The Three Questions you Really Need to Ask in Standup Meetings (Part II of II)

Dec 8, 2021
7 min read

This is the second post in a two-part series. Read the first post here.

When you use an Engineering Intelligence Solution to answer the classic three standup questions, you free up your team’s valuable meeting time for an even more impactful set of conversations. You’ll be able to spend less time gathering information and more time leveraging your expertise as a leader — once you’re no longer using facetime to surface issues, you can actually start solving them.

To frame these conversations, I recommend a new set of questions to ask in standup meetings:

• How can I help remove distractions?
• How can the team help reduce risk?
• Are we working on the right things?

Here’s how to get the most out of each one.

Question 1 to ask in standup meetings: How can I help remove distractions?

To most effectively answer this question, you’ll need to come to standup prepared. Take a look through your Engineering Intelligence Solution and keep an eye out for patterns that might indicate your team’s attention is fragmented, such as engineers who are making commits on multiple different Issues, or team members who have stopped committing for a few days. Code Climate's Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) solution offers visualizations of individual developers’ coding activity, which makes these patterns particularly easy to spot.

If you notice an engineer bouncing around, committing to multiple pieces of work in a short time period, it’s possible that engineer is trying to do too much at once. Have a conversation with that developer, and find out exactly what’s causing them to work in this way. It’s possible that they’re trying to make progress on multiple fronts at the same time, or that they’re being pulled in different directions by external forces.

Of course, every engineer is juggling multiple things at once, and it’s not uncommon for someone to jump to a new project while they’re waiting for a Pull Request (PR) to be reviewed. Still, there’s a point at which task switching becomes excessive, and the visualizations in an SEI platform make that clear.

Sometimes, the delay itself is noteworthy. If an engineer is committing to something every day, then stops for a significant period of time before picking it back up again, it’s likely they’ve been pulled away to work on something else. As a leader, if you notice this occurring, you can help your team members determine whether unplanned work is worthy of urgent attention.

Question 2 to ask in standup meetings: How can the team help reduce risk?

This question gets to one of the key goals of standup meetings: spotting and resolving problems before they derail sprints. Work that is at-risk is work that has started to go off track but hasn’t gone completely off the rails yet, which means you have the opportunity to stay a step ahead of a real problem. An SEI platform will alert you whenever a unit of work meets your criteria for “at-risk.”

While some at-risk work can be indicative of larger issues, at-risk work is often the result of a miscommunication regarding who should be doing what. When you bring risky units of work to standup for discussion, your team can quickly implement straightforward fixes.

Question 3 to ask in standup meetings: Are we working on the right things?

With an SEI solution, you can easily see what units of work are progressing, so you can ensure your team members are working on the right things. If you notice that a developer is committing against the lowest priority issue, you can discuss this as a team and realign priorities in the moment. This is rarely a good reason not to work on the highest priority things, and you can help coach the developer back to more important units of work.

Whatever caused the low-priority item to be started, the team now has the opportunity to decide what to do about the unit of work in question. It may be that the work is so far along it makes sense to finish it, or it may be something the team decides to pause until higher-priority work is completed.

Data is a Powerful Tool for Skilled Managers

Though some leaders hesitate to leverage data, fearing that it breeds micromanagement, it’s important to remember that you’re already gathering information about stalled work or stuck engineers. True micromanagement is not found in the gathering of data, but in how that data is used. Great managers ask questions, offer guidance, and help their teams collaborate on solutions. With a Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) solution pointing you towards work that needs attention, you’ll spend less time looking for opportunities to help and more time actually managing your team.