Was curious if anyone had experience/thoughts on online standup tools. I am debating if I should move our team from a typical standup to an online one. I see benefits being, people put more thought into the standup report. Sometimes I see engineers showing up to the standup and having to remember and plan on the go.
I've previously run with a #standup channel in Slack for distributed teams, where everyone makes sure there's an update in-channel at 0900 GMT of what they did in the preceding time they worked.
Plus an #achievements channel where you make a note of anything you did that was significant (I've also heard this called #whathappened)
I'm doing some consulting on the side (while starting https://getctx.io) and at this client we have a daily physical standup with a video call on Zoom, plus #achievements in Slack.
Yeah it works quite well.
As usual, the biggest problems are with video and mics in meeting rooms with bad acoustics.
Everything else is good.
#achievements works especially well because it gives a persistent, short-form log that people can read quickly when they come back from days off, for instance.
We minimized that problem by using a free app on a smart-phone that turned it into a microphone for the PC running the Skype call. Team members in the room would pass the phone around.
...some higher ups have the feeling things aren't going their way.
OR
...some people aren't available for questions somehow and you want to pin them down for at least 10min a day to get some information out of them.
In both cases the stand-up is just a band-aid for deeper issues like missing or broken processes, Miscommunication or simple that no-one cares enough to talk to each other anymore.
The habit of skipping them for whatever reason is also problematic. If you so easily skip them (as a team or as individual(s)), why have them in the first place?
Just like anything else, I've seen them done well, but also badly. My current stand-ups last probably 10 mins (never more than 15 mins). It generates questions and discussions that are carried out after the stand-up with a more focused group.
If you aim for "transparency" in your process and company culture, I think stand-ups are not intimidating and are not waste of time.
Google Hangouts is what my past few teams have used. Wanting people to put "more thought" into their standup report, however, may be a red flag. An update during standup should be brief, and not result in the standup dragging on and on. No one wants to be there any longer than necessary, and if anything specific needs to be discussed, set aside time for that topic and only for the parties that need to be involved.
My best standup meeting was so good I still remember it. It lasted precisely 1 minute 12 seconds. Make it snappy! Or better yet make it async, in Slack, using an automated tool.
agreed, may be more "thought" is not the right word. But have you been in situations when engineers show up and they are struggling to remember what they did yesterday?
That may be an argument for using a feature or ticket tracking system. If you've been assigned a feature (or "story", if you prefer) or a bug, there should never be a mystery as to what you're working on. And if you somehow forgot, a quick check would confirm what you were doing... in theory.
We're using geekbot for asynchronous daily standups and it works really well, I love it. Fixes the notes problem as well, I check the standup notes when I'm wondering what I planned to do for today ;)
Agreed, we use geekbot as well. Our team is very distributed and asynchronous and it makes figuring out what everyone is up to and who needs a hand pretty easy. Also it helps going back through the channel to figure out what I was working on all week.
My previous team was distributed (SF, TX, NY) used Geekbot in slack for standups, 9:30am local time it would prompt you to enter what you did yesterday, what you'll be working today and any blockers.
Geekbot worked good when people put thought into their reports, which was far from always - a lot of the time it'd be "yesterday: wrote code. today: will write code. blockers: everything is awful" which isn't hugely helpful for team synchronisation. That said, it was a lot better than when we tried using hangouts. With Hangouts we kept running into issues like: not socially acceptable for video conferences at desks in the SF office, and the SF people being in a conference room felt a lot more distant than the remotes on their PCs.
Current team is also distributed (same timezones as previous), but we do a highly structured standup in video conference where everyone is on equal footing signed on a workstation (instead of half being in a conf room).
We have used Hangouts forever but just started switching to using Slack video calls in a #standup room. The audio and video quality on Slack far exceeds what you get on Google Hangouts. Although we do miss being able to manually dial in a participant that happens to be somewhere that has a spotty data connection. Slack doesn't perform very well in situations where the mobile data is sketchy.
I've used a few in combination with conf calls by virtue of being on a few teams with remote workers. In those scenarios they are invaluable. I've never used them when the entire team is in the same room so can't vouch for that.
> Sometimes I see engineers showing up to the standup and having to remember and plan on the go.
Standups are not "iceberg meetings." By having the team prepare for the standup all week you might be discussing things that have been organically solved, or that aren't pertinent to you or the rest of the team. If you care enough about something, you'll remember to bring it up during standup. If you take the old-school 2 hour Monday morning status meeting and call it a standup then you aren't doing standups.
If you need that thorough 2 hour status meeting, abandon agile. Don't put your engineers through the hell of reporting to two status update workflows.
Good point. The point is not to prepare for the standup but be ready. WHat I mean is, in order for the standup to be efficient, engineers need to remember and be a little more organized in their thoughts for the benefit of others and making the standup more meaningful for the team.
We built a tool to solve this exact problem called Standup. https://getstandup.com/. It produces daily progress reports for your engineering team by scanning git data.
We put our reports up the big screen every day during our in person Standups. Every engineer quickly runs through their work items and it definitely eliminates the whole "having to remember and plan on the go".
As a manager, I also love how it helps me catch up on my teams progress every evening as well.
I built Standup Jack (standupjack.com) to give you a chance to think thoughtfully about your current and upcoming tasks before sharing them with your team.
Our team uses skype for business for our standup. We're spread all around Europe so we don't have the choice of an in-person meeting.
In my opinion they tend to take a little longer than a traditional standup but we do go more in depth when discussing issues we might be having. Usually it takes 15 minutes.
Ours too. They end up being a little longer than I wish they were. Have you guys tried any kind of online tools for this? or would you keep preferring Skype? Something like jell.com
I lead a student group. Have a Standuply report setup to run once a week on Slack. Also have Trello. Adoption of both has been tepid. I like the premise of Standuply: the bot interviews everyone (you define the questions) and then publishes a report of all the responses (or lack thereof).
I think adoption has been poor because the pace of work has been slow, even though it shouldn't be -- Trello shows lots to work on. The team isn't afraid to share their accomplishments and thoughts. But they haven't been taking on tasks by their own volition.
As a team we use Hangouts for daily standups and it seems to work well for us. I work 40% remote and another team member is 100% remote. Screen sharing for Jira works, although we usually just do straight video.
exactly, its not the problems I am worried about. I do think engineers coming to the standup with some thoughts just make the standup exponentially more useful. Totally agree with the informal-ness
Plus an #achievements channel where you make a note of anything you did that was significant (I've also heard this called #whathappened)
I'm doing some consulting on the side (while starting https://getctx.io) and at this client we have a daily physical standup with a video call on Zoom, plus #achievements in Slack.