What is a Standup Meeting?
Keith Norris
CEO Complete XRM, Inc.
Post: July 27, 2023
A daily standup meeting, also known as a daily scrum or daily huddle, is a short and time-boxed meeting that is commonly used in agile project management methodologies like Scrum. The primary purpose of the daily standup is to provide a regular and quick status update on the team's progress, identify any impediments or roadblocks, and ensure alignment and coordination among team members.
Key characteristics of a daily standup meeting:
Time-boxed: The meeting is typically short, lasting around 15 minutes. This constraint encourages participants to keep their updates concise and focused.
Daily Frequency: The meeting occurs every day at the same time, usually in the morning, to kickstart the day's work and maintain a continuous flow of information.
Standing: The term "standup" comes from the practice of conducting the meeting while standing. This encourages brevity and helps to keep the focus on the essential points, as standing for a prolonged period can be uncomfortable.
Team Involvement: The meeting involves the entire team, including developers, testers, product owners, and any other relevant stakeholders. It promotes collaboration and ensures everyone is aware of the team's progress and potential obstacles.
No Detailed Problem Solving: The daily standup is not meant for in-depth problem-solving discussions. If any significant issues are identified, they can be addressed in separate meetings or discussions outside the standup.
Visual Aids: Some teams use visual aids, like a physical or digital task board, to provide a visual representation of work progress and make updates more tangible.
The daily standup meeting helps teams stay synchronised, maintain transparency, and address potential roadblocks early on in the project. By holding these short daily check-ins, team members can quickly adjust their plans based on new information and collaborate effectively toward achieving their goals.
What are the 3 Questions of a scrum standup meeting?
There are typically Three Questions that each person should answer as part of a daily standup meeting:
1
What did you do yesterday?
2
What will you do today?
3
Are there any blockers or impediments?
Some teams may choose to modify this format, but this is a good place to start. Standup Alice makes it easy to create regular structure around these questions and you can also work in some other questions. Here are a few other questions that we have seen work well:
Do you have any news or information that you want/need to share?
Do you have anything to add to the agenda for next retrospective?
Start Today: Install Alice for your team!
What is the best time for daily standup meeting?
Most experts agree that a daily standup meeting should be held at or near the beginning of the shift. In cases where you have team members working different shifts or in different parts of the world you might need to adjust the time to be later in the day for some team members.
A word of caution: If the meeting is held at the very beginning of the shift some team members may not be as prepared as if the meeting is held a bit later.
Should everyone talk in the daily standup?
Ideally, YES. A daily standup should allow time for everyone to be heard. If your team is too large to give everyone a chance to speak, you may need to think about breaking into smaller teams.
If you have some team members that tend to be overly verbose or tend to go on and on, you might find that using Standup Alice to capture your team members answers in writing before the standup meeting is a good way to keep the meeting a bit more concise and structured.
Who should run the scrum Daily Standup meeting?
The Scrum Master should ensure that the meeting happens, but the Team Members are responsible for conducting the Daily Scrum. The Scrum Master teaches them to keep the Daily Scrum within the 15-minute time-box. The Daily Scrum is an internal meeting for the Scrum Team.
Standup Alice is a a great tool for Scrum Masters to make these daily standups happen every day, like clockwork.
Sync vs Async standup Meetings?
Is it better to run a standup meeting synchronously. However, if you can not get everyone at the same place at the same time, an asynchronous meeting is a good alternative and is much better than no meeting at all.
Synchronous Standup > Asynchronous Standup > No Standup
How to run asynchronous daily standup?
It is best if you can run your daily standups synchronously with all team members attending at the same time. However, that is not always possible. Inevitably you will have some team members who are late, others who are sick, some may be traveling or stuck in traffic when it is time for the regular standup meeting.
The best way to run async standups is with a tool like Standup Alice. Standup Alice provides all team members with the opportunity to report their answers to the daily questions and then if anyone of them is not able to attend the meeting, their answers can still be present in the meeting. This allows team members to know what they have to share and address any blockers that the missing team member might have.