Jennifer Pattarini

A daily standup is supposed to take fifteen minutes. Ask any developer how it actually feels, and you will hear a different story. Somehow a fifteen minute meeting can wreck an entire morning of coding. That feeling is not just in their heads. Scientists have studied it. The numbers explain a lot about why standups can feel so much bigger than the time on the clock. What a Meeting Really Does to a Developer's Brain When you are deep in code, you are holding a lot of things in your head at...

This is a composite story, the kind of thing that happens on more teams than most leaders would like to admit. If parts of it sound familiar, that is the point. Monday: Everything Looked Fine The sprint planning meeting went the way sprint planning meetings usually go. The task landed on the board: test and ship the new billing flow before the client demo on Thursday. Three engineers nodded. Nobody said their own name out loud. In the notes, it was assigned to "the team," because surely...

Yesterday. Today. Blockers. If your team has run a standup for more than a month, you could probably answer all three in your sleep, which is sort of the problem. The questions stopped asking anything. They just collect a status report nobody reads twice. Good daily standup questions do more than that. They surface the blocker someone was about to bury. They catch the decision nobody agreed on. Once in a while, they even make the standup a little fun. Here are 20 worth stealing, organized by...