I have seen both sides of this. I've been on teams which put daily
standups to extremely good use, coordinating interdependent team members
and maintaining focus on the iteration goal, but I've also been on teams
for which daily standups were a largely unhelpful "status reporting"
meeting with no established objectives and no apparent stakeholders.
If we have clearly-defined and well-disseminated iteration objectives, I am
in favor of daily (or otherwise frequent) standups.
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Kevin Smith <ksmith(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks Max. I have a few follow-up questions, to get a
better sense of
your position.
Do you think they aren't needed because of the current size of your
sub-team (2 people), or because of the nature of the work you are doing
right now (prototyping)? Is your opinion likely to change in a month?
Also, have you been on a team that had daily standups? If so, were they
effective there, or did they seem like a waste of time?
Kevin Smith
Agile Coach
Wikimedia Foundation
*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make it a reality.*
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:12 AM, Max Semenik <maxsem.wiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I don't think we're at a point where
daily standups are needed.
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Kevin Smith <ksmith(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
What will be the best way to reach consensus on whether/how to have
daily standups? It's a pretty important topic, and one that seems to have a
fair amount of disagreement so far. Would a meeting be the most efficient
way to discuss options? Or perhaps an IRC chat? Or an email thread (like
this)? I'm open to whatever the group feels most comfortable with. I'm also
open to individuals opting in or out of this discussion, based on your
personal interest level.
Daily standups are a core practice of Scrum, and are generally seen as
an agile best practice. So if we don't have them, it should be a very
conscious decision, and we need to accomplish their objectives in other
ways. The benefits of daily standups that I can think of include:
- Raising blockers (including to the Product Owner and process
facilitator[1])
- Helping developers stay focused on priority work
- Informing the Product Owner of status from day to day
- Team cohesion; daily social connection
There are concerns about having daily standups with remotely distributed
teams in multiple timezones, but other WMF teams have managed to work
around those. Another argument against daily standups is that each sub-team
is too small to get much benefit. However, that discounts the importance of
frequently sharing information with other stakeholders (notably the PO and
process facilitator).
So....how should we proceed?
[1] If we were doing Scrum, this would be the "Scrum Master".
Kevin Smith
Agile Coach
Wikimedia Foundation
*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make it a reality.*
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Best regards,
Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])
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