The Art of Agile Development

Stand-Up Meetings

Note

Whole Team

We know what our teammates are doing.

I have a special antipathy for status meetings. You know—a manager reads a list of tasks and asks about each one in turn. They seem to go on forever, although my part in them is typically only five minutes. I learn something new in perhaps 10 of the other minutes. The remaining 45 minutes are pure waste.

Important

Informative Workspace

There’s a good reason that organizations hold status meetings: people need to know what’s going on. XP projects have a more effective mechanism: informative workspaces and the daily stand-up meeting.

How to Hold a Daily Stand-Up Meeting

A stand-up meeting is very simple. At a pre-set time every day, the whole team stands in a circle. One at a time, each person briefly describes new information that the team should know.

Note

I prefer to stand in an empty area of the team room rather than around a table—it feels a little more friendly that way. If you have room near the planning boards, that’s a particularly good spot for the stand-up.

Some teams use a formal variant of the stand-up called the Daily Scrum [Schwaber & Beedle]. It comes from an agile process also called Scrum. In the Daily Scrum, participants specifically answer three questions:

1. What did I do yesterday?

2. What will I do today?

3. What problems are preventing me from making progress?

I prefer a more informal approach, but both styles are valid. Try both and use whichever approach works best for you.

Important

Don’t wait for the stand-up ...