this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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My most successful standups have been like:
“Okay, we’re all here. Anyone wanna take a look at anything together?”
“I need some help with XYZ. Alice, can you take a look?”
“Sure.”
“Anything else? No? Alright, let’s do it.”
Typically less than 2 minutes of whole-team time, at our desks. Really just a reserved pivot point where it’s okay to interrupt each other’s tasks to ask for some pairing time. Sometimes an unofficial second one would happen after lunch.
I find daily stand ups are completely useless because most of the useful communication can just be done by the people involved directly over email, messaging, or just talking to each other. I find it's useful to have a whole team meeting maybe like once a week just to see where everyone is at and how different parts of the project are going. There's very little reason to do that every single day.
Standups are ok if they stay fast and they are at the start or end of a day. The forced sync points are also more important in remote settings. This is especially true for new or junior employees.
I don't find whole team standups have much value aside from being checkpoints. In my experience, it's best to split up projects into tasks that can be worked on in isolation. People directly working on those tasks can organically figure out how they want to get them done and communicate with each other. The sync points can then be used to check the overall state of the project and to track critical path tasks across teams to make sure nobody is blocked.
That really only works with a mature and experienced team, which is great when you have one.
I find you need to have at least a few experienced people on any effective team otherwise it's just blind leading the blind. Pairing junior people with seniors to act as mentors tends to work well. It also lets senior developers grow. I find this works well because people tend to enjoy having ownership of their tasks.