Are agile scrums an outdated idea?
Here’s a video on YouTube making the case for why agile was an innovative methodology when it was first introduced 20 years ago.
However, he argues these days, daily scrums are a waste of time, and many organisations would be better off automating their reporting processes, giving teams more autonomy, and letting people get on with their work:
https://youtu.be/KJ5u_Kui1sU?si=M_VLET7v0wCP4gHq
A few of my thoughts.
First, it’s worth noting that many organisations that claim to be “agile” aren’t, and many that claim to use agile processes don’t.
Just as a refresher, here’s the key values and principles from the agile manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
* Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
* Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
* Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
* Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
* Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
* The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
* Working software is the primary measure of progress.
* Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
* Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
* Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
* The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
* At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Your workplace isn’t agile if your team is micromanaged from above; if you have a kanban board filled with planning, documentation, and reporting tasks; if your organisation is driven by processes and procedures; if you don’t have autonomous cross-functional teams.
Yet in many “agile” organisations, I’ve noticed that the basic principles of agile are ignored, and what you have is micromanagement through scrums and kanban boards.
And especially outside software development teams, agile tends to just be a hollow buzzword. (I once met a manager at a conference who talked up how agile his business was, and didn’t believe me when I said agile was originally a software development methodology — one he revealed he wasn’t following the principles of.)
If your scrum is an hour long, you arent doing it right. They should be 10-12 minutes tops.
I call those emails.
When I run mine… It’s story 1 - highlights
Story2 - highlights
Etc
In depth conversation can be had after standup… I’m in and out in under 10. Often under 6 minutes… lol
I’ll preface this to say I’ve only done real standup meetings on a project a long time ago, and maybe it wasn’t done the right way (No True Agile), but I didn’t really see the point.
In my opinion a 10 minute meeting with more than 3 people is probably worthless. What information is being exchanged in that time that shouldn’t just be an email? Are people not sure who can help with their issue or not going to bring up things that need more attention if not forced to speak? Does the entire team really need to hear these minute summaries of the small things people accomplished in the last 8 work-hours? And couldn’t this just be done with the team lead talking to each person and coordinating or calling meetings when members need to talk?
So these super short meetings succeed at not wasting a lot of money on process, but IMO it’s because they’re a short waste rather than because they’re an efficient use of time.
My team runs an async standup on Slack where you just respond to a bot with all the usual stuff. We also do a slightly longer meeting on Tuesday morning where we go into more details, but never more than a half-hour.
This sounds great. “Hey, I’m trying to figure out this bug in this area, anyone have any ideas”. The main benefit of meetings is forced acknowledgement of “messages”, but reading email or other communication mediums should just be part of being a responsible professional.
Stand-up shouldn’t be about what was done, it’s about what will be done that day and what overlap they may have with others.
It’s also the time to communicate changes in priorities, like prod bugs or new input from customers. Usually it’s “oh, that’s probably my fault, I’ll take it,” but sometimes it’s “let’s meet after to discuss it, I’ll need people X and Y.”
And yes, most of the time it’s a waste of time, but sometimes it’s really valuable, and it’s hard to know in advance. Having the meeting can mean the difference between a prod bug getting fixed that day and not, or a dev wasting a day on a useless project because they missed an email. So we pay that cost to make sure we can catch issues and resolve problems early and quickly.
This all makes sense to me, though I do think this “missed an email” issue really is a problem of unprofessionalism that needs to be resolved. I get that some people just don’t like it, but your job includes reading emails, at least from your immediate team members. Alternately, if it was missed because the sender is prone to sending manifestos to the entire team with an important query embedded in paragraph 4, they need to do better. It shouldn’t be that email is an unreliable form of communication.
It’s not email specifically, it could be a bunch of different things, like:
It could be a ton of things. The point is that a standup provides a sync point to catch any of those misses. You can and should improve async communication, but mistakes will happen and it’s useful to catch those if deadlines matter.
In a FOSS project or similar, it’s fine to not have those since timelines are usually more flexible. But in a business, it’s usually worth a little inefficiency if it means more predictability.
@Zaktor @7u5k3n A meeting is only useful if it (a) causes someone to do something they wouldn’t have otherwise done, or (b) shares information more efficiently than an email or chat thread would have. My current team has 15 minute standups with 12-16 people that do both, but if a meeting isn’t doing either it should be jettisoned.
The goal of the sprint meeting is very straightforward:
Its an all hands meeting meant for everyone to get their morning baseline “what is everyone else doing” understanding.
It’s also extremely critical for company culture, morning standups keep individuals anchored to “who is my team” and “what do they do”, so they understand when asked who so-and-so is and what they do here.
Without the standup meeting, you typically get situations where everyone is operating in their own glass boxes and they start to disconnect from the team. They have no idea what other people are working on, they have no idea what other people even do for the team, etc.
You dont want a situation where your developers have no idea what your QA team is busy with, and no one knows what the UX team is currently tackling. Thats how you get a lot of divergence and disconnect.
The standup helps keep everyone not only aligned, but also knowledgeable of whats coming up next.
Your devs hear about what the UX team is finishing up so they know that in a couple days thats going to be next on their plate, and your QA knows what the devs are finishing up so they know whats next to focus on.
You can consider the morning standup to be your cross pollination meeting for infoshare.
Exactly. Here’s roughly how ours go:
That’s it, and we’re often done a couple min early.
We do two teams back to back, and since I’m a lead, I usually join both so I’m aware of what’s going on. So 30 min total for two teams, and I’ll sometimes sneak in some other syncs in the extra time between stand-ups to avoid yet another meeting (e.g. discuss a prod bug with QA or discuss a process change with the scrum master). We’re planning on adding a third team to our office soon, and I think we can do it in 10 min per team.
If your process looks significantly different from that, fix it.