Daily Scrum Meeting: A Status Meeting In Disguise?

[@HealthyDev]

Are your daily scrum meetings really helping developers, or just another status meeting? Skip to points: 02:58 Provide A Tool For Realtime Status 03:35 Make Sure The Meeting Is Valuable 06:18 Keep Design Discussions Separate 07:19 Let Developers Use Their "PMOC" 08:28 Keep Ramblers From Wasting Time 10:16 Let Developers Volunteer Answers 11:58 Don't Drill Into Concerns Over Progress

[@matthewsheeran]

Although Agile has merits in its own right it is largely a corporate tool now to put developers on the treadmill to work harder to produce more in less time for the same salary. You, as i have said before, have just got to understand Marx's surplus value theory of labour!

[@LCTesla]

someone once described it as "interviewing to keep your job every morning"

[@ForgottenKnight1]

Lol, that's a very bleak view.

[@ShaunMcCready]

I’ve always felt that scrum was used by management to monitor progress and felt that I was under the gun each time my turn was up, If I repeated the same topics. It always had to look like I was moving forward and completing tasks or you were in trouble. It can even make you fish for the ideas and stretch the truth just to survive it. Horrible feeling.

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks for having the courage to share that. It's absolutely true. I hope management that are still learning to understand what agility is really about, will eventually realize how these twisting of practices are making it hard for people to have the honesty and safety to take the risks needed to be successful. I talked about that some in one of the other videos on the channel that might be relatable based on your feedback, "Is it Safe to Make Mistakes on your Software Project?": kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y5XLfaiEmLKIf9E

[@EverlastGX]

I know the feel

[@nonequivalence1864]

I can relate to this word for word. Such a terrible feeling man.

[@faridguzman91]

omg i felt this so hard man... its so annoying and unnecessarily stressfull, id rather code as a hobby just because of this

[@myentertainment55]

Wow You put this feeling in words perfectly. I would probably screenshot it as a reminder to myself.

[@teamspeak9374]

I'm actually finally in a company where people finally understand how to do scrum. We do the meeting first thing in the day, my team (4-5 people) go into the teams call everyone says if they are stuck on something and what they hope to have done by the end of the day and we go work. It usually takes around 10 minutes tops and the manager immediately cuts off anyone who starts rambling about too many details of what they did yesterday. I wish all companies worked like this, had many miserable experiences in the past unfortunately

[@Yoonalayciangelo]

This is most likely what we also do but meh .. 10mins is still a long time for me lol

[@andrearmstrong3715]

@@Yoonalayciangelo I'm also not a big fan of meetings, but I believe that a well-conducted 10-minutes meeting is still important, as some people tend to not communicate when they are stuck, which ends up being much more costly in the long run. If these meetings are conducted well, you should only have to talk about 30s as a developer, at most.

[@Yoonalayciangelo]

@@andrearmstrong3715 i agree with you, but man i don't know why others cannot admit that they are having a hard time implementing something. If it's because of pride then that sucks.

[@allancg1022]

If the point is just to answer those question why do we even need a meeting. Most of the time I feel like I could just send a message with the answer of those questions. The 3rd questions is pure bs, if anything reporting "blockers" only makes you feel and look bad, since 99% of the time nothing can be done to help and if nobody can do anything about the problem, why bring it up.

[@teamspeak9374]

@@allancg1022 well the point is also to say good morning to everyone (in my case we all work remotely with almost no meetings so its often the only time of the day when I "see" my workmates) Also what I mean by blockers arent things like oh theres a bug I havent figured out, more like team wide issues like this might be a data concern, turns out this is harder so priorities might change for product team, etc. Definitely only things that actually other people should do something about, otherwise nobody cares what you are saying and I just say "working on it" Also I dont think being afraid of "looking bad" is a healthy mindset, if you are stuck on something you should ask for help rather than develop sub optimal solutions because you want to look smart, Just my opinion

[@brianmccormick8328]

My daily scrum is exactly a daily status. It’s sickening. It’s a struggle to make enough progress day to day to sound like you’re making progress. I think of it as a prison count.

[@jwenting]

indeed. And the idea of having managers just call you into their office if they think you're "too slow" makes any one on one with your manager a communist style struggle session where you're being accused of laziness and incompetence and basically won't get out until you acknowledge that you are indeed lazy and incompetent. I've sadly seen that on all too many projects.

[@vyli1]

I don't know, as a developer, I don't care about people telling me what they're working on. I don't need them to tell me, there's Jira for that (or other ticketing system). Or, if I need to know, I'll just ask that person. The only sort of valuable information would be if somebody is blocked and can I help that person? The correct thing to do here is to tell the whole team in a group chat directly in the moment the person got blocked immediately and not wait until the next day's meeting to tell that they're blocked. So even that is stupid. Standups are stupid, developers do not need standups. Management doesn't need standup either. Nobody needs it.

[@vyli1]

@Mesophyl why? I have perfect knowledge of what everyone in my team is doing. If they're blocked, I know that way sooner than earliest stand up meeting. I don't need those meetings to get this information, there are other channels for getting it.

[@vyli1]

@Mesophyl I don't understand, but OK 🙂

[@sasukesarutobi3862]

It depends on the group dynamic of the developers and how they communicate their current work. This might be the case for a team that regularly bounces ideas off one another, or where everyone uses the status tools actively, or if pair programming is a regular and shuffled thing. But there are teams where some or even many of the developers aren't keeping track of what everyone's doing for whatever reason, and especially if there's a lot of interdependency between the items different team members are working on, then scrums can be a useful tool for everyone keeping up to speed on what everyone's working on and how it affects one another.

[@BittermanAndy]

You've never had a case in a standup where you've said "today I'll be working on the widget" and another developer has said "wait, I was about to work on the widget too" and you've said "oh right, let's get together after and make sure we're not treading on each other's toes"? If you've never had that, you've either got a quite extraordinarily efficient team and it's true that you don't need standups - you don't need anything - you have reached a level of development that mere mortals cannot hope to match; or your team is not using the standup for its intended purpose, and are probably tripping over each other in ways that could be avoided if they were.

[@vyli1]

@@BittermanAndy I wouldn't say never, but it is certainly rare. Most of the time I resolve these things in a group chat. Basically I prefer group chat to a stand up.

[@Gabriel-um9hm]

How does this video only have 21.6k views? This should be mandatory watching for any software manager. If each day begins with a long scrum meeting where developers have to defend what they are doing, argue about how a component should be implemented or simply wasting time listening to people talking about irrelevant stuff you can bet that it will have a significant impact on their productivity.

[@antoniocs8873]

01:39 - YES! Not only time wasted hearing about other peoples stuff that I don't care about, also time wasted for productivity. I won't start working seriously until after the scrum meeting. I can't concentrate when I know I'm going to have a forced break. I've been in companies where there were 15+ people in the meeting, all taking 3-4 (sometimes more) to talk about whatever they were doing. This is horrible.

[@maninblack6]

". I can't concentrate when I know I'm going to have a forced break." true, why to dive deep into something if you know you will be interrupted and have to reset almost from the beginning.

[@schoolForAnts]

4 years later and this information is just as valuable today. So glad I've come across your channel. Luckily, my team does a really good job adhering to the stand up and not getting bogged down in additional discussions or status reports, even with 13 of us. We don't usually go over our 15min target, and if we do its usually one or two people hanging back at the end for additional discussions with the our manager.

[@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

What did I do yesterday (or worse last Friday)? I have no idea until I get back to my computer and look at the git log and unsubmitted files. What am I going to do today? Probably continue whatever I was doing or pick a new task to do. Do I really care or pay attention when everyone else is telling what they did or are about to do? Not really. If it's anything important they probably contact me on text chat when the issue occurs, they don't wait until the formal standup anyway. Blockers? In my experience blockers are one of 3 things: 1. I haven't figured out a particular problem yet. So I just continue working on it, or ask someone in text chat if I think they could help. 2. I'm waiting for another developer to finish something, or even more often for the customer to decide what they want or confirm something. In either case, I will just work on something else in the meanwhile and message/email the developer or the project manager or the customer directly to remind them to contact me once the feature/decision is ready, if it takes a long time. So formalized physical standup meetings are pointless. Since text chat is better.

[@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

Also I have hypermobile joints, so standing up for long durations (as stand-up meetings always devolves into 30-40 minute time wasters all the time), really hurt my knees. So I always sit down, on the floor if they insist on having the stand-up away from the chairs. I also have auditory processing issues, so I have a hard time hearing what the others are saying, and I forget most info I get verbally right away. So if they need me to know something they better send it to me in writing anyway. So for me it's just a huge waste of productive time with no benefits whatsoever.

[@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

I find asynchronous like email, or optionally asynchronous media like text chat (you can chat to someone offline and they can respond later) is a good thing. That way I can report whatever I did and am going to do as soon as I start working and the other developers can report whenever they come in to work, and I can read that after lunch or before leaving without it interrupting my flow. I'm an early riser, at least compared to most developers, so I will start working about 8:30 or 9:00, while most others I've worked with starts showing up in between 10:00 and 12:00, and I eat lunch at 11:00. So when we had physical stand-ups, it usually was scheduled at a "compromise" time like 10:00 or 10:30 meaning, I got "nothing real done" before lunch (as less than 3 hours is too short to really get into flow. And also at least a couple of developers was always late. (And of course that also means those who are actually on time gets to hear the rant about being late at least twice a day, while those who are late may only get this lecture only once a day. That's just unfair).

[@jc8ew]

An addition to that, Having any managers (specially the pointy-haired one) in a daily standup, will make some members really verbose / More BullSh**. (SM's duty to handle this) This is to showcase their skills/items on how good they think they are and it slowly destroys the daily standup meeting.

[@HealthyDev]

Great addition. I’ve been guilty of this in the past myself. It’s hard not to feel pressure to “toot your own horn” with management present. I much prefer giving managers a landing page or view in a tool so they can stay out of these meetings. They are so valuable when focused on developers!!

[@nonequivalence1864]

Yo I don't know if you reply or read these comments but I just want to say thank you for touching on this topic. This video hits the nail on the head of how I've been feeling, literally word for word. Daily standup is for product managers to micromanage developers and the QA team. I hate how they just sit back and listen to updates. I bet PMs come into the meetings thinking: "Let's see what he/she is up to. Let's see if they're struggling. I enjoy watching these peasants struggle". I truly believe they're sadists and enjoy watching people go through tough times knowing they're getting paid almost as much as us engineers. The "Oh shoot, I'm next" and "What am I gonna say" parts are so relatable - I almost threw up. Thanks for your channel. I can't explain how grateful I am that I came across this channel and video.

[@DayDreamingFullTime]

10:56 is so true! My previous managers would have a set order for people to begin providing feedback. Usually the most senior would go first. This would add so much pressure to the rest of us in the room. As my turn would to speak would get closer I would become nervous and recite my feedback like some kind of speech. My current scrum master allows everyone to volunteer and speak up when ever we're comfortable too.

[@HealthyDev]

It always makes me happy to hear when someone has a bad experience with some agile or scrum practice but then gets an opportunity to do it right. Nice!

[@munawarb]

@Healthy Software Developer I love your channel. I'm so glad you're giving real tips instead of just the "software development sucks, I'm jaded, so I'm going to tell everyone I'm jaded and why I quit" approach.

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks, I never felt I had the option to quit since I was supporting a growing family and honestly still love it. Dealing with the expectations is the hard part, just trying to help people not lose hope. 👍

[@ataru4]

At one software house I worked at a few years ago we had 3 scrum meetings a day, and they went on too long as they often included video conferencing with devs abroad. They also had large screens next to each team with real time team and individual tracking shown. They were obsessed with this stuff.

[@HealthyDev]

Bummer :(. Yeah project managers can fall into the trap of thinking the work actually gets done in these meetings...

[@someguy007]

man your videos are sooooo underrated. I guess its coz you're speaking truths. Somehow people have fallen in love with Shiny glittery lies and sensational deceptions. While the truth tellers are in some hidden dark corner. Thanks for being truthful and real man, some of us still believe in truth and righteousness.

[@HealthyDev]

You have no idea how much that means to me. Thanks for the support! 👍

[@tqian86]

I completely agree. It's also content that stands the test of time. I'm watching this 2018 video in 2022 and every bit of it is more true today.

[@99living]

I am a product owner and this video helps me stay calm.

[@limouzine1529]

Keeping team size small is one of the best strategies.

[@tr-vh3ec]

Thanks so much for this, I think I'm guilty of being non-dev manager (I come from product ownership and only have very basic coding knowledge) that ppl are complaining about in the comments, so this is invaluable for me. I will incorporate this into the way we work.

[@RyuSaikou]

Found you on reddit, just wanted to say thanks for this. It's really helping me make better talking points for how many different ways we have incorrectly implemented agile.

[@HealthyDev]

Happy to help. After working with so many broken teams as a consultant, I took my message to KZbin to try and reach more people. If you have any other feedback or ideas for future videos, feel free to hit me up. I hope things get better for you!

[@buixote]

The Harvard BUsiness School seems to publish articles every 5 years or so about how much time is wasted in meetings. On solution to this problem is *stop going*. "Oh, hey, man, missed you at the Meeting." "Oh yea, sorry, I was busy doing work." ;-)

[@bushbuddyplatypus]

Aren't those 3 questions for the benefit of management? What would be 3 questions relevant to the developers? 1. What am I building? 2. How am I building it? 3. What external dependencies are missing? This is a prompt for required discussion later.

[@HealthyDev]

Good insights. I think the original daily standup meeting questions were good for developers who didn’t always work with each other every day to sync up. Of course we know the management side of the industry shifted the intent and focus of them (unintentionally?) over time. I’m not sure if you watched my interview with Woody Zuill yet, or the second interview I did with Scott Nimrod right after. We get into some of the side effects of teams that do mob programming. There’s really no need any more for daily standup meetings on these teams. I realize this is only a very small percentage of the industry today, but it looks like a promising direction to explore. YMMV

[@errrzarrr]

questions relevant to developers are those that are precisely forbiden: documentation, design, interfaces, algorithms, debugging, testing, tools, etc.

[@eligorniak9699]

Why did you stop doing videos??? Came back!

[@HealthyDev]

Had to take a hiatus to get my life back in order. I will be back this year! Thanks for the support.

[@kevinlao3690]

@@HealthyDev Hope everything is all well on your end. Please do take care of yourself in these troubled times. I appreciate all those videos you have created thus far and am looking forward to your return if you choose to do so. Stay safe

[@jasonphillips8933]

@@HealthyDev Glad to hear you're coming back. Just discovered your channel and it's been great to show me I'm not alone in the stuff I've noticed as a novice dev. Best dev channel on here, hands down. Hope you're doing well

[@centerfield6339]

@@HealthyDev is 2021 the year you'll be back? Miss your insights. Hope life is better.

[@nickfifield1]

As an agile coach, i find your videos excellent.

[@HealthyDev]

I appreciate that! Thanks Nick.

[@someguy3176]

Developers should talk to each other throughout the day and make awesome things collaboratively. As soon as you give that process a name, the scrum masters reach out their wavy, soul-sucking tentacles and find a way to make it miserable.

[@Meritumas]

Couldn’t agree more

[@Meritumas]

Unless developers in a so-called team work solo on separate projects, manager is interrogating individuals and at the end of the scrum devs need to write explanations why some tasks will be moved to the next sprint... mind, no customers are involved in any planning, no planning whatsoever, no demos whatsoever.

[@indrayudhroy9415]

@Johnny Five those are worded perfectly, and technically to boot! The way these people keep saying they were clueless about anything more complex than a Jira ticket -- is laughable.

[@ZenithA11]

Must have had some awful Scrum Master(s)

[@someguy3176]

@@ZenithA11 I wasn't aware there were other kinds.

[@mockdux]

I have been told to "take it offline" which feels a lot like "stop talking" in a scrum. Sometimes it is exactly what I need to hear. Police this. A good developer forgives.

[@rogermouton2273]

All this is fantastic advice, based on what actually happens when teams attempt scrum. But a repeated problem I've come across is that organisations don't even understand what scrum is before they tell people to implement it. More specifically, I've repeatedly seen situations where teams of developers who are working on things that are completely independent of what other devs are doing have to attend a stand up. So, they end up giving status updates on stuff that doesn't even have any effect on what other people in the meeting are doing anyway. So, management fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of the stand up, which is to allow time for people working on related, complex pieces of work to communicate where they're at. I've also found that the 3 questions never get asked. One of the reasons is that, even though it seems like a great theory, it turns out that no one is really interested in what you did yesterday - I mean, what counts for communication purposes is what you're doing, not what you've done.

[@manishm9478]

Yes! The only times i have found standups really useful have been at hackathon or startup weekend type events, when we needed to come together as a team to check in how it was going and help each other out. In reality in most companies, teams are much less tightly coupled than that, or try to multitask a lot. So coordinating tightly is not needed.

[@allessandro989]

Thank you so much for that video. I am currently not in a huge dev team where I have this issue, but I have been. So thanks for all that arguments I can use to push someones mind in the right direction in the future.

[@HealthyDev]

No problem, hope it helps down the road. 👍

[@1MinuteFlipDoc]

It's mainly been a status meeting in my experience.

[@Meritumas]

1MinuteFlipDoc same for me

[@thecklaelongefobis4501]

The best video I have ever washed about daily stand up

[@sangeetamisra2816]

Please keep up the great work. If find your vlogs really helpful.

[@HealthyDev]

+Sangeeta Misra thanks for the support! Really glad to hear they’re helping you. 👍❤️🙏

[@bradwright5233]

You can provide all the tools you like to provide realtime status. Management won't use it. They'll still call you or contact you for a status update.

[@HealthyDev]

You can do the equivalent of the “let me google that for you” website. You send them a link to the tool filtered to your status. If they don’t get that after a while you should probably take them out to coffee (pre-Covid) or a meal and help them understand how they’re contributing to work delays. If they still aren’t receptive, there’s only so much you can do for people who won’t help themselves! 🤷‍♂️

[@emrik2s]

My teams find 'walk the board' a better way to re-plan their sprint day to day than to answer those 3 questions. Some of the problems you explain (and I agree with them) disappear when you stop using the 3 questions. Yet the team can collaborate and decide on who is doing what.

[@malcolmstonebridge7933]

I think the three questions are gone in the latest version of Scrum - yet it seems to be hanging around a fair bit (appreciate the date of this video).

[@errrzarrr]

While I understand #3 on not talking about design details, I understand developers that do it and why they do it. Is because in a Agile framework there's never time for this because there's always another Agile meeting which is neither about design nor code. So developers are left with almost no time to discuss what they really need to discuss and team up.

[@manishm9478]

Haha yes. I just joined a team doing scrum and it's crazy how little time i have for writing code between stand ups, huddles, refinements, retros, increment breaks, chapter time and any other rituals i missed 😂

[@yiyoascen]

I just quit a company in which the ceo/pm/po would do all of these wrong things, plus give out technical suggestions or toss more trainees at the problem

[@marcingordziejewski3295]

One of the points that I heard was that daily meetings / standups are used to share knowledge within the team about what everyone else is doing so that in case of accident someone else can know the context. But there is no clear line between spreading the knowledge and just a daily, and because of that the meeting takes much more time than it should (sometimes even half an hour). And when you try to tell to just document better what they're doing, you will just get disregarded that its easier to explain verbally than in text. What do you think of that point?

[@HealthyDev]

It’s mostly a matter of whether the meeting is run by developers or management. If it’s run by management and you have to defend how it works, the best thing you can do is explain why it’s not helpful to do daily reporting (the focus of this video). If they still don’t care that’s a problem of trust that can’t be solved with an argument - only a better relationship where they trust you enough to override their initial instincts.

[@tadeh1]

Man I wish I heard this a long time ago. A lot of communication gets taken for granted all around. It's the death knell of project teams.

[@happywanderer5632]

I'm and old fart and never took any stock in this new fangled SCRUM/AGILE stuff. Always seemed like a bad substitute for actually designing the software, like having a meeting with the concrete pourers and tile-setters to decide how high the ceilings would be. In my day, oh so many years ago! :) we designed the software first, before we hired the developers. Seemed to work for us.

[@centerfield6339]

People having thousands of years of familiarity with buildings certainly makes it easier for them to imagine and communicate what they want up front.

[@rmcgraw7943]

Tacodeli! I used to eat at the one up by the Domain in Austin while I was integrating Worldpay and Vantiv.

[@HealthyDev]

Tacodeli is one of my all time favorite places in town since moving down here 13 years ago. The consultancy I used to work for took me there for lunch on my first day, and melted my face with the dona sauce. My wife makes it at home now. It’s not exactly the same, but pretty close when I can’t make it there or we don’t want to pay the high price they sell it for at Whole Foods. What are some of your favorite tacos?

[@AhmedSaber]

Just great ! i'm always thinking this way but the scram stereotype for CEO's or the stakeholders is scram meetings = status meeting.

[@etienneb.6956]

Daily scrums are a big joke in all companies I worked at. Developers, QAs, Scrum Master, Analysts, Product Owner, managers.... all of them at the daily scrum and it takes between 20-30 minutes. Around 20 people in the daily scrum and everybody try to go so fast not waste time that in the end nobody is able to get any useful information out of It. Developers are forbidden to share any technical information because most people there are not technical.

[@HealthyDev]

That sucks, I’m sorry. Classic misuse of the daily scrum. I hope you can find a way to detach from it, or educate some of the leadership on the purpose being for developers in conversations one on one.

[@logusgraphics]

Your content is definitely very insightful. Thank you.

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks Alejandro! ☺️

[@JamesRendek]

Your videos are cool and I knew what SCRUM was but I have no idea why I get so many in my feed. I haven't seriously coded anything since I ran a BBS back in the day :)

[@stesilaus1688]

"SCRUM" meetings: An opportunity for the managers' pets to strut about, boasting about the "progress" that they've made on the high-prestige projects to which they were given exclusive access. And an opportunity for other, "lesser" employees to hear about the very existence of those projects for the very first time. Sorry if that sounds facetious, but it was my genuine experience of "SCRUM".

[@jasc4364]

I was part of a team using scrum for around a month. I found it very annoying and demotivating. It is obvious that scrum is here in the hope to push people’s performance. But actually it achieved the opposite for most of us, people start to lie, exaggerate or even coming late to try to avoid the meetings. In any case nobody started working before the early scrum meeting (probably trying to find something plausible to scrum). Frankly I am not interest to listen to 10 colleague’s report every day about projects I am not involved in. All in all we lost half an hour to an hour of productive work every day because of scrum On the other hand, the management was enthusiastic to say the least, so everybody agreed (in presence of the management) that scrum is a genius strike and the guy who introduced it got a promotion a week after the start of the whole shebang. I left the company 2 months later...

[@devstories-iv1mw]

Daily scrum in the company where I work is a typical status meeting. The thing that bothers me the most is that I, as an engineer, have to justify myself every morning to some fool who has no idea about software development. Engineers are treated like little children who need to be kept under control because otherwise they would be lost. I think developers understand priorities very well and should not be treated in such a way.

[@kookoo111222]

Thank you for a good video from the developers point of view! Also liked your About page on the channel.

[@Evergreenscoderzone]

Hey! Thanks for the video. I agree with many things in that video, but at the same time I would also like to raise some real life examples which may contradict its statements: 1. The developers start thinking that this is the place where they have to talk. The only place. So they stop talking outside of this meeting, meaning that all blockers get discussed at the meeting only, but they could have been discussed before, which could have resulted in more efficient development. 2. In contrary, developers start discussing blockers outside of the standup, 1-1, picking "the most suitable helper / the best expert" out of all team members which could help unblocking them. They come up with some solution and go ahead with it, even if it's not 100% optimal. Then on daily standup they don't discuss it anymore, because it's not a blocker anymore. And only later, much later, some design flows caused by wrong "unblocking" may be unsurfaced, after something breaks in production. 3. Another real life example - when developers don't really listen to each other on standups, because they are not in context, or not interested. So it's just 1 minute per person, really quick call, but completely useless. Obviously there are many other examples of standups, some "good", some "bad", but I wanted to bring those three here to open the discussion on them. Cheers.

[@HealthyDev]

Agreed! That's a big reason why I don't like having the business in the daily stand-up. If only developers and the scrum master are there (as stated in the scrum guide) it's more obvious that devs should be talking to the PO separately.

[@NETWizzJbirk]

I am a manager who only today started holding SCRUM meetings, and the catalyst is an employee who has not been working adequately when telecommuting. I really simply want people to work on something.

[@HealthyDev]

How are you hoping a scrum meeting will keep a single employee who’s unmotivated engaged?

[@NETWizzJbirk]

@@HealthyDev I am out of ideas. It seems like a good step other than separation, which is the next step.

[@bz7901]

Status is the ONLY reason I've ever seen a daily scrum occur.

[@HealthyDev]

This is why I tell people scrum isn’t the problem it’s how widespread the abuse is. That’s sad :(

[@bz7901]

@@HealthyDev I known some people who, after having a bad productivity day, skip the the next mornings scrum out of embarrassment.

[@hesleyt]

Some people leave all blockers to be sorted by the Scrum Master rather than solving it by themselves with a phone call or an email during their daily activities.

[@Ondal1]

I have yet to experience scrum working. The idea was to help and encurage developers, but it just turns out as status meetings. Then again it's not created to be developer help, it's created as another management helper meeting, for when they can't follow what's going on.

[@RobGravelle]

If you don't mind my asking, how many hours to you put towards making music compared to programming? I find that a day job really interferes with music making. My pro musician friends say that I'm only an OK guitar player, while my genius programming acquaintances say that I'm only an OK programmer. Is there a way to kick both their a$$es?

[@HealthyDev]

Not as many as I’d like. I still write songs and practice singing and writing several days a week but it’s purely for enjoyment. Since I work as a consultant in the morning and do career coaching on the afternoon, music has to take a bit of a back seat for now. But that’s okay I’m sure it will always be part of my life - it just ebbs and flows.

[@DrunkenUFOPilot]

I'm one of those multi-talented people, though some may say that "talented" isn't the right word. Being an OK musician is great fun, but I use my talents/whatever for church performances, where the range of skill is astonishingly broad. I make my own music and graphics for videos. In the rare occasion I actually finish a video, I claim that I'll upload it to KZbin. Someday... As for software, I write plugins and filters and whatnot to manipulate video, audio, whatever to show off to my digital artist and video and musician friends and followers. I'd like to say I impress them, but I haven't completed that many plugin/filter/whatever projects and put up on github or make available to the artists/musicians, due to time sunk into full time work and commuting. But what I have done, is good. In short, my software work is better than what most artists can do, and my art work and music is better than what most software developers can do. I ride happily in the middle ground, making shaders and filters and tools for that overlap zone. I'm not sure I kick anyone's ass, but when I can spend full time on this sort of work, maybe... maybe.

[@dmd356]

Never felt likw these standups are bad, but maybe i havent been around a whole lot of places. Where i work, standup is an update of what your working on as well as a time to get some good feedback from people if i demo my stuff. As i said, i dunno if all standups are like mine but i find mine pretty useful when they can be. Sometimes they are pointless for me personally, but its not like it steals all my time away lol. As i said, havent been to many other places, so i dunno outside mine

[@HealthyDev]

They aren’t bad in all situations. I’ve just seen them used for the wrong purpose too many times. Syncing up when there’s safety to be honest is a good thing. I was on one project where some newer scrum masters created a dashboard they would bring up to have the meeting with colors that would light up next to someone if they reached a certain threshold of being “late” with a task. The director on that project was great and referred to it as “the wall of shame” privately. As you can guess the meeting became completely political with nothing of real substance discussed, and people slowed down collaboration for fear of their own status.

[@RU-qv3jl]

To be honest I no longer try and use the daily scrum as a status meeting. I know that is where it came from. I just prefer to use it as a daily replanning for the team. I prefer to use the following format “Our goal is …, looking at our sprint board and burndown we seem to be ahead/behind/on-schedule. Does anyone want to comment on that? What shall we do next as a team to get to our goal and do we think we can make it by the end of the sprint or are there risks/blockers in our path?”. It’s long when I type it here. Once the team has gotten used to the format it has several benefits IMHO. No-one is singled out. Anyone can speak up. It’s goal oriented to get us to goal completion as a team. I’ve also found that it helps to foster team spirit and to get people to help each other.

[@josevargas686]

"Yesterday I worked on my current task, today I will work on my current task, I have no blockers" ... for some reason my updates make scrum masters lose their head? What else do they want to know? I concluded that they are not satisfied until they can instill some amount of stress on the developers. It truly does not matter the quality or usefulness of the information that I hand them, they only stop insisting after I give some long explanation of some thing that they do not understand. They like to hold everyone else in the meeting captive while I try to answer their questions that show a lack of care and attention to what I am saying.

[@JS-jh4cy]

Notice how reliable and fast old software ran on your home PC versus today

[@Jaime-eg4eb]

I don't have much data but I would imagine Scrum is universally despised by developers, much like a prisoner hates his shackles. It's unfortunate that's what it becomes most of the time, but what are you going to do. If most managers we're enlightened gurus things would be closer to the ideal of this video, but a lot of them are assholes... A tool that doesn't consider that a lot of people are assholes is a flawed one in my opinion. If someone is entitled to ask you what you are doing every five minutes, you are going to be miserable. Add in an egomaniac manager and see how your productivity and will to contribute decreases day after day.

[@bradwright5233]

@Johnny Five Pay should be higher.

[@bradwright5233]

@Johnny Five I agree. I was airing my view that startup pay should be higher in light of the workload and instability of startups.

[@rmbl349]

Your videos are awesome. Would be nice if you start again with new content.

[@HealthyDev]

I will be back this year. Glad you’re enjoying them! 👍

[@JO-up6eo]

Thanks for the video. Great. Where I work (Internal Audit) the Supervisor pretend to be conducting a SCRUM and it takes about 2 hours and I am lost as to what was the point. Daily SCRUM to answer the 3 Qs is like asking developers; Did you do any work yesterday and are you planning to do any work today? I have read some articles about SCRUM and some express that it is just "Micromanagement" and I do not deal well with that type of management style. I came from a work environment that I did not have to ask permission to my Supervisor if I could talk with someone about what I am working on it. I think it is ridiculous. If the SCRUM is worth it then it is but it is hard for me to think different.

[@mig8447]

I've recently been watching your content and I'm wondering How did you get to go from a developer working for a company to be a self-employed consultant for other companies?

[@HealthyDev]

Hey good question. I’ve got a playlist of videos on the channel about my career journey: kzbin.info/aero/PL32pD389V8xsqw7G1p-Yx8opbgxjoTt0g The short version is I got really bad insomnia and lost my job. When I got better, an old client I helped at my prior company reached out for help and I contracted with them. Then the same thing with 4 other clients.

[@maximo5737]

Value... All the sir .. thank for sharing

[@miguelescalantemilke7204]

I’m seriously thinking about saying “I have no idea what I’m doing today. Nobody cares for what I answer every morning about my TODO list so we better get this going ASAP and ask the next person”

[@marna_li]

As you say, having a person asking you about status is like a manager is holding them responsible for something. Then the developers are not honest - because they cannot give the manager a satisfying answer. Since Scrum is supposed to be a team meeting you should engage all members and let them speak freely as part of a team. That requires equality and trust between members. The management should not care about the team, unless it is about details about the requirements and priorities etc If you, like me, are coming from a traditional background with status or no status meeting, perhaps managers asking you directly, Scrum may be scary at first. Especially if you have impostor syndrome and some kind of stress or fear of someone holding you responsible. This is what I experienced as a consultant.

[@hariseldon02]

Watching this series, it's funny how many things we do opposite to this. I'm starting to believe we do "agile waterfall". We have increased the days on which we do status reports instead of dailies because tasks were constantly forgotten, or devs constantly assuring that the story will be finished till code freeze (when it is too late to redistribute the load or postpone it).

[@Telorath]

So I'm on a large contract that covers multiple projects, and I happen to be on two of them. One of our daily calls lasts usually five minutes. We do have a non-developer scrum-master on the team, but the atmosphere is very "Alright everyone give your status, does anybody need anything from anyone else? Alright, enjoy your day, ping me if you need me." Bing bang boom. I feel like I can share things freely with those guys. On my project call, someone (a nondeveloper) wanted to be in less meetings so they merged both teams into one scrum meeting with management on the call so THEY only had to sit on one meeting a day, but the rest of us have to also sit through a 30-45 minute meeting every morning where if we give our honest status we get a ping from the scrum master telling us "Don't say things like that on standup"- including "I'm working on tasks for the other team". So one of my coworkers in the same boat and I just shrugged and said "I guess we just make stuff up and nobody knows our real status but us". Our load isn't taken into account across teams either, so the first team generally just sucks it up when I'm busy on the second team and our scrum master plays defense for us because he actually cares about the developers, product, and client.

[@ed-ou812]

Standups are definitely a status meeting when the Product Owner is asked to join. I argue against them joining standups but on some contracts management insists they be on the standup.

[@milystrand]

Love the videos!

[@mk8530]

I spend most of my time in some form of a status "device". Its because nobody has anything else to do , but take status. They take many forms. Emails, JIRA, IM's "Teams Meetings" Actual FTF Meetings... even if they are not about status, you can bet to be asked your status.

[@indrayudhroy9415]

It's funny how these people use the most damaging phone apps and think a status is an indication of anything other than them not having a single clue of what's going on. Plus they appear to rely on their phone to be annoying nitwits.

[@markw.schumann297]

11:58 Right on. Also, when managers push developers to defend their "Three Answers," they're communicating to everyone else that _honesty will get them busted_ so the other team members will be inclined to give extra-optimistic status reports. Then the usefulness of the standup meeting is shot to hell because it's not even a good status meeting.

[@HealthyDev]

Exactly. I talked about this on another video, "Is It Safe To Make Mistakes on Your Software Project?": kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y5XLfaiEmLKIf9E

[@gkri8390]

My colleague always says he will finish some work in half an hour whereas he always take 3 days to complete. I say 3 days in the beginning itself and iam frowned upon

[@1234567mrbob]

I have seen arguments break out about who's responsible for this or that slipup. It starts as a status meeting and degrades to finger pointing. Not always, but I've seen it happen.

[@myentertainment55]

My new project has 1 to 3 hours different meetings daily (with our and different teams). Such a waste. I think I could at least cut it in half. Only 2-3 person communicate and present. It could be 5-10 minutes meeting plus email to make sure that main points didn't get lost. Why I have to sit everyday and listen for 40 up to hour things barely related to me. Meet with core team 4-5 people, decide and make announcement to others or gather all up for final decision. Why I have to be here for the whole time? I theoretically can work during those meetings, but I hate multitasking, I can only do automatic task, not thinking. What a waste. I like my team, they are nice people, but I don't think it's best way. In other projects we had 10-15 min meeting (sometimes even 3-5 minutes if there nothing to tell) and up to 20-30 in there is major problem (very rarely) it was way better. I understand that my current project a bit different. Stakes are higher. But I still think we could easily cut it in half.

[@rhapps121]

From my perspective, scrum was a strange way to manage team. Every one or 2 days I will go and ask one by one whether they had blockers or not and thats it, no need to all of these details standups and meetings. Because i know what they are doing, i know their capabilities, i know when they are really blocked or not by looking at how long they do things and their capabilities. Sitting in a meeting telling each other what we do is a waste of time especially everyday, it is obvious each one of us only cares about our tasks and that is correct, we should focus solely on our own tasks and let me as lead/senior watch over which tasks might intersect each other and inform accordingly. Scrum seemed to force everyone to be active and to always out of their comfort zone by sprinting all the time. There is also this pressure of telling to all your peers that your status is not that much.

[@HealthyDev]

That’s a reasonable management strategy. And exactly the point, scrum was never intended to be a management technique it was supposed to be a way for developers to work with each other better.

[@rhapps121]

@@HealthyDev I think the issue is more on the management level and above. like you know business and management quantifying tasks by using numbers, they wanna know the numbers if the numbers didn't change it means you have no progress, not growing i.e stagnant which is not always true. Many still believe that by throwing more developers in project, the timeline can be shortened and the task can be finished faster/earlier which is not always true as well. in my opinion, i think scrum started as informal way of doing things, and then comes in management to start formalize and quantify the process. It becomes hipster buzzword now, everyone standup everyday simply because that is part of scrum process "officially" and must be followed. remember when we are still in college or schools? teacher/lecturer give us group assignments? and you can see the pattern on each student group. 1. there are some group where everyone collectively do and finish with great result 2. there are some group where only one or two person in the group do the assignments 3. there are some group where nobody do the assignments. 4. there are some group where the tasks are not evenly distributed. I believe this is similar to work place. and depending on which group/team we are in, the management style must change as well. Not everyone as workaholic as management , not everyone as positive as management, and not everyone as motivated as management. Yet management believes otherwise, well because you are paid to work so you must have these infinite amount of energy right? of course not.

[@HealthyDev]

@@rhapps121 you raise some good points here. Unfortunately companies having the honesty to admit some of their employees aren't as engaged (and still do a good job) is a real problem with having transparency and realistic processes - totally.

[@curmudgeoniii9762]

What would be good is for you to give examples of items .... worked for a company were individual status was on a single web page .... using a stop light icon ... red/yellow/green ... and item working on... with list of things working on... so any curious manangement could just look at page and get a good idea.. You have worked on a lot of prjects ... give example of dev states from start to finish ... and problems and way to make go smothly... How di those efforts to get ops and dev to work together... did they ever get to the goal? Video are interesting

[@chaos.corner]

It seems like many people haven't actually looked at what a scrum is supposed to be and just try and use it to have "meetings" without being someone calling stuffy old meetings. I know this is essentially what scrums at my last company were.

[@marna_li]

I would like to add to my previous comment. The culture in the business is to have status meetings - so not unexpected that Daily Scrums are treated that way. Software developers in an organization which does not reflect upon what is agile - which does not see what insights "Agile" brings other than new processes - will inherently see it as a status meeting.

[@HealthyDev]

Agreed. We have to educate management on why status can be gathered as often as they want using tools and how the benefits to the daily standup improve communication with developers instead!

[@nathanfries797]

We deleted the "what did you work on yesterday" and "what are you working on today" and skip straight to "does anything need code review", "does anything need testing" and "does anyone need help or are blocked by something". If anything needs discussion it waits for after stand up. We have a literal stuffed pineapple and we throw it anyone who goes off-topic and yell PINEAPPLE.

[@HealthyDev]

Ha!!! Nice ;)

[@xybersurfer]

that's pretty clever

[@clairebayoda8325]

Hello Sir! Do you offer private coaching/mentoring to Scrum Masters?

[@HealthyDev]

Yes I do. Check out my career coaching page and fill out an application if you would like to explore possibly getting help: thrivingtechnologist.com/services/software-development-coaching/

[@DrunkenUFOPilot]

Are there any well-known (or should be well-known) movies that nearly anyone can access and watch, or TV shows with re-runs on netflix or wherever, that show a well-run scrum meeting? Something that is generally available for free or cheap, and would be a good recommendation to give to managers, investors, spouses of software engineers, anyone, so they have an idea? And I suspect, good to give to actual software engineers, since many of them don't get it even today.

[@jose6183]

If it's so complicated to explain and implement, it's probably a bad idea. There is no defense for this from my POV.

[@rmworkemail6507]

LOL at the movies. Proper engineering practices aren't to be found on Netflix. Imagine a doctor watching a movie to learn how to do surgeries. Imagine an architect on a comedy show to learn about bridges. No, this whole idea is corrupted since it's inception.

[@Asimov16]

We used to have an hour long daily scrum LOL, and they wanted you to stand up. Waste of time too, as you more or less said the same thing everyday

[@nightbeats5023]

That was the big problem for me. Like oh well I did the same shit i did yesterday and there is still a lot more shit to do. But I made progress....super annoying.

[@DrunkenUFOPilot]

I worked at one company where not only were disparate teams all there, and it went well past an hour, but we all sat down around a table. And yet they called it "stand up"!

[@markw.schumann297]

I'm often the oldest developer on the team, and I like to say "Long standup meetings are age discrimination!"

[@markw.schumann297]

I'm gonna go way out on a limb and suggest something: advising the PM on how to make the daily standup meeting more useful for developers, and getting away from the command-and-control orientation, typically fails because the PM is *actually totally okay* with command and control. Also, if the story card you're on has "blockers" external to the team, then that means the story card was not Ready To Go and should not have been included in this sprint. 👉🏻The sprint belongs to the team.👈🏻 If it doesn't belong to the team, it shouldn't be in the sprint.

[@kott]

It is not a status meeting because the persons that are interested on a status should actually not be invited.. Daily scrums are made by and for the dev team

[@HealthyDev]

You are absolutely correct. Unfortunately many companies get this completely wrong, hence the video. 🤦🏻‍♂️

[@afhostie]

Great thing about having these meetings virtually is the ability to mute everyone who isn't a developer

[@markw.schumann297]

The expression in Scrum used to be "chickens and pigs." If you're having ham and eggs for breakfast, the chicken is involved but the pig is _committed._ In other words, only pigs (developers, testers, designers, the hands-on people) get to talk at the standup meeting because we're 100% committed to the project under discussion. Everyone else (the suits) has to listen-they're just "involved."

[@cosmicaug]

Calling things by different names doesn't make them different things. Agile "ceremonies" are meetings and if in one such meeting you are answering the questions of what have you done, what are you going to do & what your impediments are, you are giving a status. That doesn't mean that there aren't more and less productive ways of doing these things so my semantic observation is not meant to imply that anything about this video is not useful (because calling things by different names doesn't make them different things).

[@JS-jh4cy]

Yes it is a control technique.

[@rodrigoserafim8834]

Scrum meetings, in a perfect world should not need to exist. The team should be talking about those 3 things in real time, with the perfect set of stakeholders, as needed. The only reason it exists is that programmers are (not all, but as a general statistical rule) massive introverts, and you need to pry out of them with a crowbar how their development is going. The reason most Scrum meeting seem forced is, well, because they are. They are about the only way an agile manager has to ensure there is some failsafe mechanism for the team to communicate with each other and not slump over their keyboards for a month without saying a word to anyone about what they are doing. And trust me, it WILL happen if you allow it.

[@neshoneshev7446]

Spot on! Daily scrums can be invaluable in helping a self-organizing development team achieve their desired / committed goals. IMHO, that's largely the point of the meeting - since the team is self-organizing, they need to quickly hear from each other to see if anything needs to be adjusted. Unfortunately, it is very easy to turn into a status / brainstorming, etc. meeting. This often happens when managers run the meetings. It is so tempting to start commenting and "add value" to the meeting, while exactly the opposite needs to happen - empower the team and let them solve the development problems.

[@HealthyDev]

Exactly. There used to be advice related to scrum that if you weren't on the dev team and attended, you couldn't talk. That one got thrown out real quickly in most companies lol!

[@jeremyjohns9795]

My thing is to have no more than 5 extremely well assets on a team where I am one of the 5 and the design orchastrator.

[@perfectionbox]

You haven't lived (or died, rather) until you hear a boss admitting he loves forcing everyone to stand for fifteen minutes

[@djfouse]

Did any team member bring this up in Sprint retrospective? Where was the Scrum Master? It seems like Scrum Manager isn't coaching the team and managers on the purpose of the daily stand ups. Daily stand up maximum is 15 minutes. Meeting ends at 15 minutes. Dev team and Scrum Master need to enforce this.

[@errrzarrr]

You are naive if you think Scrum Master will enforce that. That's what give them power and justify their job position, that's the power they are given by their Scrum Certificate.

[@ihave3chihayas]

i honestly thought i was the only impostor every morning… thanks for the vid/thread

[@rmcgraw7943]

What did you finish yesterday? What are you working on today? Do you have any impediments? BOOM, Done!

[@Casey093]

Spend 50% of your workday in meetings reporting on your progress, and then having to explain why you did not have enough time to finish work. Project manager does not understand.

[@Muuuzzzi]

I am so glad to have found your channel, very informative, and useful advice,...Also things to keep in mind while attending daily “scum” lol 😝

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks, I’m glad to hear it’s helping you! 👍❤️

[@Muuuzzzi]

Healthy Software Developer it’s extremely helpful to know the big picture, and the greater experience of the whole developer community...

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks I’m happy when I can help people avoid pain by sharing some of my mistakes and the areas I see companies need some help. As far as the general community definitely check out dev.to if you haven’t already. Reddit is okay but I feel like the community over at dev.to is more positive and encouraging. YMMV

[@alexsh.8080]

interesting channel

[@malcolmstonebridge7933]

It's like any activity - needs skilled professional motivated people - no silver bullets after all.

[@addsonomari6129]

One Scrum Master

[@jalabi99]

Our daily standups are no more than 15 minutes because each developer gets no more than 60 seconds to answer the three questions.

[@st0ox]

If no one from management is blaming you for something in this meeting you don't need more than 60 seconds to share your experience of the last day and your thoughts about what you want to do next and what is blocking you. If you are blamed for day to day decisions by management you need of course more time to explain them technical details they probably won't really understand and wasting everyones time.

[@rmworkemail6507]

What valuable you can bring in 60 seconds? What if you want to talk about for further technical details? You'll be discouraged since Scrum and Agile aren't the space for that

[@dylanalliata4809]

A planned structured ceremony lasting at most 5 to 10 minutes where teams relate their progress to sprint goals and blockers will beat any informal discussion any day. The real reason developers hate stand-ups is that they are used as opportunities to micromanage the staff by managers. The Scrum Master should be on the watch for that. I keep my stand-ups short and allow the rest of the meeting for the parking lot where the developers discuss every and anything between themselves.