Scrum Practices: The Daily Standup

So what is the connection between the Maori warrior ceremony of the haka and the daily standup? Let’s have a more in-depth look at one of the most commonplace practices in tech organizations today.

A Brief History

According to JJ Sutherland, one of the parents of Scrum, the “first standup happened during the second Sprint ever (February 1994)…at Borland.” (1)

One of the elements of the Borland team’s “secret sauce” was that they would have everyone on the team meet every single day to discuss how they were performing. Getting everyone together in a room was key because it gave the team the opportunity to self-organize around challenges. If someone was stuck with a problem — if the accelerometer wasn’t talking to the altimeter — everyone saw that the impediment could block the whole Sprint, and they swarmed on it, making sure it got fixed pronto.

At Easel, with the first Scrum team, we implemented the Daily Standup during the third Sprint. We’d planned out four weeks of work for that Sprint — pretty much the same workload as the previous month. We finished it all in a week. A 400-percent improvement. That first Friday, the whole team just looked around at one another and said, “Wow.” That’s when I knew I might be on to something.

In 1998, Continuous integration and the “daily standup” were listed among the core practices of Extreme Programming. The notion of a standup meeting also appeared in Kent Beck’s 1999 book “Extreme programming explained” (2). The idea was that requiring everybody to stand up limited the meeting length by necessity. It became widespread, of course, with the rise of Scrum since 2002.

Let’s look at the official definition of a standup meeting, under Scrum guidelines (3):

“The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team. The Daily Scrum is held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Development Team plans work for the next 24 hours. This optimizes team collaboration and performance by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum and forecasting upcoming Sprint work.”

So, the daily standup meeting is an essential practice for agile teams, because it helps in monitoring and managing its performance, which is vital for the team to self-manage. But how does this work?

Standup Efficiency

In a 2016 study, Stray et al. looked at things that positively affect the standup process as well as the attitudes towards it (4). The findings were that:

Some team characteristics negatively affect the process, like:

• A culture of low self-management
• A low level of shared knowledge between team members

Some physical characteristics positively affect the process, like:

• Visualizing tasks on a board
• Using video instead of audio calls
• Having fewer participants
• Decreasing the duration

When looking at how people feel about standups, we can see that a “just-progress-reporting” practice negatively affects the attitude towards the meeting, while discussing, solving problems and sharing information with the team are positive factors. Some other factors that make for unhappy stand-uppers are:

• Too high meeting frequency
• Conducting meetings at a disruptive time
• Not starting meetings promptly

But are standup meetings really valuable? A study published in 2017 asked developers just that (5). Even though the respondents on average were neutral towards the practice, the majority were either positive or negative.

Stray et al., 2017

Junior developers were the most favorable, while senior developers and members of large teams most negative. Paradoxically, the larger the group, the less the satisfaction with the meeting. In particular, developers were negative when teams consisted of 12 or more team members.

There’s also a trend we can see here, where people that feel good about standups are more correlated with spending more time programming and attending fewer meetings.

Common Challenges

So how can we reap the benefits of utilizing a standup process, while navigating around the pitfalls? Let’s look at addressing some of the challenges with keeping healthy standup meetings:

“We never keep to the time limit.”

Scrum recommends that standups should not be used for discussing solutions to obstacles raised. However, empirical studies have found that spending time in the short meeting on exploring and solving problems is valuable, so that might be acceptable and even to be expected around some milestones in the project lifecycle.

If it’s not a seasonal thing, it’s usually an issue, and it’s ok to address it. As a general rule, after fifteen minutes, the average person’s mind is going to wander.

“People just report their status to the team leader, resulting in team members not paying attention to each other.”

Walk the board! That is, structure the standup by walking through each work item that is displayed on your visual management board, instead of people taking turns to talk. With the board in place, the standup moves through each work item from the highest-to-lowest priority. Developers working on each item report on progress and ask for help — anyone who can help pitches in, everyone’s paying attention.

“Should we really do this daily?”

The short answer is: usually, yes!

Some smaller teams or projects or highly-predictable, low-risk projects choose to have rarer in-person standups and post written standups instead. There are a bunch of bots around that can help with this, but realistically, this decreases the chances that everyone in the team will read everyone else’s updates, or come up with useful ideas or suggestions. But it all boils down to discipline and what works for each specific team.

“It’s hard to find a time of day suitable for everyone.”

This comes up a lot in distributed teams. Consider cycling times. Have standups in one team’s AM half the month, then switch to the other team’s AM. Or whatever works in making everyone feel they’re not beings sacrificed on the altar of productivity.

“Standups just make me uncomfortable.”

Well, to some extent, that’s the whole point! The time-boxed setting should pressure you into being efficient and productive in surfacing and eliminating blockers. It’s pretty much proven that standups do bring value to a project when well implemented, so if there are things that you feel can be improved, don’t hesitate to speak out!

And keep in mind — not listening, not speaking out or just focusing on delivering your update reports to the leader are the things that hurt the standup process most, for everyone involved, so don’t be one of those guys.

Standup Etiquette Tips

Let’s look at some standup etiquette tips that will make everyone happier and more productive:

• Think ahead. Take a couple of minutes before the call and make a note of the things you want to mention. Leave any irrelevant data out and think through a concise way to express your ideas, so you’re not scrambling for words mid-meeting.
• Always be there on time! If, for some reason, you’re not able to make it, notify peers before starting time.
• Always listen carefully to the very end of the meeting. Voice any concern, ask questions, share any useful knowledge, and volunteer to help.
• Also, ask for help! This is, after all, the core idea behind the whole standup thing.
• Signal the end. After the last person has spoken, the team may not immediately realize that the meeting is over. That’s unpleasant, and it doesn’t end the session on a high note.
• Be trustworthy. If any of your work items are delayed and will take longer than what you previously specified, always mention the delay, the cause, the solution, and the new estimate.
• Take it offline! Remind yourself (and peers) that some problem-solving discussions should take place outside of the daily standup. However, the team should ensure that the right people are nominated or sign up to deal with the issue later.
• Mute yourself when not speaking. Your background noise will be distracting to others.
• Many teams may use the time waiting for the team to gather, before the meeting starts, to socialize, laugh and get to know each other a little better — even if it’s only for 30 seconds and talking about the weather, and especially useful within distributed teams. This builds trust and makes communication more comfortable, so don’t hesitate to participate!
• And speaking of trust and better communication — if you’re not in the room, or if you’re part of a distributed team, try joining via video instead of audio! It’s an easy hack that makes long-distance relationships easier and communication smoother.

Finally, here are some ideas that you can consider for improving your standup meetings:

• The last arrival speaks first. This is a simple rule that also has the added benefit of encouraging people to be punctual about showing up for the standup.
• Time the meetings — record them for that matter — and publish the results!
• Have a Meeting Facilitator role, and rotate it around the team to ensure that people don’t end up merely reporting to the leader.
• Use standups as an opportunity to relax? A controlled trial executed to understand the impact of a preceding three-minute breathing exercise on the perceived effectiveness of standup meetings found correlations with improvements in decision-making, listening, and interaction (6).

Invoking the Warrior

Going back to JJ Sutherland’s time at Easel, he remembers (1):

With the first Scrum team at Easel Corporation in 1993, I regularly showed them a video of the All Blacks rugby team getting ready for a game. Before every game, they perform the Maori warrior ceremony of the haka. The haka is a warrior dance that charges up people about to go into battle.

While watching it, you can almost see the energy come out of each player and coalesce into a greater whole. You can see ordinary men transform themselves into something bigger, something greater. They’re invoking a warrior spirit that does not accept defeat or dismay.

Yes, a battle anthem was one of the sources of inspiration behind the ritual of the daily standup! The intention was, and still is, to create a shared space that brings people together to coordinate, evade obstacles and work more productively as a whole. Processes, rituals, and rules are simply means to that end, and should continuously be adjusted to optimize the outcome, which is faster projects and happier peers!

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(1) Jeff Sutherland — Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X

(2) Kent Beck — Extreme Programming Explained https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Explained-Embrace-Change/dp/0321278658

(3) The Scrum Guide https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#events-daily

(4) Stray, V., Sjøberg, D. I., & Dybå, T. (2016). The daily stand-up meeting: A grounded theory study. Journal of Systems and Software, 114, 101–124.

(5) Stray, V., Moe, N. B., & Bergersen, G. R. (2017, May). Are daily stand-up meetings valuable? A survey of developers in software teams. In International Conference on Agile Software Development (pp. 274–281). Springer, Cham.

(6) den Heijer, P., Koole, W., & Stettina, C. J. (2017, May). Don’t forget to breathe: a controlled trial of mindfulness practices in agile project teams. In International Conference on Agile Software Development (pp. 103–118). Springer, Cham.