Standups are Not Poisonous

I've been doing agile scrum in a seven person team (scrum master, four developers, a product owner and our immediate line manager, with the occasional addition) for over a year now every single day. We try and get it over with as quickly as possible with people letting one another know when they are stepping over being particularly "stand up" - i.e. having a discussion or talking with one another. We don't always get it right, but like everything in agile it is iterative.

I find it supremely useful - it builds self-understanding in the team and a sense of actual teamwork, even camaraderie, improves visibility of what everyone is doing (and where you may be able to help - we often chip in when someone says they are stuck to say "yeah I know a bit about that, let's chat about it after stand up") without feeling like surveillance. You also get to know if there are going to be any demand on your time for discussion (say of upcoming work) from our line manager. It is not a status meeting. Both the theory and our lived practice make it a synchronisation meeting that defines the heartbeat of the sprint process. Its actually a comfort to know if you are stuck you can say so in the stand up and people are aware you are having difficulty.

If you are doing scrum right then status meetings should be unnecessary during a sprint. The interaction between the team and the product owner (co-ordinated by the scrum master to prevent the product owner becoming noise) should be sufficiently smooth that when you get to the demo at the end of the sprint nothing should be a surprise to the product owner (they are part of the team after all) but should be for consolidation and display to wider stakeholders. We use e-mail and GitHub issues to keep the product owner in the loop at all times (increasingly moving to just GitHub) and HipChat for status throughout the day. As for "higher level" status meetings, our line manager has no need for this from us because she is much closer to the work through the stand up and our scrum master will handle these duties as required so we can get our heads down in the sprint. Status meeting for more senior management are the job of the line manager, who also plays a role in just letting the team get on with development. Status meetings as people seem to be describing them here seem to be the kind of productivity killing time sinks that the scrum process defines as "noise" and attempts to use the scrum master to keep as far away from the team as possible.

(PS I work in IS Web Development University of Kent where we take agile process in our team very serously - we'll shortly be hiring ;-) )

To expand on elliotcarlson's post:

There are a few main features of standups that, if abused or ignored, can lead to awfulness.

- They're supposed to be short, very short. A few minutes at the most. They do not work for large teams (20 people giving a status update is a lot), and if you find yourself having 20-person standups it's time to think about if you should be breaking them into multiple independent standups.

- Managers aren't present, or aren't allowed to speak. This is an opportunity to ask questions, ask for help, describe what you're working on, to other members of your team, not to justify what you were up to yesterday to your boss. It's sharing, not reporting. This part is key.

- You don't troubleshoot in a standup. If you say "I can't figure out why I can't Foo module Baz", there shouldn't be a discussion about it, but someone else might go "I've worked with Baz a lot, let's take a look together after standup.", or later in the day someone might go "Oh hey, that problem you were having with Baz? I think I know what's happening." - this is the ideal intent of standups. Very quick snippets that highlight certain things in everyone's minds.

- It doesn't need to be documented. It's not a meeting, you don't need to take down minutes. Actual tracking of work done occurs separately (your scrum master should be doing this).

What would it be like if the boss wasn't there? I've had good Scrum Masters hide under their desks if people kept reporting status out at them. The point: people in authority need to continually work to fight the urge to be "in charge" during self-organizational meetings.

Also: training/coaching wouldn't hurt..

If this is the case, its not being done right. I have heard this happening, but the standup is for the team, not management.

I appreciate the author taking the time to write the article, but my opinion is that the whole purpose of a daily standup is to open a line of communication between team members. Well, if you have this line of communication open 24 hours, emails, chat (xmpp, irc ..etc), phone, and so forth, why do I need to wait till tomorrow afternoon for the scheduled daily standup to talk about a blocker in my code?