On The Merits of the Stand-Up

or… the side-effects are the point

I know it might not feel like it, but a daily stand up meeting is categorically not a status meeting. The stand up meeting, or daily scrum comes, rather unsurprisingly, from the Scrum agile methodology.  It is a short daily meeting with the whole delivery team. For sticklers that means the developers, product owner and the scrum master.

Daily stand-up meetings can really follow any structure you want. However, typically they fall into one of a couple of different approaches I will refer to here at “Walking the Room” and “Walking the Board”.

Walking the Room - Each member of the team takes in turns to answer 3 key questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you planning to do today?
• Is anything blocking your ability to deliver?

Walking the Board - The meeting lead goes through the in-flight tickets, starting at those closest to completion and asking if there are any updates, concerns, or blockers on delivering the ticket. Then working their way through to those furthest from delivery.

Both approaches have positives and negatives. Which (if either) works best for your team is highly subjective. Personally I prefer a hybrid approach - primarily walking the board to ensure none of the in-flight work gets missed, but ensuring there is space after that for any other business. Whether that be reminders for an up-coming retrospective or to share any important news coming from outside the team.

The biggest complaints I hear about stand-ups is that they are a waste of time. That they are just status check-in and all the information is already on the board. I’ve certainly held that opinion at times too. To be fair, that is also often how they are treated and as such, I posit, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By thinking of them as nothing more than check-in, that is all they will ever be. In a strict Scrum process we even have an explicit check-in meeting, the sprint review. Held once per cycle - however long that happens to be (often this is fortnightly). Why on earth would we want one every day as well?

It is because the stand-up meeting is actually about a few different things. For example, It promotes self-management. Accountability in scrum is a big thing. The team own the sprint backlog. Inspecting their own progress and adjusting priorities daily is how they take accountability and self-manage as a team.

As developers it is really easy and although perhaps less often acknowledged, important to get lost in the details. To go deep and ensure you truly understand what you are building. The daily stand-up gives you a space to remember the broader context of your work. How does your little corner of the world fit in with the team’s overall mission. To refocus on achieving a valuable outcome. This is especially true if new work or information has been identified that endangers the timely delivery of working software. It provides the space for the team to re-organise, to accommodate the changing requirements and priorities. Agile is, after all about embracing change instead of seeing it as the enemy.

The daily stand-up should actively promote collaboration. It provides a vehicle for ensuring that the whole team knows what each member is working on, and the impediments that are slowing them down. It is a collaborative planning session. Since everyone is on the same page, there is opportunity for individuals to more easily identify how they can support each other. Whether that be a simple, in-meeting pointer, a pairing session later or identifying a major issue that a significant portion of the team needs to be involved in resolving. Or the after parties as Journey’s has come to call them.

The mechanisms we use, the structure we choose to follow can make the daily stand-up feel like little more than a status check. I hope that what I have described above shows you that with a shifting of perspective. The real purpose of the daily stand-up is clearer. That it is about self-management, adaptation, focusing on outcomes and most importantly collaboration.

Or in other words, the stand-up meeting might be the process but the side-effects are the point!