Daily stand-up == Daily interruption

08 Jan 2015

This is a response to Drew’s article Why you need a daily standup. The quotes below are all from Drew’s article (unless otherwise linked and attributed).

Here’s the lead in:

A developer from a client team recently asked me why we would need daily stand-ups for the team. “That seems a bit too granular,” he said. At MojoTech, we employ daily stand-ups as an essential part of our development process. I’ve read a few articles and seen a few videos about the benefits of the agile/scrum process, but I’d like to share what we see here at MojoTech.

Yep, I’m the developer in his story. I’ll preface this by saying I have never done daily stand-ups, not ever… so obviously I have no personal experience with them. I’ve also done mostly solo (or duo) development for like 99% of my real programming career, so my only real “stand-ups” were when I needed to stretch my legs or take a bathroom break.

If you already believe in daily stand-ups I have no premonition that I’ll convince you otherwise (though I do link to a great article further down that might help). If you’re like me and just about to get sucked into them for the first time I’d like to offer some thoughts and an alternative view of the universe.

In a standup, each developer and designer answers three questions: What did you do yesterday? What are you working on now? What challenges and blocks do you have?

Seems like it would be easy enough for the entire team to answer those questions in a blog like format that every one could skim when convenient (daily or not)… The idea reminds me of the old “Journal” feature of Backpack and how 37signals would use it to keep everyone informed:

The Backpack Journal has become an integral part of our work day. We’re checking it all the time to see what everyone is working on and what’s been finished. We don’t have to bother each other to find out what everyone is up to. It’s a huge interruption saver (and we know how interruption is the enemy of productivity).

Ok, now back to Drew’s post:

But why are stand-ups so important? First and foremost, stand-ups facilitate communication and knowledge transfer between team members.

So without stand-ups we’d lose the important real-time communication element… except…

Given the short format, we have no time for full-fledged discussions, and we often use “Let’s take this off-line,” when necessary, to create a real discussion on a given topic, usually as a thread in Basecamp or Slack.

…most of the time those discussions don’t take place inside the stand-up in the first place. So if the stand-up is more for just sharing short updates of what people are working on then why not use a medium better suited to that without the requirement of getting everyone in a room (on a call, on a Hangout, etc) at the exact same time, every single day?

The daily update ensures that our clients have the highest level of visibility into what we have built, what we are building, and what we need from them.

I can certainly imagine demanding clients wanting daily updates, but I thought we were talking about daily stand-ups, not daily updates?

Let me be clear. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of the great points Drew makes… He tries to really hammer home the value proposition: building trust, interaction, knowledge transfer, reducing risk, making sure everyone stays on the same page. (thats me paraphrasing a bit)

But couldn’t his post have just as easily been titled “Why you need good team communication”? In fact you can almost search and replace /(daily)? stand-up/ with “good team communication” and the entire logic and clarity of the entire piece is still perfectly intact. Stand-ups might be one way to achieve that goal, but great team communication does not require daily stand-ups. Meetings are interruption, even short meetings.

Plus, it’s not at all trendy. Radio shows have been replaced by podcasts. Radio music has been replaced by streaming. Broadcast TV has been replaced by streaming. Checking your favorite sites constantly for updates has been replaced by RSS and feed readers. Daily newspapers once ruled the world. Look how that turned out. The trend is ever towards time-shifting. Same great taste, fewer calories.

Another of our team brought up a good point:

If the observers won’t have the option to ask questions or otherwise interrupt - which is the way some teams run their Stand-ups - perhaps someone can record or otherwise log the Stand-ups for the time-shifted review of stakeholders/observers.

Great idea. A record. Great for anyone not present. I’m simply suggesting taking that idea one step further… time-shift the entire stand-up.

One of the big reasons I love this whole independent developer gig is the flexibility and time shifting (of life, not just content) it allows. For over a decade now I’ve been able to make my clients happy without pre-scheduled daily meetings. Yes, you must make time to communicate with clients. Yes, you must do that well. Yes, you have to do good work. And I’ll be honest here… I’ve been craving a little more routine for my life in 2015, but… 10am. Every. Single. Day. YIKES. That is the very last thing I want to permanently add to the calendar. ¹

If you want to see a more reasoned response try Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them. A little taste:

Because it’s the information that’s great: the meetings are time-sinks.

All meetings are terrible. I don’t think this is news to anybody – meetings are a necessary evil. They’re often meandering, only sometimes productive, and they always interrupt what each and every one of the meeting participants were already doing (which, ostensibly, is what they’re getting paid to do in the first place).

Typically, people try to reconcile this fact with their need for a daily meeting by trying to enforce a strict structure. “The meeting will only last 15 minutes,” they say; “we won’t actually discuss anything, go have discussions after the meeting.” Before long, arcane rules evolve about people with stopwatches, and pigs and chickens, and the daily meetings have taken on a life of their own.

The problem I have with this is that everyone is so bent on trying to minimize the interruption factor for these meetings that they forget an important fact: the only benefit to having a meeting is the face-to-face discussion that it allows for. Or, to put it another way: if you’re structuring your meeting around trying to eliminate anything that isn’t a two-minute “this is what I did/am doing/am having trouble with” update, why are you having a meeting at all?

He also offers some very real alternatives to daily stand-ups. In fact, it’s so great I’m just going to shut up now and you should go read it. Yes, now.

So what am I going to do? I’m going to finish writing this blog post, send it out into the ether, and then cross my fingers. Other than a pretty great pre-college education (that I mostly have my mother to thank for - go home schooling!), and a good solid helping of brains that the universe saw fit to bestow me with, that’s all I’ve ever really done anyways. ²

Oh, and of course I’ll suggest some alternatives. ³

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Update: I proofed and edited the article a lot more than I did the title… so no surprise as soon as I publish I realize it doesn’t say at all what I wanted it to… hence the slug differing from the new title.