Status meetings, standups, and their importance

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season where we're looking at the bright side of things. We're finding positives and the things that maybe just as easy for us to find the negatives. This episode, we're going to look at status. Status meetings, standups, particularly like daily standups and things of that nature. I don't want to equate the two. That's a different topic probably that a daily standup is not a status meeting, but I am going to group them together for the purposes of this episode. Now meetings in general we've talked about. Status meetings are in some ways more so. You think about a regular meeting, status meetings are almost more extreme as far as the positives and the negatives. When you look at the general negatives, it's a disruption. It's some amount of time that you spend on a daily or weekly basis. Often you're reporting status and this includes reporting it, not just a meeting, but actually there's time invested, there's time spent basically telling somebody what you've done. Ideally, what you've done and what you plan on doing. That's sort of the typical status format. Actually, I guess the typical, you add one more thing. What have I done? What am I going to do? Are there any blockers? What's in my way? What is keeping me from getting it done? Going off of those items, let's look at the positives. The negative is essentially it's a disruption. It's possibly, some people would say it's a waste of time. Let's flip, take a look at the positive sides and maybe by the time you're done, you won't consider it a waste of time. The first positive is that it is a pause, that it requires you to stop what you're doing or pause what you're doing at least. Instead of coming into work and focusing on your tasks, to think about it a little bit, to think about what have I done? What have I gotten accomplished? What am I going to get done? This mini planning essentially that you do for yourself, I find to be, I guess, very useful because you can take a look at things that you've been working on and say, okay, well this is, and you probably somewhat do this anyways, maybe on that ride into work or when you're grabbing your morning coffee or tea or whatever it is, but you're going to think a little bit about what is it, essentially what is it I want to get accomplished? What is it that, maybe with that, what did I get done yesterday? You probably have a bigger list that goes beyond a couple of days of things that need to get done and you're working your way through that list. That's really what status does is it has you put to paper or at least voice what those things are. Now, I think that part of the value is that this is an ongoing thing that you get to, you can look at your status from last week or the week before, yesterday or the day before, however that goes, and you can sort of figure out how you're progressing. Now, obviously, your manager or the team lead or whoever it is that you are reporting status to, they're going to see this as well. That's what they want is to see what is the, essentially what is the trend in getting things done and accomplishing the goals that we need to accomplish. That may involve other considerations like, are we slipping our dates? Are we ahead of schedule? Do we need to make resource adjustments? Is somebody floundering? All that kind of stuff. The thing is that that actually works for you as well. You can take a look at what you've been doing and say, okay, am I getting the things done that I say I'm getting done? Am I achieving those goals that I set on a status period basis, daily or weekly basis? If not, then I think that's very valuable for you to look at stuff and say, okay, I'm not getting this done. For myself, I find it's very helpful to sort of essentially draw a line in the sand. For example, I would have something that maybe it sits on my to-do list. Let's say it's a daily one, just sort of my little daily status. Okay, I was going to get this done and I didn't. The first day or two that I thought I was going to get it done and I didn't, maybe there's some reason for it. Maybe something else became a priority or I hit a snag. There's a point where that thing has been on my to-do list long enough that it needs to get off my status. The status needs to be done and then I need to never speak of it again, basically. It's a bit of accountability and not even a bit. It is definitely an accountability tool where we say we're going to get this done and then we come in the next status period or we return in our next status. Ideally, what we said we got done, got done. If not, it's a chance for us to sort of a pause to look at it and say, oh my gosh, I didn't get this thing done. Now, it may be that there's adjustment of resources or effort or priority or maybe that it just got lost in the shuffle. You can look at your, particularly in a weekly, look at say, let's say you do it on Friday, you come in over a weekend, you forget a few things. You can look at that status and say, oh yeah, this is what I want to get done. Or worst case, when you go to do your next status and you start with what did I accomplish, you should start from the list of what did I say I was going to accomplish. Because ideally, you got all of that accomplished and more. So you start with what you said you were going to accomplish. Say, yep, got it done, got it done, got it done. Oh, and by the way, I did these other things. That's not always the case. So instead we look at it, we say got it done, got it done, still in progress or didn't get to start it. Whatever your status is, whatever your current status on that ticket or that item or that task is, where you at in getting it done. And it may be even more specific where you may say, okay, I'm 25% done, 50% done, 90% done, whatever it is. Depends on how that works out. One of the things is this gives us, I guess this is a twofer here for the first one, is really it's accountability and a way to track, a better way to track and manage what we should be doing, what we've said we're going to do. Now another thing is, another bonus of these things, a benefit, is that it provides us a tool for estimation to improve our ability to estimate. Especially if you want to get into the details of a status that includes hours spent on whatever a task is. While it is, to me it is, and I think for most people is more ponderous if I have to, let's say on a weekly basis, I have to put together a status and for the things that I did, I have to do an accounting of what hours went towards what task. It's a little more burdensome because I've got to track that and I've got to make sure that I write that down in my status. However, it is also more beneficial because I can take a look at all of those tasks and I can see the rolled up hours, the summary of time that I spent and see where am I at? My estimate, was it realistic? Did it work? Did I get done ahead of schedule? Did I go beyond the initial estimate? If so, really in both cases, what factors maybe caused me to be off? Maybe it's just that I'm not that good at estimating that type of work yet, but then over time that gives me something to refer back to. When I have similar work that I need to do in the future, I can say, well, how long did it take me to do that last time I had that kind of a task? Then go take a look back at it because I have all those statuses, because I added those hours up along the way, I can see what that's likely to be. Of course, as a manager, that's going to be incredibly valuable to them as well because they can look at how's the team doing, how do they estimate things, how do individuals do on estimations and adjust accordingly. If you have a developer that consistently makes estimates that are half what it actually takes, well, moving forward, you can just take their numbers and double them and you're probably more likely to get something accurate. Your estimation skill is going to improve even, like I said, even if you don't specifically put hours, there's going to be a generalized timeframe that you're expecting to get things done. If you do, then you know you're doing pretty good on estimations. If you don't, then you need to adjust your estimations. It's really that simple. It works, like I said, even without putting hours because you're going to have, let's say, a daily standup. This is pretty common in sprints. You put something together, you'll have a rough idea that this is going to take a half a day, a day, a week, whatever it is. As you're reporting your status, it's easy for you to see, hopefully, where you're at and where you think you should be based on that estimate. If it's a five-day task that you estimate, and you're just in day one, then hopefully you're at about 20% done. If you're four days into it, then you should be well on your way to getting that thing done. It should be at about that 80% mark. If you're not, then you know it's likely to slip and you can note that to the team sooner rather than later. But also you can note that, hey, I didn't quite get the estimate right. Of course, with the status, on a daily status or even a weekly status, you have probably some notes within those statuses because you're probably going to say, this thing is not done yet. You're probably going to say, as a note, this week I ran into this snag. This thing delayed me. This thing that I thought I was going to have, I don't have. All of those add up to give you an idea of what the blocking issues and what the considerations need to be the next time you work on some sort of similar task. While all of these are excellent positives, these are good positives to get out of status, I think maybe the best one is that when you report status either to your boss or a standup to a team, then your coworkers, your compadres in getting this thing done, have an idea of what you are working on. And vice versa, you have an idea of what they are working on. And sometimes even customers may have an idea of what's going on, what's the progress. In doing those, you get the sort of again, another two for one. One is you get the ability to know enough that what other people are doing and potentially avoid duplication of effort. So you may say, hey, I'm working on this or I plan to work on this thing today. And somebody else will say, oh, wait, I got that done yesterday or I was planning on working on that. So instead of both of you spending effort on something and getting to a result, one of you can say, oh, okay, well, I'll adjust and I'll go work on something else. So that's important, but sort of as a, like I said, a one-two punch for that. It also adds clarity into what you're doing and how you're doing it. And so when this involves user representatives like maybe a customer directly or a product manager or something along those lines, then they can see some of the tasks that are getting done and sometimes they can cut you off before you go into a task that isn't needed. Or they can look at a task and say, did this thing get done? Because we see that that would be needed for, you know, this other thing would be needed before you can get to this task. A good example of that would be, I'm going to go in and create the users, let's say the users report. Well, you know, as you're saying that somebody else on the team may say, do we have the data for that yet? That was a task that I don't think we've gotten done. And maybe you thought it did or not, but you can look around and say, oh, okay, I don't have the data, so I guess it's not going to be useful for me to dive into that report yet. So because I won't have enough, I won't have something to actually validate my report against. Or you may be in a situation where you say, well, I need to work on it, so I guess I need to first find some way to generate some sample data or test data in order to test my report. And the bigger your team gets, the more important these things are. If it's one person or maybe two people, then it's pretty easy to have an idea of what everybody's working on. If you even add a couple and get to four or five people, then there's going to be interactions, there's going to be crossover, there's going to be an opportunity for duplication of effort or things falling through the cracks. There may be something that you assume that some other person is going to do it and they assume that you're going to do it and then it doesn't get done until you get to a point where it's needed and everybody looks at each other and says, oh, guess we didn't get that done yet. So this communication, as always, communication takes some time, but it's an investment, particularly in the software world, particularly with the technologies and the very complex requirements at times that we deal with. I think that communication, that clarity is essential in getting to a successful solution. So it may seem like a waste of time, but it's actually time well spent. It allows everybody to basically think of it as you're in a rowboat and the idea of everybody rowing in the same direction. Well, if you just sit down, heads down, blinders on and just start rowing, you may be rowing in a completely different direction of everybody else. It's worth it to take a minute or however long it takes, maybe seconds to pick your head up, look around the boat, see where everybody is going, see how they're doing as far as which direction are they rowing and then adjust or ask them to adjust however that works out. It's the same thing in software. It's easy to go heads down and be sort of oblivious to other things that are going on until you basically slam into a brick wall and say, oh, this thing's got to be done. Somebody hasn't gotten it done yet. But these statuses will allow you to avoid that. So instead of you getting all prepped up for a certain task today that is one that you're unable to accomplish because you're waiting on somebody else, you will know when that status because they'll say, oh, I'm not done with that task yet. And you'll say, okay, well, I guess I'm going to go work on something else because the thing I was going to work on, I can't. It's got a prerequisite that hasn't been completed yet. So there's just a few of the positives of the daily status or the weekly status. Now, as you get into specifics of the idea of standups and the types of information that you report on a status, as we've already mentioned, things like do you put hours to the tasks that you've been working on or something like that, some metric to make it more concrete measuring your progress and what's left to be done. Or do you leave it sort of loosey goosey and just say, yeah, I'm working on items A, B and C, hope to get them done today. Somewhere along the way, you see that things were worked on and that they were completed And you can get a sense of elapsed time, but maybe not necessarily the real level of effort that went into that other than elapsed time. It's just, again, one of these things that I think when first blush, first thought about it, it's easy to say, I don't want to spend that time and don't want to worry about that. That's just bookkeeping stuff that I don't need to deal with. When you think about it for a little bit, I think you'll find that it is actually very valuable. And if you utilize it properly, if you put in the effort to put together a reasonably realistic and actual status, then over time, you'll find I think that it is time well spent. That being said, challenge of the week. What is, and this will help you, what is the template that you use for reporting status? If you don't have one, you should. Even if it's just like an outline, it may be, like I said, it could be as simple as what did I do? What am I going to do? What are the blocking issues? And maybe you have a little bit of a template of the level of detail that goes into each of those items. But when you're doing regular status, you should at least have a template or as I mentioned, maybe you just start with the previous status. Once you get the first one done, and hopefully you can take the, what am I, from last week, let's say it's a weekly, hopefully you can take the, what I'm going to do items, push those into the, what I did, and then essentially using the same format, create the new list of items that you're going to do in the time period ahead. Take a look at that. What kind of template do you have? If you have one, just take a look at it, review it. Is there maybe some formatting or details or something that you can add to make it more valuable either to your boss, your manager, or to yourself? Maybe there's something there that you can spend, you can tweak it a little bit and put yourself in a position to get more out of it. That being said, it's time to get out there and get more out of your life and go out and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we'll talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoir.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go. Developer Noir podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, it'd be great if you go out to developernoir.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.