I've noticed this phenomenon for years and I've always found it odd.
Let's explore this:
My concern is that separate meetings will tend to create misaligned views. Will follow-up technical discussions uncover issues that change how we should view priority trade-offs? Probably. Will we always detect this? Probably not. Would we have a better chance of detecting this if we had everyone involved? Presumably yes... Is the failure rate high enough that this is a problem?
The separate meetings suggests that separate purposes are being served. In many cases, it's not that there are two meetings where only some people are invited, it seems to be more a case of lack of interest. The lack of interest seems to come from separate purpose. The first stand-up is focused on sharing status whereas the second stand-up is focused on technical implementation details.
The separate purposes suggests the effects of specialisation. Your job is to figure out what to build. Your job is to figure out how to build it. Your job is figure out to test what was built. Don't try to do each other's jobs... which leads to... don't bother talking to each other about each other's jobs. I suspect that if role boundaries were more fluid, perhaps we would not expect to see the multiple standup phenomenon. If I think back to my own experiences, I believe this to be the case.
The most common reason for the separate stand-up seems to be that non-technical people are uninterested when technical topics come up in the stand-up. My thought:
If there is value in technical people understanding the business context (aka problem space) then there is also value in business people understanding the technical context (aka solution space)which leads to two questions:
- What has been done to help non-technical people understand how the technical systems work?
- What has been done to help technical people understand how the business model works?
I'm all in favour of cross-functional teams and decreasing specialisation, but in reality most teams have people for whom low-level technical details are meaningless. I'd be impressed if we had a customer representative who knew what a database connection pool is, let alone one who cared; yet it's very useful to have a daily forum when the more technical members of the team can discuss this sort of thing.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what alternative you are proposing. Are you suggesting that everyone in the stand-up should stay around for the technical discussion? Or that the technical discussion should not happen? Neither of these seem like great options to me.
I would prefer to retain the tech huddle, but make it explicit that anything arising from that discussion that is relevant to the whole team should be shared at the next opportunity.
Hello Jason,
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I have translated it into french :
https://agilarium.wikispaces.com/Pourquoi+y+a-t-il+deux+m%C3%AAl%C3%A9es+%3F
Regards,
Fabrice