by Pierre LesageDoing a standup meeting (a.k.a daily SCRUM) meeting should be simple – so how come so many teams are doing it wrong?
I believe that a daily meeting is a good practice – and should be practiced by all development teams – with or without using Scrum or any other agile methodology whatsoever.
And so I bring to your consideration my thoughts on how a standup meeting should be conducted:
A stand-up meeting (or simply "stand-up") is a daily team-meeting held to provide a status update to the team members.
From Wikipedia
It’s as simple as that – each day the team meets and update each other on the current status of their tasks.
So how come some teams do it wrong?
The fact is that conducting a successful daily meeting requires discipline and following a few simple rules. Because its quite easy to mess things up and instead of a productive and informative meeting – waste everybody time.
Usually a standup meeting shall be conducted at the morning - the reasoning behind this practice is that is helps “jump start” the day – after the meeting the whole team is synced and focused - problems have been addressed and everybody knows what he’s going to do today.
I have been part of a team that did its standup meeting at the afternoon – because that was the time that most of the team was at the office. It was a good idea and it worked well – because a meeting at the morning with less than half of the team is not as effective as a meeting later with the whole (or most) of the team.
It doesn’t matter what hour you choose - make sure to have the meeting at the same time each day – it creates a routine and helps the team fall into the right rhythm.
A daily meeting should be conducted every day – no exceptions!
It’s so easy to skip a meeting (or five) when deadlines approaches. The problem is that skipping these meetings make the one you don’t skip less effective.
If you have a meeting once in a blue moon it would be a long and tedious thing (“let me tell you what I did the last two weeks”- unfortunately a real story).
If your team get used to the fact that the meeting tends to be re-scheduled or canceled – they would not show on time (or at all) to the meetings you do decide to have – which brings us to the next point:
All your team should be part of the daily meeting. I say should because we live in an imperfect world – people get sick, work out of office, have showstopper bugs to fix and so on. The important thing is to have the standup meeting at the designated time even if some of the participants haven’t shown up yet.
In one of my previous jobs we had a problem – it took forever to get everybody in the same room – Joe would need to fix one last thing and Diana had to get out of the meeting (in 5 min) and so on, the meetings used to start 10-15 min. after the designated time which I felt was unfair for the guys who showed up on time. After a awhile no one would show at the meeting and I had to go and call each member of the team personally a few times to everybody to show up. My solution was simple – I’ve started the meeting on time - without them, the fact that some participants were late didn’t effect the time of the rest of the team – and the late party learns to come on time.
There is no “minimum number” of participant - I did standup meetings with as little as two co-workers (during summer vacation) and it proved useful.
From time to time (read: always) invite testers (if not part of your team) or product/marketing guys (and gals) or your boss’s boss – let them know what you do and what you plan to deliver – just make sure they understand about the “chickens & pigs” beforehand.
A stand meeting should be as short as possible – I recommend about 5-15 minutes depending on the number of participants.
This is and important factor effecting the success of the meeting. In case you didn’t know the reason that everybody is standing up is because we want to make this meeting short.
This is one of the more problematic guidelines to follow – I’m not sure why – perhaps there’s a performer in each of us.
In one team we’ve used an hourglass to make sure that the meeting didn’t get out of hand.
We never actually stopped anyone mid-sentence, but it helped that the speaker knew how much time he has been talking.
Try keeping track of the meeting’s duration and at its end announce how much time it took – I found it helps if your meetings tends to get out of hand and last forever.
The team take turns - each member of the team should answer these three questions:
And that’s it no more – no less.
It always amazes me how easily a standup meeting can derail by not following this simple format.
I had a a manager in one of previous jobs use the standup meeting to discuss present and future work with each participant personally – this is a great way to make sure no one pay attention in the meeting – at least not until it’s his turn for this public one-on-one with his manager.
Make sure that only the person updating about his status may speaks, some teams use a “totem” that grants its holder the right of speech (lord of the flies style) some do without it – the important par tis that the meeting is about status update for the whole team not just the manager.
From time to time one of the other participants has something to say – perhaps he want to offer help, ask for short clarification, discuss a possible solution or just argue with the speaker.
This is fine as long as it’s short and to the point (e.c. “I know how to create this script – I’ll show you after the meeting), if it becomes a conversation between tow people - tell them to have another meeting after the daily standup. When such interference happens I would usually let them talk for a minute or two before stopping the conversation and tell them to discuss it after the meeting.
At a typical project meeting most attendees do not contribute, but attend just to hear the outcome. A large amount of developer time is wasted to gain a trivial amount of communication. Having many people attend every meeting drains resources from the project and also creates a scheduling nightmare.
Communication among the entire team is the purpose of the stand up meeting.
A daily meeting is a good way to keep the team focused and informed and is beneficial with or without practicing SCRUM (or any agile method).
Performing a successful standup meeting is simple – just make sure that you don’t loose sight of the real purpose of the meeting – a semi real-time status update.