Has COVID killed the daily stand-up?

I remember my first stand-up. I had just finished a five year masters degree in Chemical Engineering and I was working a part time manual testing job at a software company until my graduation date. I had no clue about anything to do with software, least of all agile. What I did know however was that working with other people was hard. I had done many group projects during my course, and there were always difficulties in knowing what everyone was contributing, and often there were one or two people who didn't contribute anything and managed to avoid anyones notice.

When I first heard the engineering lead shout “stand up!” I was very confused. Everyone else started standing up though and they all gathered around. Not wanting to make it obvious that I was the “noob”, I stood up and walked over too.

My mind was blown.

Why did I not know about this during my degree?! I definitely would have gotten a better grade in those frustrating group assignments.

It may be my rose tinted spectacles looking back on this moment, but this was stand-up how it was meant to be. It was for the developers, run by the developers.

The engineering lead quickly and efficiently worked his way around the circle, extracting key information from each team member;

• What are you working on?
• Do you need any help with anything?
• Is it on track?

When the novelty wore off

After a few months I got to the point where I'd pay attention up until a certain member of the team would start going into too much detail, and then I would zone out. Since then, this has been a common occurrence when I attend “round robin” stand-ups.

A few years into my career as a software engineer I had the brilliant experience of being a 50% scrum master for my team. I would still do engineering work, but it was also my responsibility to lead ceremonies. This was again feeding into the mantra of “for the developers, by the developers”. The ceremonies are for the team, and if they don't work, the team can change them. So that's what we did with stand-up.

The Kanban stand-up

One retro I explained how I lose concentration during stand-up and others agreed. As a team we decided that we'd change it up. Instead of going around everyone one by one, we'd take the Kanban approach and walk through the board, right to left.

You start with the tickets that are closest to “done” and talk about how you can get them over the line today. Then you move on to tickets that are further away from being done. When it was a ticket that you had input on, you spoke up. If there was a ticket that hadn't moved, we spoke about why it was still there and if there was anyone that could help. Best of all however, we were done in a few minutes and everyone was engaged and could tell you the state of all the tickets, and what we needed to do as a team.

This is by far my preferred method of stand-up. I think it's the most efficient, and it gets rid of a lot of fluff that we don't need to hear about like “yesterday I had a lot of emails… and meetings… so I did those… and then I managed to do a little on my ticket… so today I'll keep going”.

By the time this person has started talking about their ticket, most people have probably switched off to think about what snack they want with their coffee. Also what ticket are you talking about? Is it worth me trying to figure out which ticket you're talking about? Maybe I'll have one of those cup cakes that Martha brought into the office… Oh it's my turn to speak? Good question… what did I do yesterday?

Enter COVID stage left

¹By tradition he[the evil character] always appeared stage left, because left (sinistra in Italian) is traditionally associated with the devil. (source)

When COVID hit, working from home was no longer optional. Everyone was thrust into a world they didn't fully understand. I think most engineers didn't mind. We do pretty much all our work on our laptops anyway, apart from the odd question or two. If anything this is easier because we can just message someone instead of the potentially awkward small talk that we feel we have to make if we walk over to someones desk.

I don't think middle managers much loved the mandatory move to remote working. By “middle managers” I'm referring to anyone who has some responsibility for the product, without any direct ability to make changes to it. Middle managers used to be able to look around the office and see hard working developers chipping away at the backlog. Now all they can see is their dog jumping up the walls and the kid that has to quarantine again because there's a COVID case in their school.

I wouldn't want to be in their position. I wouldn't be able to cope not knowing if we were making progress, or if Steve has just surpassed his all time record on flappy bird.

The new normal

Now our stand-ups are comfortable sit downs. I'd wager that at least a third of the people on the call are wearing pyjama bottoms, and almost everyone has a hot refreshing beverage of some kind or another.

Stand-ups required you to stand so that you were uncomfortable enough to want the meeting to finish quickly. Now we spend the first five minutes waiting for everyone to join while we listen to some inane ramblings about how it's not actually that rainy most of the time in Edinburgh

Once you get started, there's the inevitable “Sorry I was on mute” comment, along with a mixture of poor connectivity, poor sound quality and a baby crying in the background

We seem to have a lot more people on the call as well. My current stand-up takes over twenty-five minutes and there's just under twenty people joining. A lot of the people who now join stand-up are the middle managers who are struggling to get visibility on what is going on.

The meeting that was “for the developers, by the developers” has turned into another status update meeting for middle managers.

I'm done with it. It yanks me out of my focus and bores me for twenty-five minutes. Then it takes almost as long, if not longer to get back into what I was doing before. I can't be the only one, so I'm going to suggest a change.

How to fix it

My main gripe with todays stand-up is that it interrupts me and halts my productivity, so my suggestions are all about making the most of asynchronous communication. If you're not familiar with the term, it basically means that you can send a message, or make an update wheneveryou want to, and the recipient can read it when they want to. So you can stay in your focus zone and get stuff done.

1. Figure out how you can use the tools you already have so that middle managers can have a good insight into what is happening with the project. We all use something to track our tickets, whether it's Confluence, Pivotal tracker, Trello, or some new shiny thing. Keep it updated, and make it the source of truth that your team can trust in.
2. Get in the habit of finishing your day well. Push up your code, create or update a pull request and mark it WIP
   ⁵WIP stands for “Work In Progress” and on a pull request it means “Don't merge me yet”.
   if it's not finished yet. Put a note on the ticket saying where you're up to and what you have left to do. This is a massive help for you as well as you don't need to spend five minutes in the morning trying to figure out what you were about to do the evening before.
3. Don't have a stand-up meeting, but use these updates instead. I've done it before where we had a dedicated slack channel where we'd post our stand-up. An extra benefit to this is that if everyone does this at the end of the day when they finish up, everyone should be able to see the whole teams update in the morning regardless of when they start.
4. If there's an update which requires a conversation, have the conversation with only the relevant people.
5. Keep experimenting. Try something new and assess whether it works or not, then adjust the experiment.

¹ By tradition he[the evil character] always appeared stage left, because left (sinistra in Italian) is traditionally associated with the devil. (source)
² I may have been the culprit here.
³ Like writing a blog post about stand-ups.
⁴ I'm also the culprit here, or my baby is more accurately.
⁵ WIP stands for “Work In Progress” and on a pull request it means “Don't merge me yet”.

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