Are we sure async Daily Stand-ups are a good idea? 🤔
As remote work reshapes our routines, async Daily Stand-ups emerge as a tempting alternative. But are they truly a game-changer?
Introduction
Hello, developers! 🚀
In this issue, my battle against going async for everything when working remotely takes another step 😃: I will talk to you about Daily Stand-up meetings!
This practice is one of the most used (and abused) among all the Agile practices, and it has been misinterpreted and misused for a lot of years (the usual example is that it becomes an update meeting) — and now that working remotely has become very common, a lot of tools that implement an “async” stand-up are used by a lot of teams, adding another misuse of the practice.
Today, I will try to describe what purpose such meetings are supposed to achieve, and why they are important, going back to what I think is one of the most underestimated objectives of Agile: collaboration!
Since I came up with the idea of this post from this post on LinkedIn, and some comments below, you should have a look at it before reading this — I will still make a short intro through it anyway.
The real purpose of a Daily Stand-up meeting
The Daily Stand-up Meeting is one of the most used among all the Agile practices — and also one of the most abused, misused, and misunderstood.
Let’s start with a generic definition: the daily Stand-up is the practice of grouping the team 15 minutes per day in a meeting where everyone takes the word for a minute, typically responding to 3 questions:
- What did I do yesterday?
- What will I do today?
- Do I have any blocker or issue, or do I need any sort of help?
We can sum up the goals of this practice into two things: status updates (question 1) & planning the day (questions 2 and 3): the purpose is to sum up what each of us did yesterday, and then plan the new day of work together.
Over the years, I’ve seen and heard of multiple common anti-patterns in daily stand-up implementation, doesn’t matter if in person or remotely:
- too much focus on the status update: people simply recap what they did yesterday and what they expect to do today, mainly talking to the PM to let him know and eventually discuss blockers
- too much focus on individual work: people are only focused on their moment of speaking, but have no interest in listening to the other members of the team because the work is intended to be individual
- too much focus on the timing: respecting the time frame (typically 15 minutes) becomes more important than achieving the goal of the meeting
- putting it in the middle of the day: as in the LinkedIn post, since people tend to get tired of stand-ups when they are only used as a status update, they start finding solutions to make it less tedious for the team; moving it in the middle of the day typically helps to achieve this, because people thinks “I already hate enough having a status update every day, at least do not force me to arrive early in the morning and talk as a first thing in the day” — understandable, since the meeting is completely non-sense when only focused on status updates.
- going async: a different response that remote teams have to feel tired of status update stand-ups is to make them async; using some online tool, people can send their update at any time and in multiple formats (some use text messages, some use short videos, etc..) without the need to enter a sync meeting; that would be a good idea if the goal of the standup was the status update — but as I already said, that is not the main goal, is just a small part of it.
Those anti-patterns are typically the consequences of a non-ideal approach to Software Development: teams that don’t approach Software Development as a team effort. What most team still does today is to work as individual contributors on a shared codebase: each team member gets a ticket assigned by the PM (doesn’t matter if the P stands for Project or Product here) and works on that for the time required (at least some days, typically). Once they are done, they open a PR, discuss it with others (typically async via GitHub comments), and then merge it.
What Agile, XP, and Lean suggest, each in their way, is a different approach: Software Development works best when done as a team effort work. People should work more closely together, integrating their code more often, and in general, collaborate continuously during the day to ensure the Software achieves business results.
With this in mind, it’s easier to understand what Daily Stand-up should really be about: the main goal is to plan the day.
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Until next time, happy coding! 🤓👩💻👨💻
🙏 Thank you for reading this shortened version of this article. You can enjoy the full version on my blog here.
