Done, Doing, Blockers

I find that most daily standup meetings are waste of everybody’s time, but I also think that they are necessary in a way. There are standalone products, services which try to solve that problem.

But, I, like many others, have a ton of accounts already for many services and I wouldn’t want to add one more product to my daily routine, if possible.

Our approach to solve the standup problem was to make it simple. We opened a slack channel and named it #standups. Then asked everyone to put daily updates in the form of:

Done:
- this thing that fixes #314
- that bug which caused this and that…
Doing:
- this other thing that I had to do today
Blockers:
- that thing that John hasn’t finished on time

This way, instead of a daily hangout/video meeting, you update your teammates when you have time rather than in a fixed schedule. Also, your teammates can see anytime what you’re working on by just checking that #standups channel you specify.

This is especially useful if your team has people from different timezones.

Also, it adds a constructive stress to yourself which motivates you towards finalizing things that you’ve previously noted as being done.

Lumbergh

Then we added this tiny slack bot, called Lumbergh, into the equation to check who has and has not entered their status updates the day before. If they have, it’s all good. But, if they haven’t, then it’s shaming time:

Figure 1-a: lumbergh in action.

I think, the key issue here is that having some mindless/non-judging bot checking the updates vs. a real person doing it. It makes things not as painful when it comes from a bot.

The bot is open-source and you can get it from my github.

sinan/lumbergh

I haven’t received a single negative comment from my teammates, they seem to like him. Personally, I think it is a good discipline for anyone to keep such a simple diary.

After reading DHH’s post where he announced a similar feature of basecamp’s, I thought this could be applied to different channels with a little customization. As he told in his post, What did you learn today at work? or What made you happy/angry today? etc.

Maybe this is not applicable for some teams, but:

Figure 1-b: bill lumbergh himself.