Is daily standup valuable or a waste of time?

[emily]

Spinach.io is backed by Atlassian Ventures. We are trying to understand what dev teams think of daily standup. Share your opinions with us and get a coffee on us ☕️

We'll post the results here, so you can see what others think of daily standup. 

https://spinach.io/survey-communities

[Robin Chalia]

Hi @emily 

Coming from a dev team lead background,
as per my experience, the daily standup is really needed for the following reasons:

1. Most of the times, devs wont speak about the small/big challenges that they are facing in their daily work. Meeting daily let them speak. It can  greatly help in timely decision making and re-estimates.

2. We cant say that the software requirements can be defined/understood completely and perfectly. When writing code, there are endless possibilities of how we want the software to behave. Daily meet-ups gives the devs a way to keep confirming about those possibilities that were not otherwise defined in the requirements.

3. Devs can more accurately share their availabilities/vacations when they meet daily.

4. In a group, working on the same goal, we very often suppress our feelings about small things - collaborations, tools, processes, policies, work load etc. Meeting daily gives a feeling of a casual meet-up as compared to agenda specific meetings. At few times, in the daily stand-ups, people sometimes directly/indirectly expresses their hurdles.

I hope my answer can be of any value to your question.
Have a nice day-ly standup :) 

[emily]

Thanks so much for this thoughtful reply @Robin Chalia 

Do you have any thoughts or personal experiences on why some folks have such a negative opinion of daily standup? Where do those feelings come from?

[Robin Chalia]

Some folks think that it's kind of non-productive to meet every day when we have some well defined goals. They just want to keep working undisturbed. These guys find it comfortable meeting either once a week or once in 2 weeks for presenting demo etc.

Some other folks may have a feeling that daily standups are a way for their line-managers to keep an eye on them. They don't like it that they are required to tell what they did yesterday and what they'll do today. As some people may start judging their pace of work.