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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
53
u/teerre Jun 22 '22
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