Pablo Fernandez

Quick definition:

A standup is a type of meeting commonly done in software development teams and now expanding to other knowledge working teams. During the standup meeting you say what you’ve done, what you are planning to do, and whether you need help or are blocked. Normally they happen daily and they are called standups because traditionally were supposed to stand up in front of your desk and just share with everyone else. The idea is that by standing up, people would be brief… that is often not the case (I worked at a place where standups would take between 20 to 60 minutes for about 6 people).

The idea of the standup is that the whole team is on the same page, but in my opinion, most developers zone out until it’s their turn, they say their bit, and then they zone out again. The only person paying attention to everyone is the manager. And generally there’s nothing bad with that except that we are wasting people’s times.

There’s a problem with the standup though, which is, at what time is it supposed to happen?

• 9? too early for most developers
• 10? ok for most, but those that show up at 9 will do nothing until the standup, because why bother getting in the zone if you are getting to get pushed out of it.
• 11? now almost everybody spends most of the morning doing nothing because of the upcoming interruption
• 12? just before lunch? maybe… at least people will keep it brief! But those that eat later will get annoyed by the interruption.
• Any time in the afternoon? are we talking about today/tomorrow instead of yesterday/today? most people don’t plan tomorrow’s work and thus the what-will-you-do? part will be of low quality. Oh… and those that are not morning people will get their most productive time interrupted.

The solution is very straightforward: asynchronous standup. People just give a brief report to the manager, but in a public space, about their plan for the day and what happened yesterday. I guess you could do it face to face, but that’s awkward. Text asynchronous standup are much better and they are friendly towards distributed work. They have a second advantage: track record.

The standup is one of my most useful tools for management. I don’t expect members of the team to read each others report, but they are all public. If I notice a conflict or a potential synergy, I may ask someone to look at someone else’s report.

If I don’t understand something, I drop a question. If someone has been working on the same thing every day for too long, specially if they mentioned they were close to finish, I have a chat with them (could be a task is problematic, blocked, a drop in performance, etc). If someone is planning on doing something that shouldn’t happen, I jump immediately.

As a manager, it’s yet another opportunity for me to give encouragement to individual members of my team about their work, to thank them for doing the crappy tasks that nobody likes, etc. I sometimes push myself to do that, because otherwise the standup could start feeling like a useless bureaucracy, writing something that nobody ever reads, a thankless task. I want my team to know I’m reading it, paying attention, finding places to help, etc.

I generally use Slack for text communication for my teams and my favorite app for asynchronous standups in Geekbot. It’s good if you are together, essential if you are distributed.