Stand-up meetings

Scrum 101

A stand-up meeting is a place for a Scrum team to discuss progress made on sprint commitments. It is usually a short meeting, typically about 15 minutes and under.

A good stand-up helps answer the following 3 questions:

• What did I accomplish yesterday?
• What am I planning to accomplish today?
• Are there any impediments in my way?

It is a good practice to have a stand-up meeting every day of the sprint. 

Stand-up meetings are meetings where the team exchanges information, and isn't a status meeting. Scrum Masters should promote information sharing in the meeting. It is a sign of a good Scrum team if people say "hey! I had run into that a couple of days ago, and I can tell you what I did to get over it" or "I'm running into the same issue, but I've developed this workaround".

Rationale for the theory

After a team has made commitments for a sprint, they need a time and place to get together and share what they have learned and where they are in terms of meeting their commitments. Stand-ups serve that purpose. They are supposed to be quick meetings, where folks share information with each other and go back to their normal work-day. 

When stories are written in such a way that promote swarming, stand-up meetings are truly helpful. With well written stories, stand-ups can help promote peer pressure. 

Tips & Tricks

Scrum Masters should come prepared to the stand-up meeting. This preparation involves trying to predict what each team member will say, and in that way you can listen for what is not being said.

Ask your team to really stand-up in the stand-up meeting, especially if the meeting usually runs longer than 15 minutes.

Here are tricks to detect if your stand-up meetings have become status meetings:

• Folks have tuned out and are looking at their phones when someone is talking.
• The person who is talking is looking at the Scrum Master and not his / her team mates
• Only a handful of people present in the room, say Scrum Master, 'dev lead', 'test lead', etc. understand what is being said by a person. 
• Not everyone present in the stand-up fully understands the impact of an issue being raised by someone.

If you have team-mates who are remote, it may be a good idea to have a video conference set-up. If you have multiple remote sites, you can alternate between them showing one site one day and next site the next day. That helps team members gel together and they are more likely to contact each other throughout the workday.

If your work-place does not have any information radiators, it may be a good idea to show some sort of a sprint metric - possibly a burn down chart to all the team members in the stand-up meeting.

A good idea for keeping stand-ups short and relevant is to have the right people involved in the meeting. If there is stroing 'management oversight', teams may not be willing to discuss real issues. It is important for Scrum Masters to keep the meetings short and only have relevant people invited to the meeting. Work status and any heat because of that can be done offline.

If you have a team member hogging the time in a stand-up meeting, it is a good idea for Scrum Masters to let the team auto-correct the behavior. This can be done by the team in the meeting itself, or in a retrospective.

It is important that folks talk about sprint commitments in the stand-up meeting. If your team has roles like an architect or dev-lead, test-lead etc. they may share information they learned the previous day that is relevant to the team's efforts. It doesn't make sense for a manager who listens in on a meeting to share what he/she did yesterday, because that is not necessarily relevant to the team's commitments.

Rate this post!

☆

☆

☆

☆

☆