Agile - Daily Stand-up

Daily stand-up, as the name suggests, is a daily status meeting among all the members of an agile team. It not only provides a forum for regular updates but also brings the problems of team members into focus so that it can be quickly addressed. Daily stand-up is a must-do practice, no matter how an agile team is established regardless of its office location.

What is Daily Stand-up?

• 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, etc.
• Have a wide variety of communication tools ready like conference call, video conferencing, instant messengers, or any other third-party knowledge sharing tools.