Daily Standup Value

When practicing agile, especially scrum, you have a couple of ceremonies that are suggested. One of those practices is the daily standup, where the developers share with each other what they did the day before and what they are going to do the next day. It is meant as a way to keep everyone on the same page and should trigger people to reach out to help faster, but how well does this actually work?

The idea of the daily standup is to share information about what you have been working on, so others may spontaneously suggest ideas, or if in the future you are working on something, you may still remember someone else faced a similar issues because it was mentioned during the daily standup. To focus on this, the idea of the daily standup is just to answer 3 questions:

• What have you been working on (since the last standup)

• What are you going to work on

• What is blocking you

The daily standup is a ceremony for developer by developers, but others are allowed to join it, but should not participate. For instance, the scrum master will be there, but wouldn't answer the questions. The product owner could join as well to get a feel of how the development is going on, but again, he shouldn't bother the ceremony by asking questions or answering the questions. If he wants to discuss things, he is free to do so afterwards. The daily standup should be kept short and useful for everyone.

This is exactly where it typically goes wrong. Either developers can't keep it short and they start discussing things that should be discussed separately, or too many people are involved and you end up with a lot of information sharing that is irrelevant. This again leads to a standup that is too long and contains a lot of information that is not relevant for everyone. You will start seeing people looking around or start looking to the phones. This is however not only limited to non-devs, it can can also be the case that there is very little cross-pollination where people are all working on their own thing and don't get any benefits of knowing what someone else is working on. This will mainly be the case for teams that consist of specialized people instead of more all-around developers.

For small coherent teams, there may also not be much benefit in having a daily standup. If you typically have a lot of communication throughout the day, causing you to know what the other are working on, spending time on a daily standup might just be a waste of time.

A big caveat as well is that some people tend to use the daily standup as the moment to flag that they need help or that they are stuck with things. While this is a question to answer during the standup, it shouldn't be the case that this kind of troubles is being postponed until the standup. When you are truly stuck, you should reach out immediately instead of waiting. I see the daily standup more as a place where you can signal that you are struggling with something, but you are still making progress or you have to look into something.

As with most things, you should try it out to see if you get any value out of it. But before start doing daily standups, you should ask yourself what you actually hope to gain by it, and how you will measure the value of it. There is no point in doing a ceremony just because others are doing it, or because you think you should be doing it.