Why does Scrum feel like micromanagement?

I seriously hate daily standup, ours go on for half an hour, sometimes longer and I have to listen to completely unrelated shit I don't know anything about. I cannot explain how disconnected I feel. I'm the only dev working on their website. Some days I don't even need to check in, I have nothing to say.

I can relate, 100%. Maybe I always did it the wrong way, I don't know. I don't know anyone IRL who does those daily standup meetings and thinks they are useful

Sounds like you're in the wrong team's daily standup.

Well sounds like you might be experiencing one of the following:

- teams or devs that don't belong to you core team are talking about stuff... like if you're in the backend team you shouldn't be listening to what the frontend guys are doing, that should be a different kind of sync

- people are talking way too much about what they are doing and conversations start to happen and it might not concern some of the devs

I don't think standups are necessary since you have an issues tracking board, I mean that's what they are for right? ..tracking. Anyone can access the board (including the manager) at any time, to check the board, the only pre-requisite is that team members are pro-active in keeping it up to date.

Another benefit of keeping the status on tracking boards is that you can have conversations on the ticket itself, keeping a history.

Alternatives? ... chat (public/private) async catch-up should do the trick ..or just plain old in person poke-and-lets-talk approach.

Our stand ups consist of 30 min of a lead developer’s stream of consciousness promising impossible features with no sense of staffing or timeline. The PM gets about a minute to check on status and see what stakeholders think. This has been going on for three years, the system is a disaster, and it’s taking 4 full time developers to implement the “idea of the week” with no discernible improvement over the old system we were supposed to replace. In fact the new system is far worse and the after hours production support time to keep the POS running is taking a heavy toll on me and my family. Humanity is the problem, not the project management flavor of the decade.

A family member made the introductions for me at this new place 4 years ago, and I promised him I’d stay for 5 years and not be the typical IT job hopper. One year to go to keep my word and I will never, ever work for this pathetic excuse for an IT department again.

Standups should be short and to the point:
What have done yesterday?
What will you be doing today?
anything you did not expect? problems?
Is there anything blocking you from completing your task/story?

ideal Demo:
I worked on ticktock fuckall task.
continue work on ticktock fuckall, and complete first part, and deliver to qa guy to start testing.
nope, and nope.

another option, the usual:
Worked on marshmello rainbow crap ticket.
Going to switch to candygloss bastard task.
PM has not delivered the required changes document we discussed yesterday.
PM should deliver the required crapheap before we can continue. ScumBuster - take it from here please.

The most easy way to solve the "too long" talking, is to use a timer, and limit turns to 60 seconds, and 30 seconds followups.

@NemeXis done right stand ups are good but they should be short.

Ours are never more than 15 and quite often ends early.

For anything that would take more time you take a separate meeting with only those that need to be there.

No discussions, only status updates.

And we are still often 10+ people on those meetings so you have about a minute each, no more.

That is why retrospectives exist. Time to complain and get a change in.

Our online stand-ups also run to about 30 min. But that is due to pleasant conversation. The actual stand-up part usually runs for 10min. If there are some issues or something to discuss we have break out sessions with people who it concerns. I find that this works really well.

Scrum, working properly, should feel like you're justifying your paycheck at your stand up. And the stand up should be nice and short. Here's what I did yesterday, here's kind of what I'm doing today, these are the blockers I had/have.

done right stand up meetings should take 10 min at most and it's just a check in. what did you do yesterday, what are you doing today and do you need help with any problems. it helps the team be aware without interrupting them. that said, usually you're supposed to be on the same project, it doesn't make much sense for you to be there

@darksideofyay yes, same project or working on things that are heavily integrated so daily standup is relevant is the whole point.

If your on different projects you could probably do with far less sync, like weekly or so.

Well first of all daily standup is timeboxed to 15 minutes. It's used to identify blockers and track progress, not discuss it

@AlgoRythm yeah that's what I thought it was, but these people (and the people running it) don't seem to know what they're doing. Some people ramble on FOREVER and the leader doesn't do anything about it. I've pointed this out before and got ignored.

@NemeXis Yup, I am the only web developer with a unique tech stack than the rest of the people in this weird team. We're a small department, though, so one or two people work on the data/reporting stuff, another guy does a bunch of other stuff I cannot even define (devops, backend, I don't even know), one woman does CRM support, another guy does tech support and so on. I'm sure none of them are interested in the website I work on.

Some of them go on talking in ridiculous detail about their work from yesterday or blockers and then I just zone out completely.

They're trying to follow the Spotify Model, but it doesn't work well in a small department like ours. It's kinda cringey, to be honest.

@dissolvedgirl If I were you I would take the team leader in a face-to-face private conversation and tell him /her that I do not wish to join these standups anymore because they are a waste of time for you and that the information that people contribute to this meeting is irrelevant for the other parties. If the team lead insists that this is good I would go and ask why and what are the exact pieces of information that contribute to your productivity and better execution, and then let him/her give concrete examples. If he/she can't produce concrete examples I would just shove it in his/her face that it is BS.

If you are the only dev on your team, who are those other people?

Sometimes, it helps to listen to their updates and understand/question their thought processes. But if they are fully irrelevant, you should ask the scrum master to hold multiple different calls

Our Daily is usually 5-10 minutes, depends how many join (it is encouraged, but not strictly required). But we're a small dev team. Usually it is 30s-1m per person plus maybe 2 minutes chitchat beforehand. Half an hour every day seems excessive to me in most circumstances and ridiculous if you're working on different features.

Scrum isn't in place for the developer, it's just a roadblock. If companies want us to attend these meetings and waste money on it, let them. Lean back in the chair and do absolutely nothing during the meeting.

If stand ups are taking longer than 15 mins, it's not a stand up anymore and your lead/manager is missing the point.

@Bazze true, its there for the team.

Sure, it takes some time, but done right it will make the team more efficient.

Done bad it will not only take to much time but break morale and hamper whatever time the devs actually get to work.

Problem is that to many managers thing that scrum it for them, but its no more for them than for individual devs.

Its still for the team and should be handled by the team.

A scrum master is part if the team, it should not be some upper management and any one above the team is there as a guest to help the team and to answer questions.

Ours is usually 5-10 minutes maximum. I actually like the daily because I get to know what the team is up to in short concise manner. Who is working on what features, and how the progress is going.
Everyone just quickly says what they are working on.

One point I find might be good for your team:
If they have some blocker let the team know and either someone volunteers to help or a specific help is asked. And they connect later on 1:1 call or chat. Not everyone needs to be involved in the resolution. So no long conversations about the blocker happen in the daily. Remember the daily is not for blocker resolution just to let everyone know that there is a blocker. Anything more than that another call or message.

@coder-guy just re-read that. *should'nt. should not feel like you're justifying your paycheck

Standups should not be the norm for every single daily meeting.

To me it's insane to have 5 days per week with every person getting a turn to just touch on what they're doing without ever going in depth.

Let one of those days be a day where 1 person actually does a demo showing what they are up to in depth.

SCRUM is not for you, the developer, is for the manager to provide feedback to the stakeholders.

there seems to be this disconnect and heavy dislike of project managers in which we think that their shit is useless while we code along doing black magics on the web. But it is not. Someone has to answer for how valuable you are to the company hiring you, someone has to provide metrics, this is where these things come in.

Annoying? yes. Necessary? also yes. People need feedback, specially since dev time costs more than anything else.

Disclaimer: Head of a Web development department + senior dev.

@AleCx04 I'd agree scrum is partially for stakeholders, but it's also aimed at helping devs. A big selling point is also that it the question "any blockers?" asked daily might adress problems that otherwise might go unmentioned. With the hope it could turn out one dev is blocked because they are waiting for another task, waiting for a review etc - which others were unaware of.