> Standups are useful for communication between a team in general, if kept brief.
Just once I'd like to work for a company that tries to stay in communication without so many explicit/manual/sync check-in gates.
* No stand-up, engineers required to write a 250-words or less blog post 2+ times a week.
* No announcing PRs, reviews &c to each other. Make watching the board a habit, one you "pull" rather than that is pushed to you. Or use a company provided chat-bot/tool to help surface changes as they happen, if you need that. The issue tracker should better dashboard whatever activity is happening, in general- indicate branch updates, pr changes, &c, clearly, across the board.
There's some value to using social processes to radiate all the changes happening, but I'd really like to see some camp out there that makes a go at mechanizing themselves. I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities, more enduring & valuable forms of communication that we have failed to even begin to explore.
A place I used to work had engineers documenting their work essentially in the form of a blog. It was actually really a useful habit, and reviewing the project blogs once each week made it really easy for me to find cases when I could help a colleague who was working on something I'd had experience with before.
I'd venture that the parent was talking about engineers "documenting" their work for managers, whereas I think you mean documentation for other engineers. Very different audiences and thus different things to say. (And widely different lifespans for the information.)
The latter no doubt is hugely useful (I'm on a long slow effort myself to get my co-workers to document their work more robustly). But writing status reports for managers/PMs on a weekly basis is, in my not so humble opinion, a complete waste of time for the company, and a sign of poor organization.
I was hoping both purposes would be served, at this mandatory level.
I would adore any engineer who writes more blog posts walking through what they're up to more technically.
How do you feel about every-day stand ups as a means for managers/PMs to check in on employees? My own impression has been that this is at least 50%+ of the reason for stand up, and to me, I'd far prefer periodic write-ins, rather than ephemeral, undetailed, synchronous communication.
Just once I'd like to work for a company that tries to stay in communication without so many explicit/manual/sync check-in gates.
* No stand-up, engineers required to write a 250-words or less blog post 2+ times a week.
* No announcing PRs, reviews &c to each other. Make watching the board a habit, one you "pull" rather than that is pushed to you. Or use a company provided chat-bot/tool to help surface changes as they happen, if you need that. The issue tracker should better dashboard whatever activity is happening, in general- indicate branch updates, pr changes, &c, clearly, across the board.
There's some value to using social processes to radiate all the changes happening, but I'd really like to see some camp out there that makes a go at mechanizing themselves. I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities, more enduring & valuable forms of communication that we have failed to even begin to explore.