A stand-up meeting (or simply "stand-up") is a meeting in which attendees typically participate while standing
Daily Scrum Meeting / Daily Stand-up Meeting
The daily Scrum meeting is a short everyday meeting, ideally during start of the working day. Each team member who works towards the completion of a given sprint needs to participate. During this meeting, each team member should briefly provide the answers of the following three questions:
A daily stand-up is a daily status meeting among all team members and it is held roughly for 15 minutes.
Every member has to answer three important questions −
What I did yesterday?
What I'll do today?
Any impediment I am facing.../ I am blocked due to...
Daily stand-up is for status update, not for any discussion. For discussion, team members should schedule another meeting at a different time.
Participants usually stand instead of sitting so that the meeting gets over quickly.
Why Stand-up is Important?
The benefits of having a daily stand-up in agile are as follows −
The team can evaluate the progress on a daily basis and see if they can deliver as per the iteration plan.
Each team member informs all about his/ her commitments for the day.
It provides visibility to the team on any delay or obstacles.
Who Attends a Stand-up?
The scrum master, the product owner, and the delivery team should attend the stand-up on a daily basis.
Stakeholders and Customers are encouraged to attend the meeting and they can act as an observer, but they are not supposed to participate in stand-ups.
It is the scrum master's responsibility to take note of each team member's queries and the problems they are facing.
Geographically Dispersed Teams
Stand-ups can be done in multiple ways, in case the agile team members are operating from different time zones −
Select a member on a rotational basis, who can attend the stand-up meeting of teams located in different time zones.
Have a separate stand-up per team, update the status of the stand-up in a tool such as Rally, SharePoint, Wikis, Kanban, Task Board etc.
Have a wide variety of communication tools ready like conference call, video conferencing, instant messengers, or any other third-party knowledge sharing tools.
5 best practices to keep your scrum meeting on track
1. Remain standing! Staying on your feet is the core principle of the scrum meeting. It reduces rambling and keeps you focused. Hold the meeting in a room without chairs or keep all chairs on one side of the room. Forcing someone to go out of their way to pull up a chair is an excellent way of silently keeping your team on their feet.
2. Your 3-question agenda
What I did yesterday?
What I'll do today?
Any impediment I am facing.../ I am blocked due to..
3. Have your project management tool visible This could be in the form of a physical kanban board or software like TFS - it’s important for your team to see what is being finished and what is taking longer than expected. This is especially helpful for teams that spend too long answering key question #1. Also, getting everyone into the habit of reviewing the project management tool right before the meeting results in a big efficiency boost.
4. It’s a collaborative effort One of the most common scrum meeting mistakes is making it a turn-based 1:1 chat with the project manager or scrum master. This completely defeats the purpose of the stand-up and should be avoided at all costs. This is valuable time that should be treated as collaborative effort for the whole team. A good way to keep scrum meetings efficient is to establish a simple rule: Everything you say should be valuable to everyone in the room. Individual talks can happen at any time of the day aside from the stand up meeting.
5. Plan the meeting around your team We get that in the real world it’s impossible to adhere to a strict schedule, but it’s important to develop some sort of routine for your stand up meetings. Without a routine, procrastination will take effect and meetings will never happen. Whether you have it everyday or every week, consistency is key. If your team gets to the office early everyday, hold your meetings first thing in the morning as to not interrupt valuable work time. Is your team’s arrival staggered? Do your team mates have other commitments in the morning? Hold your stand-ups in the afternoon.
The scrum meeting is less about strict rules and more about maximizing productivity. Turning the daily or weekly stand up into a regular routine that accommodates your team’s unique schedule helps ensure scrum meetings are an effective tool for your development team.
4 bad habits that derail scrum meetings
1. Waiting around for your team Always start your meeting at the set time. Those who miss it or who are late will feel guilty and try harder to make it to the next one.
2. Introducing new ideas The scrum meeting is not a planning meeting. Introducing new topics will divert attention away from answering your strict 3 question agenda.
3. Letting people ramble We get it — asking people to stop talking can be awkward. In general, adhering to the rule, “everything you say should be valuable to everyone in the room” will keep rambling down. If that’s not enough, another simple fix is to set a strict time limit for each speaker.
4. Abandoning team communication in favor of the stand up
The scrum meeting should not be the sole means of team communication. It’s easy to wait around for the next meeting to bring up an issue, but this just slows down your team and bloats the stand up meeting.