People don't always realize that their tasks is blocking someone else.
Often times when engineers are blocked, they work on a lower priority tasks while they wait. Sometimes that is a good thing but other times they get off track.
Spending 10 minutes every day resolving the communication and prioritization mismatches early helps deliver software faster.
With just weekly meetings, these issues could go unresolved for days.
Yes, exactly. A lot of people don't do a good job communicating this sort of thing. It helps to have someone else ask you what's blocking your progress.
I mean, c'mon. We're not children. We're professional developers. If anyone I worked with waited even a day to raise a blocker on an urgent task, I'd think much less of their abilities.
It's another trade off, though: do you annoy your developers for what I believe is just a slight increase in velocity?
While I do know some developers who like (or at least get enough value from to tolerate) standup, I know many more who find them an annoying waste of time. For teams that do standup first thing in the morning, it even makes them want to go to work less. How's that for starting the day on the wrong foot?
that meeting is supposed to only take 5 minutes, and it is only to discover the issue, not to address it. addressing the issue happens after the meeting with only the people who are actually involved.
5 minutes or 5 hours, an interruption is an interruption. My ideal day to be fully productive would've no meetings at all. I don't need each day to be an ideal day, just once a week (or more if at all possible). However, when there is an scheduled interruption each day every day, guess what?
Also, anything that feels like micro-management will be considered micro-management. A daily meeting to give a status report looks a lot like that.
> at the beginning or end of the day? or before or after lunch break?
That could work if everyone gets at work at the same time (+/-30m) or if everyone takes lunch at the same time (+/-30m), which has not been the case in most of the companies I've worked for. It'd be better at the end of the day, assuming no one does extra hours, but then it's even less useful or at least it becomes obvious it's all about status-updates.
> micro-management is if i tell you every single step that you should do, but a daily status-update is not
It's a micro-management enabler. There's no way to know if it's used to pressure someone to deliver, or to do things a certain way, without working in that team.
The bottom line is that stand-ups are of very questionable use. There are just better, more effective ways to communicate what everyone is working on, what things are done, and when someone is blocked. i.e: ticket assignments, PRs, sporadic side meetings, asynchronous communication (Slack, emails, etc), etc.
It'd be better at the end of the day, assuming no one does extra hours, but then it's even less useful or at least it becomes obvious it's all about status-updates.
i disagree that doing it in the evening makes it less useful.
it shouldn't matter much if i report resterdays work and my plan for today, or i report todays work and my plan for tomorrow.
and sure, people doing scrum wrong can use this as a way to enable micromanagement. but as has been mentioned elsewhere, the alternative is managers running around and interrupting you at will. it's not reasonable to blame daily standups for that and reject it just because it gets abused by some.
the kitchen knife analogy comes to mind...
i have had nothing but positive experience with daily standups. they help me focus and not spend days trailing off on a tangent or failing to ask for help because i am the junior, to shy to ask questions, or worse, harbor the feeling that no-one cares about my work. in other words, for me the daily standups acted as a team-integrator.
as a team leader and manager, daily standups help me be uptodate on what's happening, and save me from having to invest time to check myself. if anything, daily standups help me avoid micromanaging, because they satisfy my anxiety about the work being done without needing to be intrusive.
5 minutes of your time, that you can prepare for, so you are not surprised by it, and you'll be left alone for the rest of the day.
> Often times when engineers are blocked, they work on a lower priority tasks while they wait. Sometimes that is a good thing but other times they get off track.
Not in my experience. Most developers I work with will raise issues in Slack as they come up. That's part of what being an owner of your tasks is about: communicating issues early and often.
In this case I think it's the opposite: most junior developers I know are much quick (sometimes a little too quick) to ask for help when they're stuck, while a senior developer's ego might get in the way of raising a flag.
People don't always realize that their tasks is blocking someone else.
Often times when engineers are blocked, they work on a lower priority tasks while they wait. Sometimes that is a good thing but other times they get off track.
Spending 10 minutes every day resolving the communication and prioritization mismatches early helps deliver software faster.
With just weekly meetings, these issues could go unresolved for days.