Time to change how we do Stand-Ups

We are all familiar with the Stand-Up meeting, where everyone meets on a pre-determined cadence (every day, 3 times a week, etc...) to answer the 3 important questions.

1. What did I do yesterday that helped the development team meet the sprint goal?
2. What will I do today to help the development team meet the sprint goal?
3. Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the development team from meeting the sprint goal?

We call it the Stand-Up meeting because attendees are supposed to be standing while answering the 3 important questions. The discomfort of standing is intended to keep the meetings short. The reason we try to answer these 3 important questions is so that the project can be completed successfully in a timely matter.

However, having worked in the software industry for many years and have been on countless teams I am feeling that we are severely abusing the original intent of Stand-Ups and just doing it "just because we have always been doing it".

I have noted the following issues with the traditional in person Stand-Ups.

1. Absent attendees miss out on all the information presented. This happens more often than you think. e.g. "I need to get my car fixed in the morning, will be missing stand up today", "Cat peed all over the carpet so I need to clean it up, will be missing stand up today", "Got a dentist appointment and will miss stand up today", etc...

2. People are frequently late to Stand-Ups which inevitably prolongs the Stand-Up meeting time.

3. People almost always go off into tangent discussions that aren't important to the rest of the team. I am beginning to think this is just human nature.

4. I've heard of other Stand-Ups lasting up to 45 minutes to an hour. That team felt quite proud of it too.

5. Forced time limit almost never works. Some people just love to describe every minute detail of their work even when the 3 minute timer is beeping.

6. Humans have terrible memory.

I want to propose we replace the face to face 15 minute Stand-Up meeting with group chat software (Microsoft Teams, Slack etc...). This ensures the 3 important questions are documented and searchable. No more missing information, no more he said/she said misunderstandings and threads can be replied to and referenced back.

But I've heard feedback from teammates that they want to see each other face to face and they "supposedly" get value from making the Stand-Up meetings super long. Translation: We like to waste time talking about the weekend or what we did last night. Well, may I introduce to you the "let's go get coffee together meeting" for those social needs.

Comments

[Txai]

In my team we sometimes do the classic stand up meeting and sometimes we do the meeting using Slack. What I observed is that, when we do it face to face, there is a significant increase in tangent discussions but also it's easier for us to spot problems and give tips into each other's tasks. So, I'm not really sure if doing this kind of meeting thru text is better or not

[Justin Lam]

Maybe a hybrid approach. Face to face once a week, while the rest of the time through text?

[Txai]

Yeah, I think that's the ideal

[Juan Pablo Alvis]

100% agree on writing down all the things we shared during Daily Stand-ups.

I've been in so many meetings just trying to remember what we said yesterday or last week and sometimes there are topics that are not directly impacting the work of most of the team; as you said, it might be just human nature.

But wasting other people's time is a sin.

Good and to the point post!

Regards,

[Bertil Muth]

As a Scrum Master, I’ve been in a few daily scrums (which, by the way, don’t need to be standups). I tend to bring the time down even further, to maybe 5 minutes, so that it doesn’t feel like waste. An independent facilitator surely helps.

[Jacob Herrington (he/him)]

We have tried both, I'm not sure which I prefer. I certainly feel more productive with async standup.

[André Costa Lima]

We generally don't type out our dailies in Slack, unless teammates arrive at the office later than face-to-face daily meeting time. When someone misses the daily for whatever reason, we do not schedule for later time to avoid messing with everyone's personal schedules. In this case, the person that missed the daily shares it in Slack for everyone. We adopted this model as we are working for an external client with which we share a Slack for written communication and conference calls. The only downside of this approach is that whoever misses the daily does not get to hear other people's daily. However, it turns out quite alright because all developers are in the same office.

The above was a comment towards point 2. Other comments pretty much summed up what you should do to solve your issues.

[Justin Lam]

I don't understand how you solve this statement: "The only downside of this approach is that whoever misses the daily does not get to hear other people's daily. However, it turns out quite alright because all developers are in the same office." Does the individual just go around asking everyone their daily updates? If that's the case, why do they have to share it on Slack since they are going around talking to each person individually. Also, do you realize how much time is wasted trying to find each teammate?

[André Costa Lima]

We're a small team of 6 developers sharing the same office space and we're sitting right next to each other, so finding teammates is not a problem at all. Those who miss the daily meeting share their updates by writing in Slack, most importantly, for our client to be up-to-date on our progress.

Does the individual just go around asking everyone their daily updates? If that's the case, why do they have to share it on Slack since they are going around talking to each person individually.

Not really. Besides daily absences not being that frequent, we, the devs, generally don't do have to do that because, except for task-specific details, are aware and contextualized with what everyone is doing. Devs missing a daily once in a while never proved to be problematic. However, our client has to be up to speed at all times.

Being physically close to each other enables us to reach out for one another without hassle whenever we have to sync or sort out any issue. As an example, ocasionally, I am tasked with work that has a relationship or dependency on someone's else work. Even if one of us misses the daily, we speak one-on-one throughout the day to check up on each other's work.

Of course, whatever works for us may not work for you or someone else's team.

[Ryan Smith]

Our team has had similar thoughts about the typical stand-up recently as well. For us, the problems were related to people but also the format.

• Company dictated that agile process was "owned" by a single manager. Their attitude tended to be that everything needs to be done in the sprint, regardless of any problems. Others quickly fell into a pattern of not bringing up issues due to negative reactions or being called out, instead of a helpful environment. It became a report to your manager meeting or a PSA meeting about deadlines.
• The three typical stand-up questions were not giving us much information (partly due to the reason above this one). Sometimes work overlapped, sometimes it didn't. I usually did not care much what others worked on or were working on, I could look at our board for that information. What I cared about was what I might need from the team or what I could do to help the sprint move forward. If others were not willing to share and answered the bare minimum for the three questions, it would have required someone (scrum master) to draw information out of each person without seeming overbearing, which can be draining and is not an easy task.
• Nothing documented from the meeting, nothing comes out of it. For those that were looking to get something out of it, it felt like a mandatory waste of time.
• As you mentioned, people were late, missed the meeting regularly, or just wanted to chit-chat.

We did the Slack-bot stand-up 2 days a week, but those seemed even more ineffective because not everyone filled it out or read the other statuses.

We ended up moving to a format with a documented agenda that roughly stays the same from sprint to sprint. Each "stand-up" (it became more of a sit-down) we review the purpose of the meeting, pull up the sprint board, and document any actions that come out of it. It became a bit more structured and I think we get a lot more out of it. This does require someone putting together the agenda and starting the meeting by reviewing it. Those that like to chat or stroll in late to the meeting may not like this format. We are working on ways to make this a little less rigid.

I'm not sure why this is the go-to format in most information out there on agile, it relies on all people being onboard and working to get the most out of the stand-up. I think that type of scenario is hard to come by. I would say adjusting to meet your team's needs is the way to go.

[Justin Lam]

Thank you for the insight into your team. This just shows that there is no one solution. The traditional Stand-Up is just one form of tool which perhaps was abused or used a little too religiously. I am happy to hear that you found a format that worked for you team, and perhaps everyone should start evaluating how best to make information flow efficiently in their own team.

[JeffD]

Very common problem

Scrum is Agile, and Agile is "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". And "we don't need software to solve human problems".

I agree with Martin, Scrum master should work to avoid one-to-one discuss, overtime, useless subjects...

The Yesterday and Today work can be find with Kanban or ticket system, the most important part of Standup is "I need this ressource today", "I need to restart this server" or "I need some help"(dual programming) because exceptions and error should be asked on chat. Face-to-face, eyes away from screen, stand-up position is good for empathy (and health).

[brian j guy]

The 3 question format seems less than optimal to me. We should know what was done and what is going to be done based on whatever tool/board/etc is being used to manage the work.

For me the real question for the standup is - what is our plan of action for the team for today. This is a team discussion based on the work to be done and involves the "what are the roadblocks" type of questions.

We have tried Slack. Didn't work well for us.

[Justin Lam]

Can you share more about what didn't work?

[Marius Espejo]

I actually proposed something similar to my team. We now post our statuses on a slack channel, we’ve been trying a bot which automatically asks people for the status and blockers and forwards answers to the channel. We still do the daily meetings but now it’s mostly focused on discussion that actually needs to happen. We’re a distributed team though so the meeting is via conference call and is time capped. I think that fusion ultimately solves all/most issues mentioned. It is ultimately I think a team norms problem though, regardless of how you do it

[Craig Nicol (he/him)]

I've done that before. It's the only option on snow days. Definitely better for keeping things focused, and easier to spin out side discussion (especially when it requires a URL), but I still prefer the face-to-face because there's things you don't pick up otherwise. The way someone says "I'm almost finished" that makes you think there's a month of work left, for example.

Stand up once a day, but feel free to ask those 3 questions in chat whenever there's a natural cadence - first thing after login, just before lunch, and at the end of the day. It helps hold you accountable for your own plans.