Stand-up meeting

A stand-up meeting (or simply "stand-up") is a meeting with attendees typically standing. The discomfort of standing for long periods is intended to keep the meetings short.

Notable examples

By tradition, the Privy Council of the United Kingdom meets standing.

Software development

Some software development methodologies envisage daily team-meetings to provide status updates to team members. The "semi-real-time" status allows participants to know about potential challenges as well as to coordinate efforts to resolve difficult and/or time-consuming issues. The stand-up has particular value in Agile software development processes,[1][2] such as Scrum or Kanban, but can be utilized in context of any software-development methodology.

The meetings are usually timeboxed to between 5 and 15 minutes, and take place with participants standing up to remind people to keep the meeting short and to-the-point.[3] The stand-up meeting is sometimes also referred to as the "stand-up", "morning rollcall" or "daily scrum".

Scrum-style daily stand-ups involve asking and answering three questions.[4] Though it may not be practical to limit all discussion to these three questions, the goal is to stick as closely as possible to these questions:

  1. What did I accomplish yesterday?
  2. What will I do today?
  3. What obstacles are impeding my progress?

Whereas Kanban-style daily stand-ups focus more on:

  1. What obstacles are impeding my progress?
  2. (looking at the board from right to left) What has progressed?

The meeting usually takes place at the same time and place every working day. All team members are encouraged to attend, but the meetings are not postponed if some of the team members are not present. One of the crucial features is that the meeting is intended as a communication vehicle for team members and not as a status update to management or to other stakeholders. Although it is sometimes referred to as a type of status meeting, the structure of the meeting is meant to promote follow-up conversation, as well as to identify issues before they become too problematic. The practice also promotes closer working relationships in its frequency, need for follow-up conversations and short structure, which in turn result in a higher rate of knowledge transfer – a much more active intention than the typical status meeting. Team members take turns speaking, sometimes passing along a token to indicate the current person allowed to speak. Each member talks about progress since the last stand-up, the anticipated work until the next stand-up and any impediments, taking the opportunity to ask for help.[5]

Team members may sometimes ask for short clarifications and make brief statements, such as "Let's talk about this more after the meeting", but the stand-up does not usually consist of full-fledged discussions.

References

  1. ↑ "Agile Testing". Borland.com. Archived from the original on 2012-07-06. Retrieved 2010-01-27.
  2. ↑ "Agile Stand-up on Agile Testing". Borland.com. Retrieved 2010-01-27.
  3. ↑ "It's Not Just Standing Up". Martin Fowler.
  4. ↑ "Scrum Guide". scrum.org.
  5. ↑ "Daily Scrum Meetings". Mountain Goat Software.

External links