I hate giving daily standup updates. There is so much pressure from management to say you completed some deliverable every single day. But in reality, in order to do good work, I need to sometimes just spend a whole day doing research, or meeting with other teams, or writing documentation, or learning a new codebase, or learning a new tech stack, or making prototypes. And sometimes, weird bugs crop up and can delay me for days on end, but after I fix the issue, I could make a permanent fix (or at least document a workaround) and prevent other engineers across the company from having the same problem. Yet, every time I take the time to be thorough and do things the right way, the management questions me why I don't have daily deliverables. They ask, every day, what deliverables I have completed yesterday and which ones I will complete today. Not every day is going to have deliverables! And doing all the non-deliberable prep work and research is ultimately going to make the product better and make it possible for future deliverables to be done faster! And yet, every day, in the standup, I am pressured to tell some story about directly delivering something. Do you want me to lie to you??? I hate this. And then it completely ruins the entire rest of the day because I spend it feeling resentful about the things the management keeps asking me to do despite the fact that what I actually do is in their best interests too! Maybe I should just break everything and "deliver results" all the time like they're asking me to! Horrible, buggy crap that will break ops for everyone and be impossible for anyone else to understand! I can't even prove to them how much good I am doing because nothing seems valuable until it breaks. At least I have lots of documentation, principal engineers, and external teams to vouch for me if shit hits the fan... As far as I can tell, daily standups have just become a poor excuse for micromanagement, and enable the enforcement of dangerously misguided priorities. Anyone else in the same boat? If not, what are standups like for your team, and how do you prevent them from devolving into this kind of horrible mess?
I feel like ur team is using stand ups wrong. Ours take like 15 20min tops and it's to negotiate any blocker or needs, and quickly check status to see if we're on track for the sprint. Sprint review is the time we review completion.
^ this
Yeah, pretty sure my team is doing everything 100% wrong. We optimize for making the burndown chart go to zero, and work on the stated sprint tasks every day. Adding new tasks or increasing estimates is not allowed. Which is ridiculous, because I'm pretty sure the point is to get a realistic view of what happened and what we worked on, rather than to make up some fake statistics on how great our team is.
I can see why you hate scrum. Your post was too long, keep it short, precise and concise. There is no pressure or expectation nor judgment, just a quick status of where you are.
This was a rant, not a standup update. And unfortunately, there is pressure and judgement in my team's standup. Sounds like your team is doing a much better job than mine though.
I mostly watch and attend now and then (I am a pm). And yes, that's what stand ups or scrum are for, quick status, unblocking people, anything changed etc. Judgements or pressure can be applied in other places - manager meetings and such.
The problem is your shitty management, not scrum update. I cant count how many times I say I didnt do shit yesterday and would do random shit today.
The daily stand ups are there to remind SDEs that we are no better than FC workers. We, too, have daily quotas. If you attend a C2FC (which you should), they have a daily standup to motivate (and perform some simple stretches). This is not a very popular opinion on here, but you cannot convince me that SDEs are just glorified FC workers. Don’t be surprised if our office space is moved to the back rooms of these massive facilities — the leadership of the company sees us as working class code pushers just as they see FC associates as blue collar grunts who will follow orders and meet quotas. It’s what I hate the most about being an SDE for this company.
What's FC and C2FC?
Fulfilment center. And I did do those....I agree in some ways with what you're saying
Ur team is not doing scrum right
I know...I just don't know how to convince management of this
Find a team that is doing it right, pick their brains on how they handle management metrics that don't align with how software development actually works, and mirror on your team what makes sense. I'm guessing management maybe consists of non-technical ppl? It's hard for business management to understand development, and because they don't understand it they seek to apply as much control and predictability as they can to give them a false sense of understanding and control (aka SAFE Agile 🤣 scrum 🤣). Best advice I can lend, having gone through this recently, is just take control and adjust the standups to fit what makes sense for your team (get some of your peers on board and ask for forgiveness later), and when you inevitably end up with questions and concerns around the burnup/burndown charts being ugly, articulate why at a high-level, but focus 95% of your "why" on the outcome ("as we got into the code we realized there was a more efficient way of executing the user story, so we added a few additional tasks that allowed us to both finish the user story to business req acceptance criteria and remove some technical debt, saving the company additional time and money that can now be allocated towards further enhancements") Edit: as for needing to report out daily progress...I love when my dev team flies through their tasks and we can close things out daily, but there is also an understanding that software development isn't inherently timeboxed to 24-hrs, and advocating that understanding to management is tough, but I find analogies work well.
Stand up isn't meant to be a flex contest to see who got the most done each day. It's main purpose is to quickly make your team aware of everything going on amongst everyone and let people know if there are any blockers. No need to have people accidentally duplicate work just because you don't know what your teammates are doing each day
During the past 2 years of giving standup updates, I realized it's quite an art to give away the "right" amount of information to management at every stanup. Give them the right level of abstraction and don't expose details. Pay attention to people who are good at this and are not being picked up on during the standup. It helps to prepare bullet points beforehand, not to improvise. Also document your bullet points.
Good tips. It's just impossible to add research/learning/documentation tasks to the sprint on my team, and then also impossible to say you're doing something not on the sprint board during standup.
Are you scientist/phd or swe?
I’m 100% with you. I’m doing a project that requires A LOT of research and mini 1000 tasks don’t allow that.
Yep. We sure don't do much to incorporate edge cases in software development processes, for all that we're supposed to cover all of them in the software itself.
Does your management also measure your effectiveness based on LOC?
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Scrum is a scam... it's a tool to enable micro management and mindless race to finish
I completely agree with you.
100%