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0 pointsandy_boot6y ago0 comments

I also noticed this.

We came up with a variant to fix this. You have to say what the next person in the circle said they'd do yesterday before your talk.

This forced everyone to pay more attention as you don't know who would be standing next to you tomorrow. It wasn't easy to do but I think it did make people more aware of what was going on.

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philbarr6y ago

This sounds horrendous. It doesn't really feal like it would achieve much either except making standups even harder.

Fire-Dragon-DoL6y ago

This is a terrible approach for the fact that instead of addressing the problem of people not listening because of stuff not relevant to them said from others, it ensures you must listen to that irrelevant stuff.

So instead of wasting some people time, you are now wasting 2x that time.

Make the meeting relevant to everyone, make it tight (time-wise). Hiding the problem under a tarp ensures it doesn't get any improvements.

drewcoo6y ago

Why is this voted down? Stand-ups are supposed to be about increased team cohesiveness and this helped their team achieve that.

djKianoosh6y ago

wow this would suck in a 20 person standup

matthewmacleod6y ago

Literally everything would suck in a 20 person standup.

djKianoosh6y ago

can confirm

TomMarius6y ago

Why would you have 20 person standups?

djKianoosh6y ago

because government project? although I imagine this happens in non-gov settings too, this is just my experience.

Here's the reason: managers are so spread thin that they don't want to be in 5-10 standups all morning, so they combine around organizational structures rather than product(s)/deliverable(s). Another case of the software delivery matching org structure...

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dragonwriter6y ago

Well, yes, a 20 person standup is a little more than twice the maximum size conventional wisdom holds is appropriate, so it is going to suck to start with and much advice for normal 5-9 person stand-ups will be counterproductive and make it worse.

bmcfeeley6y ago

I know we tend to have little control over this as ICs, but I think the party line here is that 20 is too many people to effectively make use of most agile/scrum ceremonies. Do you actually need to know all 19 other persons’ updates?

djKianoosh6y ago

Individuals don't, but the managers, who may be well meaning, feel the need to.

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