Methodology Bits: The Daily Standup

The Development Team uses the Daily Standup meeting to inspect progress toward the Iteration Goal and to inspect how progress is trending toward completing the work in the Iteration Backlog.

Goal

If the work doesn’t need to be coordinated, you don’t need a team. Conversely, if you have a team, I assume the work requires coordination.

A daily standup meeting should help keep the whole team focused on the objectives that matter most. Standup is about the team achieving its goals.

Format

When?

The team agrees on the place and time of the standup meeting. It always takes place at the Same Place, at the Same Time. While the daily standup is a great way to start the day and should be positioned early in the day, it also needs some preparation from the team members to be effective, therefore it should not be positioned too early in the day.
The meeting is timeboxed, and should never take more than 15 minutes, the ideal length is around about a minute for every team member, the shorter the better. If the participants are done before the timeframe is up, then the meeting ends early.

Where?

The team should be standing, around a task board (physical or virtual), preferably in the place where their work is generally done, as opposed to a meeting room. Meeting rooms invite participants to sit down and have a long meeting, while the aim of a standup is to provide a quick update. The place where the work is done usually contains reminders and mementos that help team members recall things connected to their tasks.
If the team works in an open office environment and the noise of the standup would disturb others, then a meeting room can be a solution – however, this should be noted as a deficiency of the work area.
If some team members are regularly working remotely, then everybody should join the standup as if they were also working remotely, so there won’t be an isolation of the remote team member(s) from the group of local team members.

Who attends?

The Daily Scrum is an internal meeting for the Development Team. While every member of the team is encouraged to be present at the daily standup, the team should not wait for the team members to arrive if they are late. The team should not wait for stragglers, including architects and managers, either. The meeting is for the whole team, not for any particular individual.
While the meeting is for the Development Team, others are also welcome to observe it. If other people apart from the Development Team are present, the Scrum Master ensures that they do not disrupt the meeting.
For each standup, a facilitator is selected. In order to give space for self-organization to appear, the facilitator should not remain the same person for all the standups. The method of facilitator selection can be a round robin algorithm, some random selection method, such as picking cards, with the highest value taking the role, or even the last person entering the room can be appointed to facilitate the standup.

What preparations are necessary?

Each team member should make sure to update the task board before the standup meeting. The standup should not be a tracking meeting that is spent by updating the items on the board.

How does the process look like?

As the user stories have a central role in agile development, the standup should be a ritual where the Work Items attended, and members of the Development Team attended only to speak for the Work Items – as Work Items are inherently reluctant to speak for themselves.
To enforce the timebox, an easy-to-see timer should be started at the beginning of the standup.
The meeting facilitator should remind the team of the Iteration Goal to give focus to the conversation.
After stating the Iteration Goal, the facilitator should start walking the board, from right-to-left and top-to-bottom, that is, starting with the task closest to completion. Anyone who has done work on that task since the last standup should speak up and update their peers in a 30-60 seconds timeframe.
Special attention should be paid to items that haven't moved since the last standup, as they are likely to be stuck.
The most important rule for a standup update is “Tell the headline, not the whole story”. The standup is a time to raise issues and surface ideas, not a time for in-depth problem-solving. Usually, the three-question strategy provides a useful frame for the updates:

1. Any impediments in your way regarding this work item?
2. What are you working on today in connection with this work item?
3. What have you finished since the last standup in connection with this work item?

The ordering of the questions implies their priority – the standup concentrates on identifying and removing blockers, helping in work organization, and is not a status report or a time report meeting.
As blockers are the most important items on the standup, they should be made explicit, noted and tackled effectively in a timely manner. One way to deal with blockers is an “impediment board”, that contains blockers raised by team members. Whenever a blocker is raised, it should be added to the impediment board or the corresponding impediment board item’s occurrence count should be increased.
As a rule, the team should try to take topics that concern only a few team members offline ASAP. If a team member has input that concerns the whole team, as opposed to only the currently speaking team member, then it is encouraged to share said input. Otherwise, the team member should state having input and facilitate further discussion about the topic after the standup.
To keep the conversation short, the rule of two hands is in effect: if anyone thinks the current conversation has gone off topic or is no longer effective, then they raise a hand. Once a second person raises a hand then that’s a sign to stop the conversation and continue with the rest of the standup. In this case, make a note on a whiteboard called “the parking lot”. After standup is over, interested people can stick around to continue talking about the parking lot topics. This way, people will become accustomed to sharing the right level of detail, while having confidence that there will be a venue for discussing more detail later.
When the tasks are all discussed (or the meeting runs out of its timebox) then the facilitator announces the end of the meeting. People can stick around to discuss the topics in the parking lot or catch each other to exchange ideas on topics that were taken offline. The facilitator should start tackling the impediments board by discussing the blockers with their reporters and create action items to contain or counteract the problems.

Standup Antipatterns

Updating the board during the standup – the board should already be up-to-date by the time the standup is started. The standup is aiming to be short and to-the-point, having to update tasks during the minute or so that each team member gets is far from ideal.
Reporting to power-holders – the standup is not a status report or time report meeting. It’s not intended to provide opportunities for micromanaging the work of the team members. It is for the team to get a shared understanding of the work for the day and be able to effectively organize work and help each other out.
Reporting to facilitator – the standup is giving an update to peers, that is, other team members. The facilitator is not the audience of the update, therefore if the team members seem to be giving an update to the facilitator, then they should be encouraged to direct their update towards the team. An effective way of doing it is for the facilitator to move out of the line of sight of the currently speaking team member.