I find Scrum stand up meetings humiliating

[heyya99]

For years, I've found myself a bit grumpy at stand up times. It pains me to give an update and I now know why. It's because I find them degrading. They're never about 'geeing' the team up for the day and moving blockers etc. They're basically status meetings. I hate standing there, proving what I've done, watched by team leads, managers and BAs. They make me feel small and back in school.

Does anyone else hate this pointless concept?

[SueEllen]

Nope.

If you can't give an update make your stories and tasks smaller.

[northernladuk]

For years, I've found myself a bit grumpy at stand up times. It pains me to give an update and I now know why. It's because I find them degrading. They're never about 'geeing' the team up for the day and moving blockers etc. They're basically status meetings. I hate standing there, proving what I've done, watched by team leads, managers and BAs. They make me feel small and back in school.

Does anyone else hate this pointless concept?

Guilty conscience?

[SpontaneousOrder]

If you literally have nothing to say then it's: "I'm still working on this ticket. Probably for the rest of the day. Next!"

It's nice to break your story into smaller technical tasks like SE said (maybe) so that you can move some piece of card that means something, to the right, at least every day. Then it's:

"I've done the happy path for my story, represented by this card which I'll now move to the right / tick off / whatever. Today I'm going to address the validation required for the unhappy paths, as per this card. Then The story will be done."

It's not very interesting, and thats fine if there's nothing other people really need to be aware of. But at least you can spend 30 seconds outlining what tangible progress you've made.

Plus, then, someone else may have the opportunity to say: "Oh.. that reminds me - is the validation going to throw detailed exceptions? Or will they get sanitised on the way back through boundary 'x' ? because it might affect what I'm working on."



Alternatively if everyone is going:

Yesterday i did this thing none cares about
Today i'll do that thing none cares about

then there's probably something amiss and you can feel justified in wishing you were somewhere else.

[oliverson]

For years, I've found myself a bit grumpy at stand up times. It pains me to give an update and I now know why. It's because I find them degrading. They're never about 'geeing' the team up for the day and moving blockers etc. They're basically status meetings. I hate standing there, proving what I've done, watched by team leads, managers and BAs. They make me feel small and back in school.

Does anyone else hate this pointless concept?

Totally and utterly pointless. Been in a room with 30 team members before some offshore - took over an hour.

Nobody is really interested in what anybody else is doing, they just want to get their piece out of the way and then get on with it.

Yet another pointless methodology, supposedly agile but now an industry. We've been LEANED everybody!

[BrilloPad]

What do the coders you work with think?

[DotasScandal]

Nobody is really interested in what anybody else is doing, they just want to get their piece out of the way and then get on with it.
Yet another pointless methodology, supposedly agile but now an industry. We've been LEANED everybody!

The problem is that in most organisations, Scrum meetings are no more than a RITUAL, run by self-styled "Scrum masters" who think that agile = dicking around with colorful post-it notes.
Hence the negative added value (perceived and actual) for everyone involved in doing actual work.

[BlasterBates]

This sums up the problems:

Why Agile Isn't Working: Bringing Common Sense to Agile Principles | CIO

If Boeing had used Agile on it's new Jumbo the port side wing would be quite different to the starboard wing.

[SpontaneousOrder]

This sums up the problems:

Why Agile Isn't Working: Bringing Common Sense to Agile Principles | CIO

If Boeing had used Agile on it's new Jumbo the port side wing would be quite different to the starboard wing.

From that article:

The agile methodology produces the opposite of the promised effects. There are many reasons for this, but I'll focus on are the three most destructive agile principles, which I've renamed (shown in bold below).

The first, delivery over quality recasts the agile principle of "early and continuous delivery of valuable software." Yes, early visibility is an important tool for customer collaboration. What is dangerous, though, is that focusing on continuous delivery has the effect of creating an unmanageable defect backlog while developers work to put something in front of the customer.

Says it all really... the reason 'Agile is failing' is because idiots spout nonsens like this and then attribute it to 'Agile'.

There is nothing whatsoever in 'Agile' that even remotely suggests anything like delivery over quality.

The early visibility he refers to is all about delivering higher priority functionality first. I.e. a less rich product - NOT a lower quality product.

In fact when you look at the 12 principles in the manifesto, and the language used, quality over quantity is clearly being pushed.

[VectraMan]

I quite liked doing stand up meetings. If nothing else it was a chance for a bit of a break mid morning, and it did often mean that by having a short daily meeting you avoided a lot of the need for a long, painful, oh my God when will it end die die die you've said this fifty times already you ******* ******* type meeting.

Is it Scrum? The place I worked that did stand ups never mention Scrum, whereas the place I worked that made a big deal out of doing Scrum never had stand ups. But then they also told us we had an absolutely fixed deadline with an absolutely fixed set of features that had to be complete.