For a while now, I’ve been noticing a “start standup” button at the top of Jira boards and I’ve been wondering what it did. Today I pushed that button in the hope that it would do something to help make the standup more effective, and now I wish I hadn’t.
What does it do? Pushing “start standup” will add another column to the far left of your board.
At the top of this new column is a countdown timer, which encourages us to think of the standup as a time-boxed event where we should fill the time and stop when the timer runs out. When it does run out, it makes some noise and stops. A far more useful approach would be a count up timer that provided feedback about how long the meeting has been running.
Underneath the timer, we have a list of all the people in this project with the label “up next” at the top. This encourages us to walk through each person one by one to get their update.
You might think that’s the way that scrum encourages the standup to run but this isn’t a scrum board and even if it was, that’s a poor way to run a scrum standup. We should be walking the work, not the people.
Then clicking on the name of each person filters all the work on the board to that specific person, encouraging us to think only of what that person is doing, not what the team as a whole is doing. Standup is supposed to be about coordination and collaboration and filtering by person is the opposite of that.
What could the “start standup” button have done that might have been useful?
- It could have ordered all the work in priority order so that we could talk about all the work items in descending order of priority. In general that would mean highest priority label first and then in descending age within that priority.
- It could have provided more context about each issue than we normally see on the front of the tickets. It might have showed the most recent comments or a list of sub-tasks, or other things that are relevant during standup.
This could have been a useful feature, but it isn’t. It’s worse than just not-useful as it will deliberately encourage poor behaviour from teams.
If you see this button on your board, I encourage you to ignore it.