But in 15 years, any time a standup was below that target, people commented on how unusual it was to be done already.
The standup is either early enough in the morning that it becomes a passive aggressive way to get people to show up 15 minutes early to work (because if you try to show up on time, you'll be late for a short meeting, essentially missing it), or it is late enough that early risers have to avoid flow state tasks early in the morning or also miss the meeting.
If you are in the middle of something, a 15 minute meeting clears working memory every bit as much as a 3 hour meeting. So if you're going to lose your spot, you might as well get something else out of it. Which contributes to the "but it's never 15 minutes" phenomenon.
I just got out of my team's standup. MY team has 8 people.
The standup lasted 6 minutes. I think the people who complain about this, are the ones who have a reason to complain. You don't hear the success stories.
> I just got out of my team's standup. MY team has 8 people. The standup lasted 6 minutes. I think the people who complain about this, are the ones who have a reason to complain. You don't hear the success stories.
I'm not sure if I'd count a 6 minute standup as a success story. My guess is the only person deriving any value from it is some kind of manager who's tracking status, and pulling everyone into a meeting room to do that is mainly just a convenience for that person.
The kind of information that can be conveyed in less than 1 minute per person is likely information that can be collected less disruptively in other ways.
From my perspective as a developer, the best "standups" were the ones that actually deviated from orthodoxy, where we talked about some technical issue or something.
There are many templates for failure, and the funny part is that often the people who contribute to the failure are the ones complaining. But in all cases a good scrum master should be picking up on this and fixing it.
Most typical one is that a team member wants to go deep into details about a task which isn't important and not the case. And after explaining for 10 mins about how they where brilliant in so many ways, they complain when the rest of the team "wastes" their time spending 5 min in total explaining why that brilliant feature was actually not needed which is why it wasn't on the board and no-one asked for it etc. The solution here is to repeat time and time again what the purpose of the meeting is, and cutting people off mid explanation when they go outside their timebox Note though, don't do individual timeboxes unless you are facing this specific issue, it's not good overall but sometimes you need to correct behavior.
Then there are cases where team members aren't paying attention to others and complain the stand-up is wasteful because they never learn anything new anyways, but when you talk to other team members that person spends the rest of they day asking questions that where already answered at the daily. Obvious here you need to do some coaching for that specific member, but I've found it also helps to let them not do their own points, either skip them completely or do them for them. My experience is that it's often coupled to that person going through what they need to say and forgetting to listen.
And on and on. There are so many cases where teams need to correct bad habits rather than complain about the stand-up being there. But sadly the retrospective is often the first thing to go out the window on teams, and they never get to discussing overall how the process is going, and then the daily stand-up gets changed into a 30 min status meeting, and people start hating it.
LPT: schedule your standup for the 15 min before lunch. It’s an almost automatic way to ensure that it finishes quickly. No one wants to be the one that’s making teammates hangry. It also means the meeting never interrupts a developer’s flow since they were going to break for lunch anyways.
Why do you think the daily stand-up should be the days starting point? That's not a requirement and not at all practical. If you have to skip a stand-up some day because of a dentist appointment or other meeting, do you just not do anything for the rest of the day?
Um, no. My day starts at 7:30 or 8:00 am. Standup is at 11am. I'm about 1/2 done with the day when standup happens. Other folks on my team start work at 10:00 am, so it's closer to the start of the day. I prefer having 1/2 day to get stuff done by the time standup rolls around.
Have you forgotten to have retrospectives? Yes, the first 2 weeks, the stand-ups is badly place, then the team talks about it and chose a different time. (Remember the team decides the time, not management or Product owner), management only gets to decide that you are doing scrum, which means you need to have the daily stand-up.
If you've goon 15 years without any stand-up being under 15 min, then you are doing something wrong. Is your team absurdly large? Is your scrum-master not fluent in scrum? Does no-one in your company understand how a time-box works? Or do you insist on bringing up lengthy technical discussions that you could perfectly well take with the 1-2 people involved outside of the stand-up?
There are tons of ways to do it wrong, and pretty much every single one comes back to people not understanding what the stand-up is and isn't for.
It's popular to shit on scrum, but a lot of the criticism comes out like someone going "Programming in C is rubbish, it always throws segfaults, and it's impossible to create good software in a programming language that isn't pure functional"
It's an opinion sure, but it's based off of being bad at coding C and preferring to code in Haskell, where you might ask the person if they had considered actually learning C before shitting on it.
> If you are in the middle of something, a 15 minute meeting clears working memory every bit as much as a 3 hour meeting.
Getting interrupted for a 5 min talk with a colleague is just as interrupting to your flow. Don't pretend to claim that everyday in your 15 years of scrum you have accomplished absolutely nothing on a day if there was both a daily standup, lunch, and a person asked you question.
Yes interruptions are bad and should be minimized.. which is why having 15 min condensed to get everyone aligned is better than having 5 people dropping by randomly to ask "did you commit the feature yet?" "Was it me or you who was supposed to do X" "You do know that I'm waiting for you to finish Y right?" "Are you waiting on me to do Z, cause I prefer doing X first, but no-one needs that yet".
And again, if a team has more than 15 min total of those kinds of interactions during a day, you need to reflect and improve. If you have less than 15min, then great, everything is cleared up after the daily scrum.
Agile retrospectives are supposed to include discussion about switching up your process to deal with a problem.
Lean management is about picking a small number of processes that are easy to remember and keep backlogs ('inventory') from becoming a liability. And then sticking with them.
I've heard it argued by a former mentor, and people who write books, that Scrum is/has become a Lean process. I still haven't found a counterargument that I think will convince any of them.
A process that is meant to engage everyone in fixing everything but the sacred cow draws attention to the sacred cow. The dissonance is something that people who spend all day thinking in terms of logic prefer not to look at, and so this makes some people angry, others sad, and everyone uncomfortable.
> Have you forgotten to have retrospectives? Yes, the first 2 weeks, the stand-ups is badly place, then the team talks about it and chose a different time. (Remember the team decides the time, not management or Product owner), management only gets to decide that you are doing scrum, which means you need to have the daily stand-up.
Sure, that's the orthodoxy, and assumes the team is actually empowered to do that, but agile-as-practiced often doesn't actually address the problems that it was supposed to solve. In many ways it just replaced one set of ceremonies with another, leaving the fundamentals unchanged.
But in 15 years, any time a standup was below that target, people commented on how unusual it was to be done already.
The standup is either early enough in the morning that it becomes a passive aggressive way to get people to show up 15 minutes early to work (because if you try to show up on time, you'll be late for a short meeting, essentially missing it), or it is late enough that early risers have to avoid flow state tasks early in the morning or also miss the meeting.
If you are in the middle of something, a 15 minute meeting clears working memory every bit as much as a 3 hour meeting. So if you're going to lose your spot, you might as well get something else out of it. Which contributes to the "but it's never 15 minutes" phenomenon.