Your Daily Standup may be a waste of time

One of the twelve principles in the Agile Methodology goes as follows

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Unfortunately, many management professionals have misinterpreted the above to mean that teams cannot be efficient if they do not have regular face-to-face meetings. As a result, most software development teams start their working day in a meeting called the "Daily Standup" where each team member has to answer the following questions:

• What did you get done yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• Do you have any blockers?

It is important to note that the Daily standup was *never* supposed to be a status update meeting. Status updates should be shared on a Kanban Board which many teams use some variation of today.

In fact, the Daily standup was designed to be a single meeting for the team to:

1. Communicate if priorities have changed, 2. Prioritise the work that will deliver the most business value, and 3. Remove any obstacles faced in delivering the product.

Unfortunately, if practised like above, the Daily Standup does not often assist the teams to deliver software to the customer and is often considered to be a waste of time. Yet, many teams practice it anyway due to the popularization of practices such as the Scrum Framework which have miscommunicated the purpose of Agile Methodology as a means of managing remote teams rather than its original focus on de-risking software development through iteratively delivering business value.

If you're interested in helping your team to become more effective, here's my suggested guide for how to run your next Daily Standup:

1. Give an overview of the team's progress and identify if the team is on schedule and if the priorities of the project or customer have changed 2. Identify any tasks which either need additional resources or have changed in their priority 3. Allow any team member to openly highlight any blockers they are facing and what assistance they may need to overcome such

The purpose of the Daily Standup is to help the team to function better; not to report progress or otherwise serve a management reporting function. As such, it is important to remember another one of the 12 Agile principles is as follows

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

If the Daily Standup meeting isn't helping your team to deliver a better product, then it's time to either change it or get rid of it entirely.