What is stand up meeting

As we continue our topic of agile methodology, it’s time to move to stand up meeting event or daily scrum. So, what is daily scrum? If we answer briefly, daily scrum or stand-up meeting is a scrum event of approximately 15 minutes duration, which occurs daily to plan sprint development for the next 24 hours.

The purpose of this event is checking the working progress of each developer. This event allows team members to cooperate for achieving their goals in a more efficient way.

Three main questions that should be answered during stand-up meeting are:

  • What was done yesterday?
  • What will be done today?
  • Are there any issues that delay sprint progress?

In other words, daily scrum meeting makes development process transparent for everyone and allows the team leader to stay in control.

Now let’s learn the procedure of daily scrum. First of all, the scrum master discusses the work progress with each developer. The goal is to find out which user stories were completed and which ones are still on-going.

Furthermore, during the meeting the scrum master needs to know if there are any new issues, he wasn’t aware of. If a developer encountered an issue which appears to be quite challenging to solve, he/she can ask his/her colleagues for assistance after the meeting.

Finally, the scrum master can share any news concerning new and already existing projects, if there are any.

It might look simple, yet there are certain obstacles which scrum teams can encounter while organizing the meeting:

  • Deviation from the subject
    It’s very important to stay focused on the theme of the meeting. Discussion of non-related topics will increase the length of meeting making it a waste of time. Additionally, team members can get distracted from the working process which can cause the decrease of productivity.

  • Attempt to solve issues during the meeting
    As we mentioned above, one of the purposes of stand-up meeting is discussing the issues which developers encountered during their work. Nevertheless, these issues should only be mentioned, everything concerning solving them should be discussed after the meeting. Otherwise, it will increase the length of the event.

  • Inconvenient or non-regular time for the stand-up
    If the meeting is organized at an inconvenient time, it can disturb the working process. The best time for daily scrum is at the beginning of the working day. If stand-up meetings are scheduled every day at the same time, people will less likely forget about them and miss important information.

  • Not following speaking etiquette
    It’s counterproductive to interrupt your colleagues or not to listen to them during disruption. This will lead not only to missing important information, but will cast a shadow on relations within the team.

To sum up, daily meetings are essential for scrum teams. They provide transparency and increase the efficiency of development process. To get the most value from this event, the meeting should be scheduled every day and before the actual work starts. It shouldn’t be longer than 15 minutes in order to stay informative and productive.

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