Is The Daily Stand-Up Harming Your Team?
NOTE: I have deprecated this version of this post. I have put the new version at:
New Version of Are Daily Stand-Ups Harming Your Team?
This original post was not as clear as I had hoped, and I don’t mean for anyone to get the wrong idea. Thanks to Ron Jeffries and George Dinwiddie for their converstaions that helped me better organize my thinking and the purpose of this post.
Ron Jeffries:
I’d bet a bit that if you ask each person to write down two or three important things that happened yesterday, they would not all write the same things. And I’d bet a bit that at least some of the things written down, not everyone on the team would know.
The telephone game is real. Not everyone will remember everything they need to. I’d bet i could find a significant lapse in a few days that a quick standup would have prevented.
I could be wrong. You could have the first team in the universe with perfect communication. That’s just not how I’d bet.
28 December 2012, 7:53 pmWoody Z.:
Hey Ron – thanks for visiting and commenting!
My main point is that we should strive for “continuous communication”. I try to follow the basic “XP” tenet of “if something is good, what if we did more of it?”
So… if daily “team alignment” is good, what if we could have continuous team alignment? What whould that look like? How could we move closer to that? Once we have it, do we still need daily stand-ups?
28 December 2012, 8:53 pmGeorge Dinwiddie:
Woody,
It’s fine with me if you’ve found that things are working fine, for your team and in your situation, without standups. But teams that are working well together can still benefit from standups. Not every person is in every conversation. Even when promiscuously pairing, not every person is up to date on every code change. Not everything that affects the team happens within the team room. These are only a few, but there are many reasons why a well-functioning team can get great benefit from a daily standup. I’ve witnessed it.
It’s hardly useless, in my experience. Even with well-functioning teams, there are things that someone didn’t pick up on in the team room. Maybe they didn’t hear it. Maybe they didn’t notice the significance. Maybe they were in the bathroom at the time. It doesn’t matter the reason, things fall through the cracks. The daily standup is an inexpensive ritual for catching many of these things.
If a group is not functioning as a team, then I agree they’ll get benefit by addressing that. But I don’t think the standup contributes to poor teaming. And I certainly wouldn’t say it’s harmful to the team. Nor would I say it’s a symptom of poor teaming, having seen instances where it was not.
BTW, I’ve heard people make the same arguments about retrospectives–that if you pay attention all the time, you don’t need a retrospective. People don’t seem to function well that way. The rhythms and cadences are helpful for noticing things that slip by in the moment, and for seeing things in a different light when examined periodically and deliberately. They may transform if you’re doing a good job every day, but I think people are fooling themselves when they say they no longer can provide value.
– George
29 December 2012, 5:54 pm