4 Reasons Why Daily Standups Are Stressful for Developers
& effective solutions to overcome these obstacles
It was a hot sunny day in August 2010, and the clock struck eight.
I was standing in front of the Bigpoint office in Hamburg with my daily croissant in my hand. I put my employee badge on the reader to unlock the door, then head to my desk next to the glass wall. I checked my email box before I started tap-dancing my fingers across the keyboard.
“I’m ready now,” I thought to myself after finishing part of the refactoring in the Battlestar Galactica game. I pressed the “commit” button.
Oops! Eclipse refused to collaborate. It showed me a merge conflict error because our remote team in Malta has pushed an update to the project.
After two hours of struggling with fixing the conflict, I heard Markus calling: “Guys, it’s time to gather.”
All the team stood up and looked at the whiteboard with a bunch of little colorful cards glued on it. Our mission was clear: we had to move the cards in front of us from left to right. All we need to do is to share what we’ve done. I didn’t understand how it exactly works, but sure I’ll figure it out later. Let’s just don’t worry about that for the moment, because today is a special day.
Today I officially became a member of a Scrum Team for the first time in my life.
Excited about the news, I spent long hours Googling and reading posts about the concept of roles, sprint, estimation, backlog, and what they mean to me as a developer. But what helped me have a better understanding of Scrum was the experiences I’ve had after my work for Bigpoint.
As years went by, I had the chance to join other teams that have applied agility differently. Some have removed estimations, some were more strict about the quality of the issue description in Jira than others. Some teams have focused on one service, while others have taken care of multiple services and projects simultaneously.
Despite all their differences, there was one thing all these Scrum Teams had in common: it was the Daily Scrum — though my fellow developers and I have escaped it sometimes when the Scrum Master or PO (Product Owner) was absent.
You may wonder why we avoided it when we were able to?
Well, the short answer is that we didn’t see its benefit.
In a small team, often almost everyone knows what their mates are doing, especially if they are communicating together during the day. So there was no need for an extra ritual to exchange the current state.
But to be honest, there were other reasons behind why developers might prefer to avoid the daily or look at it as a stressful event. In this post, I’ll break down some of these reasons based on my personal experience.
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