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The daily stand-up was intended to quickly help developers remove any blockers to commitments before starting their working day. But at many companies, stand-ups have devolved into tedious one-sided status reports.
Now, as organizations desperately search for efficiency gains, these repetitive rituals are on the chopping block. Could those 10 minutes have been an email or a Slack update? And are they ever just 10 minutes anyway?
We spoke to ten engineering leaders and coaches who have sat – and sometimes stood – through hundreds of these rituals to work out if the daily stand-up is still relevant.
A ‘parody of productivity’
The original idea behind this agile ceremony was that by making people stand up, each person will naturally keep their updates brief, ideally down to one to two minutes. But now that most teams are remote or hybrid-first, nobody has stood up for a while.
It’s also become a more traditional meeting on calendars, blocking out 30 to 45 minutes of everyone’s morning, or a midday or end-of-day interruption for global colleagues.
In his post, ‘Some thoughts as I sit here in another stand-up,’ senior software engineer Lloyd Atkinson writes that, “Every day, we are expected to repeat the same mantra: ‘Yesterday, I did the work I needed to do. Today, I will do the work I need to do’.” For Atkinson, the daily stand-up had become a “parody of productivity.”
Frustration for this particular agile ritual pervades much of the tech industry. “Which absolute fucking maniac in this room decided that the most sensible thing to do in a culture where everyone has way too many meetings was schedule recurring meetings every day?” Nikhil Suresh, director of Hermit Technology, wrote in his own anti-agile argument.
“I am telling you right now, the average 15-minute stand-up runs for 30-60 minutes, every fucking day, and absolutely jack shit is accomplished, other than everyone delaying work until the stand-up is over.”
Where did it all go wrong?
“I don’t think the stand-up is dead, I just think it’s misused and badly named,” agile coach Erin Davies said.
Names are powerful, so it’s a good place to start. Not just because it’s ableist and relies heavily on everyone comfortably speaking the same language. She says it also carries too much ceremonial gravitas from the early days of scrum.
In 2020 even the scrum guides changed the name from daily stand-up to daily scrum. They also updated the questions to:
- What did I do yesterday which helped the team get closer to the sprint goal?
- What will I do today which will help the team get closer to the sprint goal?
- Are there any impediments which will prevent my team from getting closer to the sprint goal?
But old habits die hard.
Walk the next 24 hours
For those teams using kanban, you may prefer to “walk the board,” addressing the in-progress tickets closest to done and moving left.
“The most important thing is the thing that’s nearly finished,” said Paul Harding, agile delivery coach at AND Digital. “Stop starting. Start finishing. What have we got closest to done? We just create waste otherwise.”
Paraphrasing Ryan Ripley’s Fixing Your Scrum, Harding said the daily stand-up is grounded in scrum’s focus on product. “By focusing on achieving the goal rather than finishing all the items, we target business value [and] outcomes.”
Irrespective of frameworks, he emphasized, “the purpose is for the team to sync what they are going to do in the next 24 hours.” The sprint goal is owned by the team, so the stand-up should be grounded in collaboration toward that goal.
Echoing kanban’s origins at Toyota, he explained, “If we are planning to build a car, what are the next steps in 24 hours? Today I’m planning to build the steering wheel. These are the challenges. Joe, can you help me with that?”
Can you stand-up without trust?
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“I think the debate about meetings and rituals being ‘a waste of time’ is as old as companies trying to adopt agile without properly having understood it,” leadership trainer Milena-Mercedes May said. “To make stand-ups work, you need to make the agile culture work, with the empowerment of the agile team.”
Yet about 23 years since the Agile Manifesto was signed, agile still isn’t working for a lot of organizations. The most common anti-pattern of stand-ups is that it is used for reporting.
“The ideal is not that everyone justifies the time that they spent yesterday and justifies that they are getting paid for their job,” May said. “The daily stand-up is a tool for collaboration, communication, feedback and detection of impediments.”
This all hinges on a blameless culture built on trust that people are doing the work they are supposed to.
“In a daily stand-up, teammates must be communicating in a group instead of all reporting to the same person,” May said. Be wary of a manager or product owner turning it into a one-to-many communication channel. Instead, she said, when you see that people are reporting and justifying their time, clarify: “We believe you, no need to justify. Is there anything we can support you with?”
What if people don’t speak up?
There’s no denying that the stand-up, like all meetings, favors the loudest voices. If someone hasn’t said anything, May recommends the facilitator should check in and ask:
- What’s on your mind?
- What are you working on?
- Do you need any help?
- Can you support anyone with anything?
Another way to keep things from regressing into a status update is to post the questions ahead of the stand-up.
Also, if you’re a project manager or scrum master, agile coach Ritika Singh recommends that you stop attending the stand-up for a couple days. Follow up 1:1 to see how the meeting went without a senior person present. It might get very interactive.
Status updates still have a place, Singh said, because it’s important to give delivery updates to stakeholders. But that can be done by sending out a short, precise email at the end of the week highlighting any impediments. It’s not something that should be done daily, and certainly not as a team.
Is your team mature enough to skip it?
The daily stand-up is, among other things, an indicator of the maturity of your team. It shows how effectively teams can work together to prioritize things, and if people are willing to jump up to help colleagues.
“Not to sound too agile, but it obviously depends,” Singh said. Particularly for new teams, she recommends scrum because its set ceremonies get teams into the habit of sharing, collaborating, inspecting, and adapting. For a mature team that’s good at communicating, she said a daily Slack notification could suffice.
“If everybody’s working in the same room, I generally think that a daily stand-up doesn’t provide value for the cost,” said Kent Beck, chief scientist at Mechanical Orchard and inventor of agile framework extreme programming. “A stand-up brings with it a daily coordination cost where everyone has to be there at the same time,” he continued. “The time spent at the stand-up can’t be doing other things.”
The question every leader should be asking is: Does the investment into a stand-up pay off? It’s different for every team and organization. But the industry is starting to consider the cost of its obsession with meetings.
When things are changing really fast and the cost of error is great, Beck says it is crucial to bring everyone together. But in a steady state with a good communication flow, a stand-up can be a needless expense.
How do you remotely do daily stand-ups?
As a fully remote startup organized by timezone, Beck does see the value in daily stand-ups for Mechanical Orchard. Even if you are mob or pair programming, in a remote setting, he argues, you need to have a come-together moment to get the day going, a “social gluing” that, when co-located, would happen organically over coffee.
A hybrid team that meets in person three times a week may just want to stand-up on Mondays and Fridays. Then get into the habit of a quick check-in at the end of the day, even a Slack update, before you transition back into being an individual. When you are working with a truly global team, it can also be challenging to find a fair time to run these daily check-ins. Sometimes you need two meetings, Lisette Sutherland, remote facilitator and director of Collaboration Superpowers said, or a combination of asynchronous and synchronous communication.
GitLab has an almost anti-meeting culture, as described by principal engineer Natalia Tepluhina on the CTO Insights podcast. This remote-first company with 2,700 employees in 65 countries is very intentional about its asynchronous communication. The only mandatory meeting is your weekly 1:1 with your manager.
Yet, GitLab still has daily stand-ups – just in the form of written, asynchronous posts in Slack, answering:
- What have you done outside of work? How’s your life going?
- If you’re blocked, how can the team help?
That first question is designed to build asynchronous social bonds, while the second focuses on team goals. The company also discourages DMs because it constantly looks for ways to radiate knowledge outwards.
Status update: cancel pointless meetings
Teams need to consider if any regularly scheduled meetings still bring purpose and value to the team.
“At the end of a stand-up that felt particularly un-useful or where people were checked out,” Beck said, team members should feel safe to say “Time out. We need to have a conversation about the conversation we just had that seemed like a waste of time to me. What would it take for it to not be a waste of time?”
Rate every team meeting at the end of every session, recommended Sutherland. This can be via thumbs up/down, 1-to-5 via hand signals or via a Slackbot that automatically asks you for a rating from 1 to 10.
Check your pulse
“Teams that collaborate intentionally will have superpowers,” Sutherland says, which means that stand-ups can be done asynchronously and written down or in a meeting – whatever works for you.
“I am 100% for teams creating a check-in pulse together – but how and when is up to the team,” she says. “If the team is delivering value and is happy, then the current pulse is fine. If not, they have to change the pulse.”
How’s your pulse?
