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>If a clear majority of the audience isn't interested in your status then you're just burning hours.

From my understanding stand ups are not supposed to be status reports. They tend to turn into them though as it seems the most common format is 1) what did you work on yesterday, 2) what are you working on today, 3) what's blocking you?

I prefer daily stand ups (near the onset of the day) for small teams to be 1) what's our goal for today? 2) what might block us or slow us down? 3) how are we going to tackle our goal?

When stand ups start feeling like justifying your existence then morale drops, [looking] busy work increases, and too much time is spent on CYA. Focus on solving problems not explaining them.



> what's our goal for today?

The same as it was yesterday or whenever the last planning session happened.

Like TFA said, the team, as a whole, shouldn’t be changing priorities like socks.


If your goal for the sprint is "build widget" then your goal for the day should be "build part 3". You don't change priorities each day, you change how far along you are and where you expect to get to.


The term "Sprint" makes me cringe, it's meaningless in my experience. It doesn't effectively identify goals or deadlines. It's a stupid techie/hipster term that no one apparently pays attention to.


> The term "Sprint" makes me cringe,

Tried that once as a team. Then it became a derogatory joke word, haven't sprinted since. Well only in real life when playing tag with my kids.

Estimating, delivering on time, working together, can be hard. Someone deciding to rename it with a new label, doesn't usually solve the problem, though now everyone has a new label to make fun of.


If you're doing kanban and work in an environment where product direction changes quickly, then definitely this.

If your standup can be replaced with everyone posting on a slack channel, then it's just a status update as there's no discussion and alignment happening, which are the valuable parts.

Most teams should experiment with their process more.


The standup should be with the people on the current sprint. Alignment should have happened in earlier planning stages. "Discussion" is (should be) highly structured in a daily standup and any discussion that is like a dialog should be placed in the parking lot until the meeting ends, when only those interested in that discussion need to attend.


Goal for today - get stuff done. finish up things we planned for the week.

Blockers - hopefully blockers are identified and communicated right away vs waiting for standups.

How to get stuff done - less unnecessary meetings and processes. Async communication.


Though what you are doing today is a direct result of what happened yesterday.




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