The Dailies: A Good Way to Eliminate Team Learning Debt

Introduction

Recently, I’ve been fascinated by reading articles on the blog “Understand Legacy Code🔗”. In the article “It’s like coding in the dark!🔗”, the concept of dailies at work was mentioned, which I will refer to as daily meetings and record my observations.

Developers and Learning

  • We are passionate about techniques and want to understand how to best practice something.
  • We enjoy experimenting or observing experiments conducted by others.
  • We can argue endlessly about languages, frameworks, patterns, environments… and various other topics.
  • We crave knowledge through different articles, books, videos, seminars, and any source of knowledge.

Not all developers are like this, but especially in web development, one needs to possess these traits to keep up with and respond to rapidly changing technologies. As the environment changes faster, the main issue is that “we simply don’t have much time each day for research.”

Thus, Jonathan Boccara recalls in his article that it prompted him to form daily meetings:

“It’s common to learn interesting insights during informal chats with colleagues. Do you know those people in the company who know a lot? You probably have a few around you, right? Or you might even be one of them (just you don’t know it yet). I feel this knowledge is somewhat wasted. In such informal moments, why can only a small portion of developers gain these insights? Why not let other developers in the company benefit too?”

About Learning Debt

The accumulation of learning debt follows this repetitive process:

  1. Learning: Developers build mental models of the current codebase without support.
  2. Review: Encountering social cues that undermine and devalue proactive learning during formal processes.
  3. Environment: Returning to a personal work environment that continues to hide learning and contributes to a non-supportive learning environment.

This is another major topic. Simply put, most companies do not recognize learning as a form of performance (and I’m curious how to assess effectiveness), even though it is necessary for anyone entering unfamiliar (or forgotten) code. However, keeping up with the latest developments is not seen as actual work.

Developers’ “failures” in documenting or transferring knowledge are not due to laziness or lack of concern. Instead, [environmental pressures] create a complex tension between performance and learning goals. When making learning visible is unsafe, the performance culture wins.

About Daily Meetings

Daily meetings are a short sharing format aimed at conveying a large amount of knowledge within the company with minimal workday time.

  • Small Steps Lead to Big Gains: A fixed time for a talk every day, lasting 10 minutes each. Over time, this will accumulate into a vast amount of knowledge. Additionally, there is a 24-hour gap between each talk, allowing time to digest the content and providing opportunities to ask questions.

  • Quick and Brief: The talk lasts only 10 minutes, which is key. Everyone can spare 10 minutes in a day; the brief duration is not long enough to become boring, making it easier to keep up with and remember the content of the talks.

  • Addressing Real Issues: The talks are conducted internally, eliminating the need to budget for external trainers or arrange meetings with them, keeping it agile. Another benefit of internal training is that it increases the likelihood of addressing actual problems faced by internal personnel.

  • Lower Participation Costs: No need to move locations; the talks are held directly in the office! The team hosting the daily talks only needs to turn their chairs, and after the talk, they can immediately return to their workstations.

  • Record Keeping: The talks will be recorded and uploaded so that everyone can rewatch or share them. We can create transcripts of the talks and share them.

What’s Worth Sharing?

I believe that being an educator does not need to be perfect. The focus of daily meetings is on brief and continuous internal knowledge flow. Similar to writing this blog, I have been continuously discovering shortcomings and supplementing knowledge in the process, often realizing that the topic is more complex than it initially appears, leading to subtopics and new discussions.

Consider it a brief sharing that doesn’t need to be perfect. Maintaining feedback and improvement over time will naturally enhance efficiency and quality.

What is the cost?

In addition to the 10 minutes of hosting, there are two additional costs:

  • Preparation: Depends on familiarity with the topic being shared.
  • Documentation: Depends on the level of detail in the records; writing is definitely the most time-consuming part. It is strongly recommended to document using methods suitable for the team, which can be articles, videos, or transcripts.

Summary

Daily stand-ups help cultivate habits of team growth and documentation, and they also encourage and create an atmosphere of free learning within the team. Based on the experience provided by Jonathan Boccara, if 10 minutes can be set aside daily to facilitate the flow of knowledge within the team and eliminate learning debt, it is a method worth trying.

Further Reading