Daily Standups
The daily standup (sometimes referred to as the daily scrum) provides the team a forum to meet to provide a status update, including the work plan of each team member for the upcoming day.
Who Attends?
The scrum master and development team are required to attend the daily standup, as the meeting is intended to keep the team informed of each other’s status. However, the product owner and other attendees are welcome to attend, as long as they understand that they are just observers and are not to participate in the discussion.
When Do Standups Take Place?
As the name implies, daily standups should occur every day of the sprint—typically the beginning of the day. To ensure maximum attendance for the meeting, you should consider scheduling this meeting at the same time every day during a time period when the team is available and focused on the day ahead. That is to say, there is no rule against scheduling the daily scrum 30 minutes or an hour after the start of your company’s workday to give developers time to get settled, check email, and/or catch up on issues from the day before. Scheduling the meeting a little later in the morning also reduces the chances that heavy traffic is going to prevents team members from showing up (or showing up on time.)
What Happens During Standup?
Each team members indicates what they did the day before, what they are going to do today, and if they have any issues blocking their progress. The daily standup brings visibility into the work performed by each team member and helps to identify:
- Issues blocking the work, so that those issues can be resolved quickly
- The amount of work completed and remaining for the sprint
The scrum master leads the daily standup and should keep the team focused on the high-level status. Detailed design discussions and questions should be tabled for discussion after the standup. If team members start going into too much detail or others start asking design-related questions, the scrum master should remind them to focus on their status update and to put additional items into a parking lot. The individuals that need to be included in the parking lot discussions can remain after standup or schedule another time to discuss.
If team members are not progressing through their tasks but are not reporting any blockers, they should be held accountable by the scrum master and other team members.
How Long Do Daily Standups Last?
The Scrum Guide states that the daily standup is a “15-minute time-boxed event.” However, you daily standup may vary in length, depending on the size of your team. Updates should take no longer than a couple of minutes per individual.
If you are having problems with the team not keeping their updates short enough, you can set a timer for one or two minutes. Team members, then, have to keep their updates to that duration.
To Stand Up or To Not Stand Up
Do you actually have to standup in the meeting? Truthfully, no. However, standing up does help to keep the team focused and keep the updates short. If you are standing up in a conference room, you are more likely to pay attention and less likely to be on your computer doing other work or answering emails. You are also less likely to spend too much on your status update.
If you choose to allow your team to sit down during the daily standup, you might want to enforce other rules like no phones or other electronic devices in the room, unless you are using your computer to display an electronic sprint board.