Let’s talk about Stand-ups

Stand-ups are a part of the daily chores of an engineering team. I have observed misconceptions about stand-up’ purpose across many teams. The teams wrongly follow the practice with the purpose of giving a status update to their managers. And the manager joins the stand-up with the motive to confirm everyone is productive. All gather in a room and give their progress of yesterday and plan for today to their manager.

Stand-up meeting

I am sure that stand-up with the motive of status updates should have faced the dilemma of “Why do we need to join a call early morning every day? Can’t everyone give their status update async on slack?” from the influence of async communication in the era of remote working.

Such a question should trigger a retrospective to everyone “Why have I always done stand-up as a sync meeting?”

So, here is my take on it

“Stand-ups are planning meetings and not status update meetings”

Stand-ups are 20–25 minutes of time where the team meets together to plan the day and discuss blockers. The team will discuss and decide e.g. who will be able to pair programs or review pending pull requests.

You can identify if the team understands the purpose of standup by observing their communication patterns. Good stands up are where communication is going into zig-zag order and are often led by engineers. Round robin communication is for the status update. Team with a round-robin communication style stand up are suffering from one or more issues from below

1. Lack of collaboration in the team. Team members hardly work together on common initiatives.
2. Lacks focused direction. The team is trying to achieve many things in parallel.
3. High lead time for changes
4. Knowledge silos
5. Zombie engineers. Engineers turn into zombies once they provide their status updates.

So, what can you do to make your stand up alive? Below are some tips that can help

1. Create understanding around the purpose and value of stand-up in the team
2. Limit team’s work in progress
3. Use stand up to find help from each other. e.g. decide on who will be able to review the tickets in the “In Review” column today
4. Look at your Kanban board in the meeting and navigate from the right-most column to the left-most column
5. Let engineers take charge and moderate the stand-up
6. Everyone should plank to avoid long stand-up (kidding :D)

Let me know your thought and feedback in the comments.

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