What is Standup Meeting?

A standup meeting (or "standup") is a meeting in which attendees generally participates while standing.

Daily Scrum Meeting / Daily Standup Meeting

The daily Scrum meeting is a short meeting that happens every day. Daily scrum meeting ideally starts during beginning of the working day. Each team member who are part of the sprint needs to participate.

Some of the characteristics are specified below -

• Daily Standup is a daily status meeting that is conducted for all the team members and it would be held roughly for around 15 minutes.
• Every member of the team should answer to these three important questions -
  1. What I did yesterday?
  2. What I will do today?
  3. Any obstacles I am facing or blocked due to.
• Daily standup is for status update, it is not for discussion. For discussion, team members should schedule another meeting at a different time.
• Participants would usually stand instead of sitting so that meeting would be wound of soon.
• Have your Project Management tool visible - A Kanban board or a software like Sprintly is used. It is important for the team to get transparency on what is being done and what is consuming more time than expected. This would be really helpful for the teams that spend too long in answering "What I did yesterday?".
• It is a collaborative effort - This standup meeting can be treated as a collaborative effort for the whole meeting.
• Plan the meeting around your team - It is important to develop some sort of routine for your standup meetings. With a routine, delaying tactic would take place and meetings would never happen. Whether you have it every day or every week, consistency would be the key. If you team comes to office early, meetings can be conducted as to not interrupt their work time. Scrum meeting is more about productivity rather than adhering to rules. Turing the daily or weekly standup into a regular routine which accommodates your team's unique schedule would help to make sure that scrum meetings are an effective tool for your development team.

Why Standup is important?

The benefits of having a daily standup in agile are as follows -

• The team would evaluate the progress daily and would even see if they could deliver as per the iteration plan.
• Each team member would inform all the members within the team about their commitments for that day.
• It gives transparency to the team members on any delays or obstacles.

Who would attend a Standup?

• The Scrum Master, the product owner and the delivery team should attend the standup on a daily basis.
• Stakeholders and customers would be encouraged to attend the meeting and they can act as a spectator. However, they are not supposed to participate in standups.
• It would be the Scrum master's responsibility to take note of each team member's queries and the problems they are facing.

Geographically Dispersed Teams

Standups would be done in many ways, in case the agile team members are operating or working from different zones-

• A team member would be selected on a rotational basis who can attend the standup meeting of the teams that are located in different zones.
• A separate standup meeting would be conducted, status of the standup would be updated in a tool such as Rally, Share point, Wikis, etc.
• Variety of tools should be made ready for conference calls, video conferencing, instant messengers or any third-party knowledge sharing tools.