Meetings: Every Software Developer’s Worst Nightmare
Recently I’ve been pondering my biggest pet peeve, the biggest burden on my productivity… the dreaded meeting. Or as my favorite QA Jacque calls them, the “M word.” Meetings (pardon my language) are the biggest mind number sometimes. I hate them. Everytime I’m getting productive or about to have a major breakthrough, a meeting takes place that crushes my dreams of accomplishing something. They’re that awkward event that you cannot live without yet can completely drain energy from a developer. Why???
The problem is having meaningful meetings… how often have you found yourself in a meeting that started strong and then quickly dwindled away into a horrible nightmare of empty talk of process or other boring things? I know I’ve attended several that I just kept screaming in my head “please someone just kill me now!” as I watched the clock tick from 2:30pm to 4:30pm. There’s even the time I attended a meeting on “time waste” that really felt like a big waste of time. ARRGGHH!!! It makes me want to pull my hair out!
Of course, as a developer you can’t just sit and code all day long every day (even though that would be absolute bliss) and meeting with customers isn’t just an option, but a requirement. So how do we keep them from being so boring? In my opinion, make every meeting a stand up meeting… no chairs. And no I don’t mean your morning stand up… I mean make EVERY meeting a required stand up, people standing will want to get done ASAP so they can go sit back down, right? Keep it to the point… remember it’s possible to compress any conversation to an absolute minimum by cutting out the cruft and focus on what’s important. It takes work from both customers and developers though.
Developers, be to the point. Discuss business logic and ask for clearification, but please don’t expose technical details. Your customer doesn’t need to know you’re using Very Crappy Fake MVC FrameworkTM or that you’re storing data in Even Crappier RDBMSTM! Would you really like to hear irrelevant details from your customer about product marketing, business processes that don’t even involve you or the software you’re developing for them, or specific procedures used by the legal department ? Of course not! Such details may be involved in their work, but it has nothing to do with you… so why do you think that such details in your work matter to them? Focus only on the relevant details and business logic they care about, not irrelevant techno babble to make their eyes glaze over!
Of course, I don’t really have the answers to everything, and I don’t portray myself as such. I’d just like to say that developers take pride in being creative and accomplishing goals versus spending insane amounts of time in long drawn out meetings. Even worse if it’s a meeting with other developers arguing about god knows what. Ideally, you should converse with your customers so much that the need for in room meetings are seldom and when they are required are short, quick, sweet, and to the point. Just keep it simple! 
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March 25th, 2008 at 6:56 am
Best way to get more productive meetings is to only schedule meetings for 30min. If a meeting is 1 hour or more, then it will most of time be a total waste of time after 45mins. If you need more time, schedule several meetings with a detailed agenda.
The other way is to think about entry and exit goals for the meeting, such as “this meeting is only valid if this/that has been decided” and “this meeting will end as soon as we decide that..” or “it will end when we have come up with an actionplan”. This means that the meeting owner must be better when preparing the meeting. Too many times, people schedule meetings just to have a chat which could have been done informal. Also demand that meetings produce a minute of meeting.
March 25th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Preach it, James! You’ve got my vote for Scrum-master. ; )