Another jab at Daily Stand-up meetings

SCRUM or Daily standup meeting is one of the founding pillars of Agile software development.
This is the meeting where the team come together for ~15mins daily with one agenda.

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What will I do today
3. Am I blocked? Who can help?

This is is a sacrosanct ritual and must not be seen as a toil. Hence it is extremely important that the meeting is short, to the point and effective.

Usually I see that the stand-up meetings are done by going through all those people present in the meeting one by one. This seems perfectly in-line with agenda of the stand-up meeting, So what’s wrong, you ask?

This method focuses on people but the premise of agile engineering is sprint backlog. Do we really need to care what a person did or how much we progressed on a backlog?

So to get our focus more on the committed user stories I have been advocating this change. Reverse the way we do stand-up meetings, How?

1. Organise your sprint on focus areas or what I like to call it as tracks, these can be high level epics. (This has to be done during the planning.)
2. In the stand up meeting, open the kanban/ sprint board
3. Go through the update of stories in those tracks. People working under that track provide their update.

This change brings in the following values

1. It helps to define sprint goals, less tracks means less working sites
2. You get a sense of how many people are working on a given track.
   • More people on a track is a sign of good break down of tasks = more parallelism = lesser silos in the team
   • This helps mitigate the risk of unplanned absence in the team
3. It is easier to look at how far we are from completing the committed user stories
4. If a person provides the update in two or more tracks then this means he has to multitask and may be causing inefficiencies because of context switches

Let me know in the comments below what is your opinion