Shape Up Your Daily Standup

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

The daily stand-up focuses on accomplishments and impediments. It should describe what was completed, and who needs help. If instead it’s treated as an update where generic information is recounted while developing problems are ignored or excuses offered, it will add no value to the project or team.

The Scrum methodology doesn’t prescribe all that much. In fact, when I first studied it, I had a sense that it was an incomplete methodology — more of a suggestion of how to do things than something that was actually useful. I later came to understand that it was intentional; one of the whole points was the concept of self-organizing and self-improving, and part of the goal was to determine processes that worked for our team that might not work for others.

One of the things that Scrum does prescribe, however, is the “Daily Scrum” sometimes called the “Daily Standup.” This clever name comes from the fact that the meeting is supposed to happen every day, and it is usually done standing up. The latter characteristic is meant to distinguish this meeting from all other meetings, especially status updates. The idea is that this meeting feels differently when you are in it, and thus is different from meetings that developers loathe.

The bad news is that it is easy to get your developers to hate your daily standup, too.

There are three questions that each developer is …

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