Goodbye to did, doing, blockers

Many of us have been in the interminable daily standups going around to each person for the standard "Did, Doing, Blockers" routine. It often dissolves into a haze where the updates all sound like "Worked on thing A, going to try to wrap up thing A today, no blockers" and it all seems like a waste of time.

It's often cited as a useless relic, another reason why Agile is no longer useful. Like all things Agile, I find standup meetings become unhelpful when the format of them is:

1. Dogmatic. "We MUST do it by the book!"
2. Unchanging. "We have to do it the same way we did yesterday."
3. Unexamined. "Don't worry about whether this is helping us, just keep doing it!"

For many years as an engineer I experienced the classic format, and as a manager I have to admit that it has a certain allure. It allows you to always hear from everyone on the team and gives you a sense that you know what everybody is working on. Then for awhile we took a half-measure, realizing that the real thing the team was on the hook for was to deliver projects, so we walked the sprint board, THEN had everyone briefly say if they were working on anything not represented on the board.

That got us closer to a better picture of what mattered, until the standup took forever and we realized there wasn't a lot of point to going around to everybody. We instead started walking the board from right to left, then checked in on each project from a high-level view, and then put the question out to see if anyone needed something to work on. Generally folks on the team would ask in the team Slack channel if they freed up, but it was a nice check-in point to highlight the top priorities and get them plugged in quicker.

After those changes, standups became pretty quick, around fifteen minutes. We have a parking lot to go into detail, and I try to make sure that, if we say we're going to have a follow-up conversation, that it actually happens. It can be very frustrating, especially as a newer member of the team or in your career, to raise issues, only for them to disappear or never get any further time for in-depth investigation.

Some teams do mostly or entirely async standups over Slack, and if that works for your team, go for it. For my team that spans many timezones, it's nice to have a touchpoint as a team and an opportunity to raise important concerns or solicit feedback. For any Agile ceremony, make sure you are getting honest feedback about how well it's working and a way for team members to suggest changes that can be run as experiments to see if they work better than what you had before.