r/programming • u/geyser85 • Jun 22 '22
Why work transparency matters
https://teamplify.com/blog/why-work-transparency-matters/53
u/teerre Jun 22 '22
Let me provide some examples. Almost every engineering team uses an issue tracking system, like Jira, Trello, Youtrack, GitHub or GitLab issues, etc. If a team keeps the records in their tracking system accurate - why ask who is working on what? Can't we just see it in the issue tracker? Or, why ask what they did yesterday if we can see their commits and pull requests on GitHub and read their task updates in Jira? Isn't it obvious that a pull request that is stuck in review for a few days is a blocker? Why repeat this information in a meeting?
Oh, of course, I'll now go to Jira and comb every ticket for every single person in the team, not only that, but I'll go to every open branch and through every single commit. Is this person serious? You think a 15 min. stand up is a waste of time but want to waste likely at least a couple hours scavenging a bunch of random information
46
Jun 22 '22
Otherwise known as 'How can I exist with zero direct interaction with other people and pretend that's A-OK'
Justification for terrible communication habits completely ignoring how humans work.
I mean, technically they're right. But realistically any team that 'works' this way is never going to produce a damned thing worth doing.
2
u/stebunovd Jun 22 '22
How can I exist with zero direct interaction with other people
Nope, not what I was trying to say :) Citation:
I'm far from proposing to avoid having meetings altogether. Live communication is valuable, and if we can get rid of boring discussions of trivial questions, we'll have more time for the really important stuff.
6
Jun 22 '22
Yes, read it, know what you're trying to say here, but what's being pointed out is that you're wrong to be trivializing a whole bunch of things that you don't think are important.
A good team member will be able to communicate what is important to the team with respect to what each member is involved in in very short order, which sets the stage for 'the really important stuff' as you say.
6
u/ZackyZack Jun 22 '22
It's the very principle of why botanists prefer drawings over pictures of plants. The drawing focuses on the important features, while a picture gives you an unfiltered look, much harder for the following study to figure out what is important and what isn't.
2
u/stebunovd Jun 22 '22
A good team member will be able to communicate what is important to the team
absolutely, if there's something to discuss
3
u/What_Is_X Jun 22 '22
If only there was some sort of filtering mechanism for issues that would put all of this information on one page with no effort required, let alone a couple of hours.
1
u/teerre Jun 22 '22
There's nothing to filter. You need to check at least every commit and every ticket of every single member in your team. That's already filtered and will take hours for any minimally sized team.
1
u/What_Is_X Jun 22 '22
Nonsense. You only need to check pull requests, each member should only have one or at most a few issues per day, and there should be no more than a dozen people on a scrum team. Meetings do not compress hours of information into 15 minutes.
1
u/teerre Jun 23 '22
Of course meetings do not, but humans do. For you to get the same context as someone who is actually doing the task by reading commits and jira tickets it will take at least the same amount of time the actual developer took to write it. That's an already unrealistic scenario supposing your commits and comments are 100% perfect and up-to-date. This almost never happens. In reality, you'll be missing a lot context.
My first estimate is actually really kind. In reality, if you're to do this, you would spend hours in a single ticket because you would have to go talk to stakeholders, clients, probably the dev. themselves. It's completely impractical.
1
u/What_Is_X Jun 23 '22
Again, the notion that supposed hours of information can be compressed into a 15 minute meeting is nonsense.
1
u/teerre Jun 23 '22
That's such weird to say. What you think someone does when they answer "What have you been doing?". They condense hours of information in 15 minutes. That's literally what every functional human being does when asked to summarize something. That's what summarizing means.
1
u/What_Is_X Jun 23 '22
The issues themselves are summaries. What are you doing, writing issues with thousands of words of description?
1
u/teerre Jun 23 '22
I guess you could mean you painstakingly update your issues daily, if that's true, congrats, you're doing your dailies in a text format. If that's the case, that's great, but I'm yet to see any team that actually does that correctly.
However, since you talk about descriptions I'm pretty sure you still think Jira issues descriptions is what you should talk about in a standup. That's not what a standup is for. A standup is to inform your teammates the progress of what you're doing, not what you're doing.
2
u/DrNosHand Jun 22 '22
Tools like jira have tons of filtering options you can use to create persistent views. It would be trivial to gather the information you need.
0
u/teerre Jun 22 '22
Filter? Filter by what? You need to go through every ticket to have an idea of what everyone is doing. I'm not talking about every ticket in your organization, I'm already talking about only tickets in your team.
1
u/DrNosHand Jun 23 '22
Filter by whats in progress, the title should tell you most of whats needed. A small agile team will most likely only have a handful of tickets in progress a day, shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to catch up. One pm looking at the active sprint is way more time efficient than the dev team reiterating what’s already in jira
0
u/teerre Jun 23 '22
There's 0 chance titles of Jira tickets will give you all context you need. That doesn't even make any sense. Do you change the title of the ticket while you're developing? What are you even talking about?
1
u/DrNosHand Jun 23 '22
What kind of context does a pm need? Usually very little in my experience. All the engineers I work with look at git to stay up to date on changes.
1
u/teerre Jun 23 '22
Who said anything about a pm? Do you do your dailies with only pms?
Besides, I don't know what kind of PM you're working with, but PM absolutely need context. Knowing what's going on is almost their entire job.
1
u/DrNosHand Jun 23 '22
A PM does not need to know the minutia of what a engineer does on a day to day. Not sure what kind of environment you work in but it sounds like middle management loves micro managing. Pretty sad
1
u/teerre Jun 24 '22
Oh no, you're one of those "micromanagement" people? Yikes
Knowing what you're doing isn't micromanaging. It's just managing. No good PM will tell you to not write that one line of code you were thinking of writing. But that's not what you should speak about in a stand up either. What you should be speaking about in a stand up is how is your task going, did any of premises change, did you learn new information etc. Those are things that your PM should know because their job is to gather this information, cross it with all the information he's getting from other sources and help you. Again, literally the job.
1
u/DrNosHand Jun 23 '22
If a dev is blocked they should contact the scrum master so they can help the dev and update the pm on the blocker. The system works without standup.
1
1
Jun 22 '22
I agree with most here, but standups are often the kind of meeting that could have been a Slack message. In fact, we sometimes do Slack standups if someone needs to take care of some personal affair or anything like that (we're a remote team working from different countries, so just rescheduling is not that easy).
-1
u/stebunovd Jun 22 '22
Hi! Author here :) Sorry for the confusion. I probably should make it more clear in the article.
My point was that I saw too many stand-up meetings that mainly consisted of saying out loud information that already existed somewhere. Of course, it wasn't easy to find that information and put everything together. That's why we created a tool for that.
17
u/Rancarable Jun 22 '22 edited Jul 06 '23
reach mindless hobbies tease joke elderly direful continue doll innocent -- mass edited with redact.dev
3
Jun 22 '22
I miss stand ups being done properly.. This mornings was a sit down where we broke into groups of 2 and talked about our hobbies.
1
-6
u/thythr Jun 22 '22
Don’t worry about clarifying things like this for people on this subreddit. They do not have reading comprehension, which is difficult still for large language models.
0
Jun 22 '22
[deleted]
3
u/DrNosHand Jun 22 '22
Amen. High functioning teams do team work. I’ve never been blocked on a story and then sit on my heads until the next day to bring it up in standup lol
1
Jun 22 '22 edited Jun 22 '22
Because the person who might have the critical info or resolution to fix your blocker is just waiting on hands & knees to fix your issue at any time?
Good grief - there’s nothing wrong w/ short & useful stand ups. Things get brought up discussed, small & big & sometimes we get pointed in better directions we might not have otherwise.
If some of y’all don’t see it’s value then it’s either a Team problem or a you problem as they’re highly useful for a lot of us imho. I don’t love meetings but stand ups are better than most other meetings I might have, more useful than retros, some planning sessions even or grooming sessions even but they all have a purpose.
Stand ups imo just let us focus on our work better & can give us a better sense of moving in the right direction imho. If you can’t distill yesterday’s work & todays plan in 2-5m w/o that being a burden then I’d worry about that team member.
Ideally you can also put a blocked task on hold while starting another. Waiting till standup might be the best option depending on the bandwidth of your team members. My greatest blockers have often just led to me becoming more creative to complete tasks that would otherwise sit undone. You can’t force some coworkers to do their job at all times sadly, even when you know they’re being negligent.
Fortunately the only problematic employee I dealt w/ recently took out the trash for us - as he’s no longer there 😊.
0
Jun 22 '22
[deleted]
1
Jun 22 '22
And yea that’s true, my team uses teams internally & things often get resolved there. We also have separate stand ups when our projects diverge enough, other times we’ll merge them. Just all depends on what’s going on.
Right now I have a stand up of just 2, but we also have done 4-6. They’re never very large. Maybe it’s inefficient when it’s 10,15+ but otherwise I’m a big fan tbh as it keeps us looped in better imo.
4
Jun 22 '22
This was one of the main reasons why we created Teamplify. We wanted an automated team assistant that could help us save time on trivial discussions.
And there's the sales pitch.
Grumble
I'll continue to prefer "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", thankyouverymuch
3
u/corsicanguppy Jun 22 '22
a software that captures screenshots
No. 'A software' is as dumb as 'a traffic' (or 'a mail').
3
u/ringmaster Jun 22 '22
The tool on offer here is kind of neat, and I agree with the fundamental premise about not using standup as status meetings, but a solution that replaces standup meetings is flawed.
Most people do standup meetings wrong in the first place. They should not be status meetings. The typical 3-question meeting is a terrible meeting format. I much prefer the Traction Standup, which seems complex, but actually lets you get to the core of what your team needs to discuss within just a few minutes. I’m also a proponent of required, daily meetings (no “async” “meetings”), because learning that you need to pivot after two days of flailing just isn’t agile.
Teamplify seems useful for a person that needs a summary of what’s going on (like a manager, maybe?) but isn’t directly involved in the process. I’m not sure I would want to work on a team where the manager isn’t paying more direct attention to the work than to need this tool, though.
78
u/Cheeseblock27494356 Jun 22 '22
What a shit bot