Daily Stand-Ups
Everybody must leave their desk and stand near a wall with cards stuck to it for exactly 15 minute – right? That’s what we get told a standup is, but we’re also told that “Individuals and Interactions over Process and Tools”. So why does a standup sound so much like a process?
Let’s start by explaining what a standup is: It’s a daily team interaction to synchronize work being done so that sprint goals are being reached and impediments are identified and subsequently removed quickly. Happens daily at the same time each day, usually in the morning and it’s 15 minutes timeboxed (regardless of number of people). It’s mandatory to have the team members at the meeting, but the Product Owner is optional and stakeholders don’t attend. Toolbox meetings, huddles, daily scrum, roll-call, status update, start of day meeting, check in’s, these are all similar to standups in different industries.
All this seems like a lot of overhead, so why do standups? The idea is to get the team together regularly to share understanding of the work, goals, coordinate their efforts and help each other resolve problems. Leaving management out of the meeting means that the team is free to share problems without fear of management telling them to solve their own problem (duh). Literally standing up to do the meeting keeps it shorter because people don’t like standing for too long, although this doesn’t work when working from home. While we are working from home it can also be a good idea to extend the meeting to bring some social contact into the team.
All too often standups don’t work well for a variety of reasons:
- When starting agile people complain of too many meetings because they just added standups to their existing meetings. Cancel all the status update type meetings and hold the standup instead, working software/outcomes should be the primary measure of success anyway.
- Each member reports status to manager or scrum master, this doesn’t help get work done. The standup is run by the team for the team to synchronise on the work.
- Standups that drag on past 25 minutes. Get each person to time their own contribution to 90 seconds max, ask the PO and SM to talk last.
- “No update” type meeting where nobody in the team seems to have done anything since the last meeting. Present the sprint/Kanban board to job each person’s memory, change the questions asked…
Sometimes standup meetings get a bit stale after the team has been working together a while and the information shared is not as valuable as it used to be. That’s the time to change up the questions that we ask everyone to answer in the meeting, here’s a few suggestions but experiment with your own too while keeping within the general theme of progress towards the sprint goals.
| Yesterday | Today | Obstacles |
| What did I accomplish yesterday | What will I do today | What obstacles are impeding my progress |
| What have you finished since yesterday | What are you working on today | Any impediments in your way |
| Things I have done since yesterday’s meeting | Things I am going to get done today | Obstacles that I need someone to remove |
| What you did to change the world yesterday | How you are going to crush it today | How you are going to blast through any obstacles unfortunate enough to be standing in your way |
| What have you completed | What are you aiming to complete next | Do you have any blockers |
| What Code Smell/Missing Unit Test/… did you spot yesterday | What improvement did you make to the code yesterday | What’s slowing you down |
| Who did you meet with yesterday | Who are you meeting with today | Any blockers |
So there you have it standups aren’t all about process, you can adapt them to work for your team. As Pablo Picasso said “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist”.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStandingUp.html
https://agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser/2011/01/daily-stand-up-variations.html
