It's not micromanagement when the manager is trying to understand what is happening on the team. That's part of their job. If they were asking for updates from you every 5 minutes, that would be micromanagement.
How long do you think your manager should go without knowing what you're doing?
If you want to know immediately, ask me. If not, I guess a good indication would be the slack channel for the team (I'm working remotely), or the JIRA board update.
Thank you. There are multiple tools and channels for reading and querying all of this information. Between JIRA, and, if necessary, your VCS remote, you can figure out almost everything about what a team is doing. Any grey areas? Ask directly, with whatever channel suits the urgency.
I once suggested that instead of standups developers write an end-of-day comment into whatever ticket they're working on. This would enable managers, others, by filling the blanks that status change/VCS timestamps might not tell you. People just looked at me like I was crazy when this would be even more efficient.
Don't like the Burndown Chart over the course of a year? You can literally look at the Sprint Reports to see what issues/assignees are spilling over a course of time. Managers have all the tools they need but that's not the point of this stuff. The point of this stuff is to reinforce that they are the boss. They could even make the SCRUM Master's job actually useful and be responsible for this kind of research but I've yet to see a SCRUM Master be anything but a proxy for this antiquated posturing.
Just as much as there's a general fear that labor is hiding behind process, so is management.
> How long do you think your manager should go without knowing what you're doing?
A weekly status update is good enough for regular status. I must mention that if you are looking at status reports from the time dimension, you have already failed.
The manager should cultivate an environment where engineers and managers talk in small groups at any time. There is no need for a standup for this. Everyone can decide for themselves if they need to spend time with someone else. The manager can decide for themselves if they need to chat with a report instead of taking away time from all reports everyday.
Of course, this would require the manager to do the work to chat with reports and figure out what's going on.
Weekly status updates are probably enough if the team is 100% senior devs who know how to work independently and who know how to proactively reach out if they need someone else to get involved with something.
That is not the team composition most people are working with. The median developer in the industry only has a few years of experience.
skydhash|4 years ago
imbnwa|4 years ago
I once suggested that instead of standups developers write an end-of-day comment into whatever ticket they're working on. This would enable managers, others, by filling the blanks that status change/VCS timestamps might not tell you. People just looked at me like I was crazy when this would be even more efficient.
Don't like the Burndown Chart over the course of a year? You can literally look at the Sprint Reports to see what issues/assignees are spilling over a course of time. Managers have all the tools they need but that's not the point of this stuff. The point of this stuff is to reinforce that they are the boss. They could even make the SCRUM Master's job actually useful and be responsible for this kind of research but I've yet to see a SCRUM Master be anything but a proxy for this antiquated posturing.
Just as much as there's a general fear that labor is hiding behind process, so is management.
nine_zeros|4 years ago
A weekly status update is good enough for regular status. I must mention that if you are looking at status reports from the time dimension, you have already failed.
The manager should cultivate an environment where engineers and managers talk in small groups at any time. There is no need for a standup for this. Everyone can decide for themselves if they need to spend time with someone else. The manager can decide for themselves if they need to chat with a report instead of taking away time from all reports everyday.
Of course, this would require the manager to do the work to chat with reports and figure out what's going on.
TheCoelacanth|4 years ago
That is not the team composition most people are working with. The median developer in the industry only has a few years of experience.