Why I hate SCRUM daily stand-up meetings
July 17, 2012 21 Comments
I’ve been doing SCRUM stand-up meetings for 2 years before switching to a pre-sales role, and I’m going to tell you why I hated this.
Disclaimer #1: think again before posting your”you don’t understand what SCRUM is” comment. First, this blog post is not about SCRUM in general, but specifically about SCRUM daily stand-up meetings. Then, I fully understand the concept – thank you – but it’s just that I (ie: “me”) don’t like it and I think that there are other ways to achieve the same results.
Disclaimer #2: yes, this is about what I selfishly think… but it’s my blog so I do what I want 
Let’s all happily meet in the morning ! (late people will be crucified)
First, the meeting is supposed to begin every morning at the same time. Why in the morning ? Because “it helps set the context for the coming day’s work“. The issue is that developers – in France anyway – don’t like being told when to arrive in the morning: you arrive early, you leave early, you arrive late, you leave late !
But not anymore: with the SCRUM daily meetings, everyone needs to arrive more or less at the same time every morning (talk about freedom !). And if you arrive too early, you just wait for everyone while checking your favorite websites.Why ? Because it takes a while for you to get “in the zone” … and you don’t want to be interrupted during that time right ?
Did you clean your room honey ?
Then, let’s talk about the famous 3 questions: “What did I do yesterday ? What will I do today ? Do I have any impediments ?“
Sounds like what my mum was asking me when I was 5 years old. “Well, yesterday at school, I learnt how to write my name. And today, I’m going to do some painting… but it’s hard: can you help me mommy ?“.
On top of this, the need to setup a meeting to learn what my collegues are working on feels so wrong to me. As the member of a team, I happen to know what people are working on just by talking to them during coffee/lunch breaks. Also, reading SVN commits comments is a great way to keep an eye on what people are doing.
Join up, they said! It’s a man’s life, they said!
Finally, I’ve always liked testing new software components. This is a way for me to learn new stuff, which is always exciting… and it keeps me motivated.
The problem with the daily meetings is that you cannot say things like: “well, yesterday I finished working on the billing component and today I’m going to spend a couple hours studying this new PDF rendering library because it looks very cool, even if this is something that has nothing to do with the backlog“.
So why don’t I like standup meetings ?
- because I don’t want to be told exactly when to arrive in the morning.
- because I don’t want to wait for everyone to arrive before being able to really start coding.
- because I don’t need a daily meeting to know who is working on what (I’m a social guy and I use coffee breaks and lunchs to talk about that !)
- because I don’t need to scream for help: I know who can help me if I’m stucked.
- because I’m big boy !
Laurent KUBASKI
Isn’t micromanagement wonderful
Paul.
The truth is that there are a LOT of people that don’t need daily meeting, but there are a LOT of other people that need them because they don’t read commit messages, they don’t talk of work at coffe time, sometimes they don’t even work in the same city and do the daily meeting from remote.
Sometimes part of the team is not technical and do not even know how to use SVN/Git/Whatever. (Graphical designers, etc…)
It’s perfectly fine for you to study new libraries and things like that as long as you do your homework and do not miss deadline, you are a lucky one to have the time to do so DURING WORK.
If you feel unconfortable to say you are going to study a PDF library today then you know you shouldn’t be, which means daily meeting is useful to avoid you drifting away from your duty and gets the job done.
Don’t like it? talk with your boss asking for time to study, do not point your finger on the daily meeting.
There are jobs where you have to arrive on time, no matter what and if you are late of 5 minutes twice you are called by your boss. Again, you are lucky. Anyway nobody said you have to do the daily meeting at 8:00 AM, you can just schedule it to 10:00 AM every day.
“You are doing it wrong.”
Don’t you think some people *do* need the discipline, hand-holding and “forced guidance”, though? Not everybody socialize with the other team members, and often times people can be shy, not daring to ask for help (especially juniors in some cultures). SCRUM dailies are not meant for autonomous people, IMHO, rather the opposite.
@matt: it’s his opinion that’s why he wrote why *he* hated SCRUM daily stand-up meetings.
We’ve dropped our daily standups on many projects once we get to the point that the team know what each other are doing instinctively but that is not always the case, so we have continued to use them successfully.
While you may be able to ask for help when you get stuck not, assuming everyone behaves exactly like you is wrong. Some people unless prompted will continue to dither until they have read all of twitter. Having a meeting when you have people like this on the team ensures people aren’t procrastinating for any longer than a day and forces them to speak up.
So yeah it’s not the be all and end all… Only do it if you need it and stop worrying so much.
Daily Meeting time is decided by the team at “inception” time, not imposed by SM or PO. For example we do it al 10.00am. I hope everyone is up and running at that time
If you arrive at office earlier, of course you can start coding, yoiu dont have to wait for the DM to start coding
Usually during coffee breaks people dont talk ( and DONT HAVE to talk ) about tasks and impediment. IMHO coffee break must be a pause from work, time for kidding and chatting.
An impediment is not a “scream for help”, is just a way to inform SM and PO about that.
Last but not the least, we are all big and professional guys, PO and SM are not your parents, DM is just a little moment in the working day where you inform everyone about what you are gonna doing and about issues or iompediment you have. Nothing more than this.
My 2 cents …
Teamsnippets.com helps with most of those. Ditch the three questions and just do what’s valuable to you and your team.
Are there fair and balance reports on what SCRUM really improves? … in the software development arena. Anything, productivity, quality, creativity, etc.
I would like to know the costs of Scrum too. Costs associated to the “daily meetings”, per developer, per team, per project. per company and IT companies.
It would be great to associate a $$$ cost to SCRUM (an estimation of course) since its inception.
It would be interesting to know the cost/benefit of SCRUM. Don’t you think?
Thank you
jD @ http://pragmatikroo.blogspot.com
agreed.
The morning meetings are nothing but pain.
At least why dont you at least sit down for gods sake !!
“Don’t you think some people *do* need the discipline, hand-holding and “forced guidance”, though?”
Yes. But this suggests that different resources need different management styles, and that applying the same style to all team members may not be the most effective.
“On top of this, the need to setup a meeting to learn what my collegues are working on feels so wrong to me.”
Agreed. If you are a good team that already finds ways to get together and talk about what’s important, a formal meeting is a waste of time. Sitting in a common area where this can happen throughout the day can make it even less useful.
Having said that, it’s great starter discipline, and can be useful in environments where it’s not easy to get people together (I’ve been in places where I wasted way too much time trying to track people down or when my attempts to discuss things were rebuffed by people who were “too busy”). I’d start a new team on daily standups, but would push the team to find ways to eliminate the need for them once they got better at working together.
Also, most shops that run daily scrums and don’t get much out of them aren’t collaborating enough. It becomes one person reporting status, while the others worry about what they’re going to say when it’s their turn (because “that stuff” has little to do with what they’re doing). If that’s the case, you may as well revert to people sending an email with their status to the project manager, who gathers and emails a summary of what’s important to the team.
But…that’s not what works best in agile (or lean). http://www.langrsoft.com/blog/2007/12/stories-and-tedium-of-daily-standups.html
I love you man, even if you are French
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Right on!!! (& assume there are 1000 of these “!” at the end of those last two words) … I absolutely hated scrum, and believe is the one thing that has made this (formerly) (very) productive software Engineer to be absolutely turned off by his profession. I’m working on a related field now, of course, but this B.S. every morning made what used to be an interesting day seem like slave labor.
That is hwo I am feeling now…my company started this shit recently….totally hate it. Basically it is a daily status meeting that adds no value to the development process…It could be achieved by fewer meetings or just a e-mail to management every day….
I hated scrum meetings. It is a great tool for managers to micro manage developers and kill their creativity.
I guess you don’t need to be in a team because it’s all “I” for you.
The only people that will defend scrum are the project/program managers justifying their employment. Over 2 years of soul sucking scrum experience here….feel your pain bro
I’m a developer with over 10 years of experience and I’ve been doing scrum for the past year. Hate it… but everyone is doing it these days. Only escape is to leave the profession.