<story><title>The pointlessness of daily standups</title><url>https://codethrasher.com/post/2019-10-06-the-pointlessness-of-daily-standups/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>solidasparagus</author><text>Depends on the size of your team. Once you get to 10+ people in a team, it&amp;#x27;s hard to spread information effectively with 1:1 communication. What I&amp;#x27;ve liked about standups in teams of that size is the opportunity to kick of unexpected brainstorming because you mention what you&amp;#x27;re working on and someone mentions they have expertise&amp;#x2F;ideas in the area that you didn&amp;#x27;t know about.&lt;p&gt;There are of course many ways to run a productive team.</text></item><item><author>alxlaz</author><text>But as the article points out, knowing daily where everyone was with their tasks isn&amp;#x27;t something that needs a formal meeting. I&amp;#x27;ve worked in highly integrated teams, too, and easily got by with one team meeting a week.</text></item><item><author>tsimionescu</author><text>&amp;gt; What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other&lt;p&gt;I think this is the key difference between teams that like stand-ups and teams that don&amp;#x27;t. In the teams I&amp;#x27;ve worked in, our work was highly relevant to one another, so knowing daily where everyone was with their tasks is usually interesting to everyone.</text></item><item><author>vfc1</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked in many teams that used standups, the general feeling was that they were utterly useless.&lt;p&gt;Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them.&lt;p&gt;I even saw once a developer on his last day throwing the speaker&amp;#x27;s token (a teddy bear) to the trash can LOL!&lt;p&gt;Everyone on the teams I worked on seemed to think that standups where useless, this showed clearly through the team body language and tone in those meetings.&lt;p&gt;Its an interruption on your work just when you just got started in the morning, now you have to stop and go to a meeting.&lt;p&gt;What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other, and if you need help you ask it anyway on the spot, there is no need to wait for the next standup for that.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to come up with different things to say on the meetings, as there aren&amp;#x27;t many things that have changed since yesterday.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sandos</author><text>In my experience, 10 is way too many for daily standups! Thats when they start getting dragged out from 5 minutes to a 45 minute snore-fest, hearing every little needless detail from someone elses problem that I have no need for!&lt;p&gt;I find the team needs to be at most 6 people, otherwise you probably need to split the team for daily standups to work.</text></comment>
<story><title>The pointlessness of daily standups</title><url>https://codethrasher.com/post/2019-10-06-the-pointlessness-of-daily-standups/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>solidasparagus</author><text>Depends on the size of your team. Once you get to 10+ people in a team, it&amp;#x27;s hard to spread information effectively with 1:1 communication. What I&amp;#x27;ve liked about standups in teams of that size is the opportunity to kick of unexpected brainstorming because you mention what you&amp;#x27;re working on and someone mentions they have expertise&amp;#x2F;ideas in the area that you didn&amp;#x27;t know about.&lt;p&gt;There are of course many ways to run a productive team.</text></item><item><author>alxlaz</author><text>But as the article points out, knowing daily where everyone was with their tasks isn&amp;#x27;t something that needs a formal meeting. I&amp;#x27;ve worked in highly integrated teams, too, and easily got by with one team meeting a week.</text></item><item><author>tsimionescu</author><text>&amp;gt; What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other&lt;p&gt;I think this is the key difference between teams that like stand-ups and teams that don&amp;#x27;t. In the teams I&amp;#x27;ve worked in, our work was highly relevant to one another, so knowing daily where everyone was with their tasks is usually interesting to everyone.</text></item><item><author>vfc1</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked in many teams that used standups, the general feeling was that they were utterly useless.&lt;p&gt;Except for management, as standups are a simple way of keeping psychological pressure on developers and squeezing every last bit out of them.&lt;p&gt;I even saw once a developer on his last day throwing the speaker&amp;#x27;s token (a teddy bear) to the trash can LOL!&lt;p&gt;Everyone on the teams I worked on seemed to think that standups where useless, this showed clearly through the team body language and tone in those meetings.&lt;p&gt;Its an interruption on your work just when you just got started in the morning, now you have to stop and go to a meeting.&lt;p&gt;What people are working on is usually unrelated and of no interest to each other, and if you need help you ask it anyway on the spot, there is no need to wait for the next standup for that.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to come up with different things to say on the meetings, as there aren&amp;#x27;t many things that have changed since yesterday.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andreygrehov</author><text>What’s the point of knowing what the rest of 10 people are working on? You won’t remember all of it anyway. There is no need to add so much cognitive load to your brain every single morning. Engineers should imho start their day with clear mind.</text></comment>