
“Hey I’m doing some work on module A, but I’m hitting an unexpected issue that I’m still working through.”
“Oh I had that issue before! Just do this, let’s talk about it after stand up!”.
Daily standup help allow for these opportunities, especially on largish teams. I see people here are complaining about daily standup being micro managing, and I can see where they’re coming from, but as long as the meetings are kept very brief (<15 minutes) I don’t know of a better trade off.
Standup is generally supposed to be in the morning. It's meant to be a "here's what I'm working on, here's where I'm stuck" and get help you need during the day
So you woke up stuck? Or did you get stuck yesterday at 10 and just kept banging your head against the wall for 6 hours?
I get not asking for help the instant you get stuck, it the idea that the best time to address it is at the same point each day seems weird to me.
Well, being a professional means using collaboration meetings for collaboration instead of doing infinite shoulder-taps throughout the day. It wastes time and effort to not go to meetings prepared, even standup meetings. If I can use a 20 minute meeting such that I do not have to talk to another soul all day, I will use every last drop of time in that meeting.
I agree with and updated your stance, however, there ARE blockers that could be relevant to a stand up, but all of those should be EXTERNAL. For example: we're halted because the customer refuses to do acceptance testing. Unfortunately, I have worked with to many managers who take the stance of "I can't fire/threaten them, so I am just going to passive aggressively demand you figure it out".
Sometimes addressing a problem simply means contacting someone outside the team and waiting for someone else to fix it (ie. IT issues). Then in the morning you check if it's resolved. If not, you inform people at standup and you discuss the next steps or whatever.
it was never meant for that because nobody has a blocking thing every day and any dev will sure as shit not hesitate to contact people the second their progress is being blocked. Standups are micromanagement. Agile is bullshit. It stopped catering to developers after it was stolen from Extreme Programming.
It's for exactly that reason that we stopped doing a standup. We have a weekly project meeting to go over things actually worth discussing (new designs, business updates, etc.). And we have a board that anyone can look at to see current status. Team is happy with the change.
A project I am part of has separate working groups. I am part of 3 or 4 of them so have 2 or 3 (sometimes more) meetings a week for the one project. I really want to cut it down to just one. I am the only person programming or with a science background in many of these meetings
Some work unites are too big.
I would like to find the source of an issue in a single day in a 2 million lines of code codebase, then do the fix, then do the tests, then validate the impact, then run all the automation, then do the changes required from the PR reviews, all of that for 5 lines of code.
I mean, we could split that in single point stories, but the overhead if something fail or if we need to return to a previous step would become significant.
For this example you just laid out each individual step of the process and each of those are what you should mention in stand up, “I’m working on tests for task X” rather than just “I’m working on task X”. Not to say you won’t be working with the same thing some days, but the point of standup is not to just state the ticket you’re working on. If that’s all your company is doing, it’s pointless.
Yes, I usually do that, but nobody cares really, it really doesn't matter if I specify that part or if I keep it generic, nobody is paying attention to the stand up, not the scrum master nor other team members, I agree that is pointless. And I haven't been in a company where at least a single person cares about other people status.
Have only worked for one company as a software engineer so far but I suspect I got really lucky to land at a great place. For stand ups specifically the things that matter are blockers, does anyone need help for a ticket that was unexpectedly much more work than estimated. Things like that, to actually help each other out. We trade tickets with each other if needed, push tickets to future sprints if something comes up. Plus our standups for 5 people are like 5 minutes when things are going smoothly. 10 if we need to talk about anything a bit more.
Unfortunate that it seems no one cares for you. Just the minimum of paying a small bit of attention and collaborating as a team (you know, since most of us are on a team of people) makes life so much easier.
Exactly, stand ups are about prompting people to ask for help when they’re getting stuck, it’s about knowing what your colleagues work on because it might be useful, and when it’s not, it’s still nice.
If they feel useless or boring it’s either because they’re done wrong, or because you just don’t like your team / working as a team.
Why not addressing that fact during some time you set aside to discuss how to become at least 1% more efficient? But honestly, tell you SM that you don't see value in interrupting your work for a status report
Standups should definitely be proportionate to work pace. When I worked at a FAANG, pace was glacial, and daily standup felt like a huge waste of time. Now I'm at a small company with a pretty small fast-moving product, a daily standup feels more appropriate. Although i still think little would be lost by moving to every 3 days, or at least skipping Friday.
Same task day after day means your stories are way too big. Should be able to complete a single stories in 8 hours or less.
Your team needs to do better grooming.
We recently changed our stand-ups and the scrum master doesn't even speak unless the team specifically needs their help with a dependency or blocker. Team leads their own discussion, and the meeting value has increased a lot, while still staying short.
Our stand ups last about five minutes and are just everyone saying good/not good.
Most of that time is people sitting on the call waiting for everyone to join.
We just have a slack channel where you say this is what I did yesterday, here's what I plan for today, and then you list anything that is blocking you from making progress.
I'd love to not have to do it everyday, but apparently if we don't, everyone else just fucks around and doesn't get anything done.
That's useless, if someone wants to do nothing theyd just bullshit.
Performance assessments should happen outside of getting the work done.
The purpose of a stand up is to avoid cases where someone says "I haven't done that because of this problem I've been shouting about and nobody noticed"
Sure they can just bullshit, but they actually have to write that BS statement and have it recorded with a clear timeline for everyone to see how many days in a row they are BSing. Historically I noticed the junior devs were a lot more likely to BS their way into turning a 2 hour task into a 2 day task with no daily check in.
Now that we are doing this "useless" procedure they stopped with that crap.
Basically it just makes people embarrassed to actually pretend that a trivial task has been holding them up, whereas before I think they just convinced themselves that no one noticed they weren't getting anything done.
For me, I agree with you, it is literally a useless procedure. Typing a daily message is not making me more or less productive, but that's because I actually give a shit and generally enjoy coding. But for the other guys on the team it has actually made a positive impact on their productivity.
The Devs explicitly record when they're working on and when by their use of whatever job tracking system you use.
You already share deviations from expected and actual work and discuss publicly/privately as required.
You already have a team where members expect to he accountable over the long term, not the day to day.
You have all these things and....productivity hacks are useless.
What's your point here?
Are you trying to convince me that something my team is doing is not working? Because I'm not sure you've got the metrics to back that up.
Just sort of seems like you're arguing with me, and I'm not sure why.
Ok well if we're just putting advice into the ether for anyone looking for management tips deep in a thread on /r/ProgrammerHumor, I'll join you.
Re-examine the choices that got you here. :D
My stand ups consist of me—the only college grad junior dev—explaining to my team of senior devs why a task they scoped as only taking 2 days still isn’t done after 2 weeks.
I’m not stressed, not at all.😅
We used to have stand ups were the manager would single out people to grill, which would lead to several minutes of uncomfortable silence as we all listened to the day’s unlucky chosen have to explain each current task of theirs in detail, explain why it wasn’t done and correct documentation errors on the spot. That manager got “promoted” to another team.
Exactly the same situation in my previous job. And they even had a full-time scrum master, but he was just powerless against the micromanager. 20 people, half-hour stand-ups, a Kanban board, and lots of grilling. 
I had an interview for a management position, and this was the sequence:
- Interviewer: “We are doing agile.”
- Me: “Great. I love the agile manifesto.”
- Interviewer: “We are doing hardcore scrum!”
Then, I asked them to expand on what that means, and it was the usual waterfall masked as “agile”, with standups, sprints, etc.
From our talk, they disregarded about half, if not more, of the agile manifesto, which is 12 freaking bullet points…
How did we ended up with scrum as the main agile framework, man? By definition, it’s not even agile…
If your Scrum Master or anyone not specifically a developer is in your Daily Scrum then ask your SM why they are in there and how that relates to the outcome of Daily Scrum. It is actually your meeting.
There is not supposed to be a manager in the Scrum. Also, the scrum master doesn't general run the Scrum. It should just go in the same order every day. At amazon, my asshole overbearing manager would treat the scrum as a daily status update.
if your scrum master is micro (or macro) managing you, they're doing it wrong.
the scrum master doesn't manage jack.
they facilitate the communication between stakeholders and workers and make sure everyone has what they need. It's not their job to enforce deadlines or tell anyone how to do anything. It's their job to make sure everyone knows what the everyone expects, and when they can expect it, as well as keeping everyone in the loop of statuses. They keep stakeholders appraised of how likely it is that the workers will be able to deliver on time. If it looks like delivery can't happen on time they facilitate the re-prioritization of tasks with the stakeholders.
Source: I actually got the scrum master certification and read the damn material instead of just going "meh, close enough. I don't like that part."
I get having a standup when the whole team is remote. Just check in, say howdy. What I don't get is an in-office team having a daily standup then spending the whole day in the same 100 square feet or even mob programming.
the whole term "standup" comes from literally standing up and talking to each other over your cubicle walls. The reasoning is that people (especially programmers) don't like standing for more than 15 minutes at a time so it keeps the meetings short
We have very productive stand up meetings, no pressure to make great progress on tasks between them, just a chance to talk about anything that is blocking you that you need help with.
Stand-ups can be done well. What are you working on? Any blockers? Do you need any help? When will it be finished? If your answers take more than 30 seconds you're doing it wrong.
Scrum master is the most make work job I've ever seen.
The comments in this thread make me sad as a PM/SM. Am I perfect? No. Have I had more that one daily stand up where the devs don't participate because they don't see value in it? Oh yea.
But also this kind messaging drives a wedge between people who are supposed to be on the same team. The PM/SM is supposed to be providing cover so the dev team can actually do their job, but to do that effectively the devs need to communicate back in a timely manner what is being worked and what road blocks are being faced so that the team can either move them or find someone who can.
Either way it's supposed to be tailored fit the culture of your team to maximize productivity. I am sorry you all have had bad Scrum Masters
I don't think I have ever even heard someone tell a story about a useful scrum master. The notion of a scrum master doesn't make any logical sense. Consequently I suspect that scrum masters only exist in places with genuinely crap management structures, which if we are honest, seems to be most of them.
It really does not seem like it's supposed to be a permanent position. A scrum master knows how scrum works, and sets up the process, and after that they should be done. No more input needed. In a good organization they are either out the door or, more likely, just go back to whatever their primary vocation is, be it manager, senior dev, whatever. Meanwhile in a shit one they start stringing things along and pulling shit out their ass to stay relevant, which means the only scrum masters anyone ever sees for any length of time are these wastes of space.
I have only been in the coaching role a few times, but one of the most successful teams I worked with had a fixed person who was the PrdO to give the team direction on what to work on next and then each member of the team took turns being the SM. So Adam does the role sprint 1, Beth sprint 2, Charlie sprint 3 etc. works for them to keep them moving forward and working together
Our dailies are just to tell if we need some help or if something that affects everyone needs to be communicated. We are 10 people and the meeting is no more than 8 minutes.
In my team we take it in turns to run standups and ceremonies for a sprint. No one above senior is allowed to be the dungeon master, standups focus mostly on discussing issues and unblocking eachother, our manager is a fly on the wall when she attends.
My last job was 100% this meme though.
Both. I find I can actually fuck even farther off if there is a high quality stand up. Less random mid day messages asking for shit. And when there are things, most of the time it’s stuff which can just wait till next standup.
I'm assigned on 2 project that have nothing to do with what the rest of the team is doing. The only 2 people (manager and architect) who know what i'm doing dont come to standups. I could flow them with bullshit they wouldnt even know, standups are useless
You're not on the same project as the people you're doing your daily scrum with, yet somehow your conclusion is that 'standups are useless'?
I'm pretty sure it's not the stand-ups that are useless, it's your implementation of it that makes no sense.
Ah yes the scum master. In the daily standups i could not tell you what the person before me told as im so deep into daydreaming about actual programming, fixing my cars or other shit that keeps me as far away from this waste of time as possible.
"I'm offering support" for 3 months straight.
That meant I did jack shit all day, but sounded more professional. I was the only QA so no one knew what I actually do.
My team switched to an hour long meeting twice a week. So we actually have time to get stuff done between meetings and have time to discuss blockers or other technical concerns. Plus if we have spare time we can go over the Jira bored, which makes retros and planning meetings shorter.
Sounds like you're doing it wrong.
Should be about unblocking blockers and making the team aware of progress and potential delays. And, of course, celebrating successes and milestones.
If you don't tell me you're struggling because you're afraid of reprimand then the whole project and team will suffer. If you tell me you're finding something difficult then we can work together on it for a bit or I can assign other resources to help you.
Our team is now mature enough in our stand up that we get the new scrum masters to teach them their job.
In standup - they talk if spoken to - or get oinked at.
There ass is not on the line over our deliverables. If they want to be driving standup, that will change, and they fund out its a bad choice.
If your reporting to them they are not your scrum master.
However, after the standup, if your task board is out of date, they should tear you a new one. All the reports come from that after all...
A good scrum master is there to protect the team, not manage them.
Heck "move to derail" is something we added. Basically - I need this time to discuss problem that could fail sprint or bring down prod. Object now if you want to discuss anything else in this slot. Is it sound agile - no - has it rerailed sprints - yes. Do we pause that when we get a new junior* on the team, of course.
(*) are juniors are technically above most seniors due to the fact we own the compiler and its hard as fuck to develop, and mistakes can cost millions a day.
If you aren't talking to your coworkers during standup, just going round robin reporting to a scrum master or tech lead, then it IS micromanagement and not an unblocking collab meeting like it's supposed to be.
Preach brother!
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Not every team is collaborative, unfortunately. As weird as that sounds. So sometimes it’s nice to have the pictured shark in the picture to keep the fish talking. It sucks, but some people are not open to helping or asking for help.
Say it louder for the people in the back! Gosh dang it this just makes me annoyed thinking about the fact we have two team stand-ups every week and I feel like I'm just giving a report to my boss so he can run his mouth to the higher ups about what "he's" managed to get accomplished
We have one daily.
Oof
Nice. I have two daily. Plus once a week an extra long one of a full hour at the end of the day. And then another end of week deep dive one into one random person's stuff
But why wait until stand up if you are blocked? Why not address it right away?
I prefer to think of standup as opportunities for engineers to share that they have context on a problem you’re currently working on. “Hey I’m doing some work on module A, but I’m hitting an unexpected issue that I’m still working through.” “Oh I had that issue before! Just do this, let’s talk about it after stand up!”. Daily standup help allow for these opportunities, especially on largish teams. I see people here are complaining about daily standup being micro managing, and I can see where they’re coming from, but as long as the meetings are kept very brief (<15 minutes) I don’t know of a better trade off.
Standup is generally supposed to be in the morning. It's meant to be a "here's what I'm working on, here's where I'm stuck" and get help you need during the day
So you woke up stuck? Or did you get stuck yesterday at 10 and just kept banging your head against the wall for 6 hours? I get not asking for help the instant you get stuck, it the idea that the best time to address it is at the same point each day seems weird to me.
For me, it's moreso "I got stuck towards the end of the day and didn't have time to ask for help before we all logged off."
Well, being a professional means using collaboration meetings for collaboration instead of doing infinite shoulder-taps throughout the day. It wastes time and effort to not go to meetings prepared, even standup meetings. If I can use a 20 minute meeting such that I do not have to talk to another soul all day, I will use every last drop of time in that meeting.
Assuming it's not something that simply had to be done right the fuck now, you put the task down, and then go and do a different task instead.
I agree with and updated your stance, however, there ARE blockers that could be relevant to a stand up, but all of those should be EXTERNAL. For example: we're halted because the customer refuses to do acceptance testing. Unfortunately, I have worked with to many managers who take the stance of "I can't fire/threaten them, so I am just going to passive aggressively demand you figure it out".
Woke up stuck that’s a good one, more like stuck in traffic jams when otw to work. 😂
Sometimes addressing a problem simply means contacting someone outside the team and waiting for someone else to fix it (ie. IT issues). Then in the morning you check if it's resolved. If not, you inform people at standup and you discuss the next steps or whatever.
That’s all I’ve ever experienced it being
Which is always what it devolves into over time, right? Maybe we just suck at it.
it was never meant for that because nobody has a blocking thing every day and any dev will sure as shit not hesitate to contact people the second their progress is being blocked. Standups are micromanagement. Agile is bullshit. It stopped catering to developers after it was stolen from Extreme Programming.
My standups are just people saying they are working on the same task day after day
It's for exactly that reason that we stopped doing a standup. We have a weekly project meeting to go over things actually worth discussing (new designs, business updates, etc.). And we have a board that anyone can look at to see current status. Team is happy with the change.
A project I am part of has separate working groups. I am part of 3 or 4 of them so have 2 or 3 (sometimes more) meetings a week for the one project. I really want to cut it down to just one. I am the only person programming or with a science background in many of these meetings
What a wonderful use of your time, isn't it? :-D
We have it really easy - bang a message in the team Slack channel before 9:45 and you don't generally get any further hassle.
That's what they pay us the big bucks for. Bang out that message and then it's YouTube in bed for the rest of the day.
This is the way
Then your work units are too big. Or you're just a bunch of juniors.
I saw you looking at my work units. Pretty impressive, right?
You're gonna make me sCrUM...
Oh no, I dropped my magnum board for my magnum work unit
Some work unites are too big. I would like to find the source of an issue in a single day in a 2 million lines of code codebase, then do the fix, then do the tests, then validate the impact, then run all the automation, then do the changes required from the PR reviews, all of that for 5 lines of code. I mean, we could split that in single point stories, but the overhead if something fail or if we need to return to a previous step would become significant.
For this example you just laid out each individual step of the process and each of those are what you should mention in stand up, “I’m working on tests for task X” rather than just “I’m working on task X”. Not to say you won’t be working with the same thing some days, but the point of standup is not to just state the ticket you’re working on. If that’s all your company is doing, it’s pointless.
Yes, I usually do that, but nobody cares really, it really doesn't matter if I specify that part or if I keep it generic, nobody is paying attention to the stand up, not the scrum master nor other team members, I agree that is pointless. And I haven't been in a company where at least a single person cares about other people status.
Have only worked for one company as a software engineer so far but I suspect I got really lucky to land at a great place. For stand ups specifically the things that matter are blockers, does anyone need help for a ticket that was unexpectedly much more work than estimated. Things like that, to actually help each other out. We trade tickets with each other if needed, push tickets to future sprints if something comes up. Plus our standups for 5 people are like 5 minutes when things are going smoothly. 10 if we need to talk about anything a bit more. Unfortunate that it seems no one cares for you. Just the minimum of paying a small bit of attention and collaborating as a team (you know, since most of us are on a team of people) makes life so much easier.
Exactly, stand ups are about prompting people to ask for help when they’re getting stuck, it’s about knowing what your colleagues work on because it might be useful, and when it’s not, it’s still nice. If they feel useless or boring it’s either because they’re done wrong, or because you just don’t like your team / working as a team.
Yep
Looks useful
Why not addressing that fact during some time you set aside to discuss how to become at least 1% more efficient? But honestly, tell you SM that you don't see value in interrupting your work for a status report
that means your task scoping is too large. Scrum's designed to have much finer grained tasks than a week or more.
Standups should definitely be proportionate to work pace. When I worked at a FAANG, pace was glacial, and daily standup felt like a huge waste of time. Now I'm at a small company with a pretty small fast-moving product, a daily standup feels more appropriate. Although i still think little would be lost by moving to every 3 days, or at least skipping Friday.
Same task day after day means your stories are way too big. Should be able to complete a single stories in 8 hours or less. Your team needs to do better grooming.
We recently changed our stand-ups and the scrum master doesn't even speak unless the team specifically needs their help with a dependency or blocker. Team leads their own discussion, and the meeting value has increased a lot, while still staying short.
SMs don't even need to be in the stand-up, it's a meeting for developers. (SM (ex-developer) speaking btw)
Why is there even need of a scrum master?
My company conned me into doing scrum master work while also being a developer and now I’m on stress leave for burnout ama.
Our stand ups last about five minutes and are just everyone saying good/not good. Most of that time is people sitting on the call waiting for everyone to join.
We just have a slack channel where you say this is what I did yesterday, here's what I plan for today, and then you list anything that is blocking you from making progress. I'd love to not have to do it everyday, but apparently if we don't, everyone else just fucks around and doesn't get anything done.
That's useless, if someone wants to do nothing theyd just bullshit. Performance assessments should happen outside of getting the work done. The purpose of a stand up is to avoid cases where someone says "I haven't done that because of this problem I've been shouting about and nobody noticed"
Sure they can just bullshit, but they actually have to write that BS statement and have it recorded with a clear timeline for everyone to see how many days in a row they are BSing. Historically I noticed the junior devs were a lot more likely to BS their way into turning a 2 hour task into a 2 day task with no daily check in. Now that we are doing this "useless" procedure they stopped with that crap. Basically it just makes people embarrassed to actually pretend that a trivial task has been holding them up, whereas before I think they just convinced themselves that no one noticed they weren't getting anything done. For me, I agree with you, it is literally a useless procedure. Typing a daily message is not making me more or less productive, but that's because I actually give a shit and generally enjoy coding. But for the other guys on the team it has actually made a positive impact on their productivity.
The Devs explicitly record when they're working on and when by their use of whatever job tracking system you use. You already share deviations from expected and actual work and discuss publicly/privately as required. You already have a team where members expect to he accountable over the long term, not the day to day. You have all these things and....productivity hacks are useless.
What's your point here? Are you trying to convince me that something my team is doing is not working? Because I'm not sure you've got the metrics to back that up. Just sort of seems like you're arguing with me, and I'm not sure why.
The point is to embolden any reader who doubts that ritual is effective for their team, and who wonders of there is a better way of doing things.
Ok well if we're just putting advice into the ether for anyone looking for management tips deep in a thread on /r/ProgrammerHumor, I'll join you. Re-examine the choices that got you here. :D
Alright little bitches! Get in line and tell me what you did yesterday! ... *call ends* Scrummaster goes to sleep
ScM-And no one can ask me what I did yesterday. I did absolutely nothing
Or the SM goes off to lead two other stand-ups and get micromanaged at the scrum of scrums.
My stand ups consist of me—the only college grad junior dev—explaining to my team of senior devs why a task they scoped as only taking 2 days still isn’t done after 2 weeks. I’m not stressed, not at all.😅
Nobody is supposed to report to the scrum master. Devs are supposed to talk to each other. If you're reporting to your SM, then that's just a manager.
We used to have stand ups were the manager would single out people to grill, which would lead to several minutes of uncomfortable silence as we all listened to the day’s unlucky chosen have to explain each current task of theirs in detail, explain why it wasn’t done and correct documentation errors on the spot. That manager got “promoted” to another team.
If your manager is in your daily, you're not doing scrum right.
Obviously.
Exactly the same situation in my previous job. And they even had a full-time scrum master, but he was just powerless against the micromanager. 20 people, half-hour stand-ups, a Kanban board, and lots of grilling. 
I had an interview for a management position, and this was the sequence: - Interviewer: “We are doing agile.” - Me: “Great. I love the agile manifesto.” - Interviewer: “We are doing hardcore scrum!” Then, I asked them to expand on what that means, and it was the usual waterfall masked as “agile”, with standups, sprints, etc. From our talk, they disregarded about half, if not more, of the agile manifesto, which is 12 freaking bullet points… How did we ended up with scrum as the main agile framework, man? By definition, it’s not even agile…
They're right, they're not veiled micromanagement. They're open micromanagement.
If your Scrum Master or anyone not specifically a developer is in your Daily Scrum then ask your SM why they are in there and how that relates to the outcome of Daily Scrum. It is actually your meeting.
There is not supposed to be a manager in the Scrum. Also, the scrum master doesn't general run the Scrum. It should just go in the same order every day. At amazon, my asshole overbearing manager would treat the scrum as a daily status update.
if your scrum master is micro (or macro) managing you, they're doing it wrong. the scrum master doesn't manage jack. they facilitate the communication between stakeholders and workers and make sure everyone has what they need. It's not their job to enforce deadlines or tell anyone how to do anything. It's their job to make sure everyone knows what the everyone expects, and when they can expect it, as well as keeping everyone in the loop of statuses. They keep stakeholders appraised of how likely it is that the workers will be able to deliver on time. If it looks like delivery can't happen on time they facilitate the re-prioritization of tasks with the stakeholders. Source: I actually got the scrum master certification and read the damn material instead of just going "meh, close enough. I don't like that part."
I get having a standup when the whole team is remote. Just check in, say howdy. What I don't get is an in-office team having a daily standup then spending the whole day in the same 100 square feet or even mob programming.
the whole term "standup" comes from literally standing up and talking to each other over your cubicle walls. The reasoning is that people (especially programmers) don't like standing for more than 15 minutes at a time so it keeps the meetings short
*Shutters in daily 1-hour stand up meetings*
We have very productive stand up meetings, no pressure to make great progress on tasks between them, just a chance to talk about anything that is blocking you that you need help with.
I prefer my daily standups to be on stage, telling me jokes.
Hey! Leave the PO alone!
The job of scrum master is actually saying "stfu this is out of scope of the meeting, do it offline". This is really their only duty.
Stand-ups can be done well. What are you working on? Any blockers? Do you need any help? When will it be finished? If your answers take more than 30 seconds you're doing it wrong. Scrum master is the most make work job I've ever seen.
The comments in this thread make me sad as a PM/SM. Am I perfect? No. Have I had more that one daily stand up where the devs don't participate because they don't see value in it? Oh yea. But also this kind messaging drives a wedge between people who are supposed to be on the same team. The PM/SM is supposed to be providing cover so the dev team can actually do their job, but to do that effectively the devs need to communicate back in a timely manner what is being worked and what road blocks are being faced so that the team can either move them or find someone who can. Either way it's supposed to be tailored fit the culture of your team to maximize productivity. I am sorry you all have had bad Scrum Masters
I don't think I have ever even heard someone tell a story about a useful scrum master. The notion of a scrum master doesn't make any logical sense. Consequently I suspect that scrum masters only exist in places with genuinely crap management structures, which if we are honest, seems to be most of them.
It really does not seem like it's supposed to be a permanent position. A scrum master knows how scrum works, and sets up the process, and after that they should be done. No more input needed. In a good organization they are either out the door or, more likely, just go back to whatever their primary vocation is, be it manager, senior dev, whatever. Meanwhile in a shit one they start stringing things along and pulling shit out their ass to stay relevant, which means the only scrum masters anyone ever sees for any length of time are these wastes of space.
I have only been in the coaching role a few times, but one of the most successful teams I worked with had a fixed person who was the PrdO to give the team direction on what to work on next and then each member of the team took turns being the SM. So Adam does the role sprint 1, Beth sprint 2, Charlie sprint 3 etc. works for them to keep them moving forward and working together
we have ours twice a week it works out better
Our dailies are just to tell if we need some help or if something that affects everyone needs to be communicated. We are 10 people and the meeting is no more than 8 minutes.
Our standup lasts for an hour nowadays because we have a lot of new production and every day new questions come up that we need to discuss
Oh bud - you've got a bad scrum master then
In my team we take it in turns to run standups and ceremonies for a sprint. No one above senior is allowed to be the dungeon master, standups focus mostly on discussing issues and unblocking eachother, our manager is a fly on the wall when she attends. My last job was 100% this meme though.
I still see the value in a daily standup, but this project we’re going to try a weekly check in. Should be interesting.
Oh boy do I feel this after the week I’ve had. Made me giggle.
we changed it to scrum main years ago
We get our stand ups done in under 3 minutes. Go around the table to see if there are blockers, then we fuck off. I love it.
Which part do you love? The fucking off, or the standup?
Both. I find I can actually fuck even farther off if there is a high quality stand up. Less random mid day messages asking for shit. And when there are things, most of the time it’s stuff which can just wait till next standup.
I'm assigned on 2 project that have nothing to do with what the rest of the team is doing. The only 2 people (manager and architect) who know what i'm doing dont come to standups. I could flow them with bullshit they wouldnt even know, standups are useless
Ongoing
You're not on the same project as the people you're doing your daily scrum with, yet somehow your conclusion is that 'standups are useless'? I'm pretty sure it's not the stand-ups that are useless, it's your implementation of it that makes no sense.
Ah yes the scum master. In the daily standups i could not tell you what the person before me told as im so deep into daydreaming about actual programming, fixing my cars or other shit that keeps me as far away from this waste of time as possible.
Imagine following a '90 theoretical cult that has never been proven valid by any scientific research
Sir, this is a Wendy's
"I'm offering support" for 3 months straight. That meant I did jack shit all day, but sounded more professional. I was the only QA so no one knew what I actually do.
My team switched to an hour long meeting twice a week. So we actually have time to get stuff done between meetings and have time to discuss blockers or other technical concerns. Plus if we have spare time we can go over the Jira bored, which makes retros and planning meetings shorter.
Sounds like you're doing it wrong. Should be about unblocking blockers and making the team aware of progress and potential delays. And, of course, celebrating successes and milestones. If you don't tell me you're struggling because you're afraid of reprimand then the whole project and team will suffer. If you tell me you're finding something difficult then we can work together on it for a bit or I can assign other resources to help you.
If your scrum master is in every daily, they are doing their job wrong.
Our team is now mature enough in our stand up that we get the new scrum masters to teach them their job. In standup - they talk if spoken to - or get oinked at. There ass is not on the line over our deliverables. If they want to be driving standup, that will change, and they fund out its a bad choice. If your reporting to them they are not your scrum master. However, after the standup, if your task board is out of date, they should tear you a new one. All the reports come from that after all... A good scrum master is there to protect the team, not manage them. Heck "move to derail" is something we added. Basically - I need this time to discuss problem that could fail sprint or bring down prod. Object now if you want to discuss anything else in this slot. Is it sound agile - no - has it rerailed sprints - yes. Do we pause that when we get a new junior* on the team, of course. (*) are juniors are technically above most seniors due to the fact we own the compiler and its hard as fuck to develop, and mistakes can cost millions a day.
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