After working with stand-up meetings for a while I feel that this practice acts like a thermometer for an agile team. As a constant status report, it demonstrates how most of the other practices are being applied and how good is the team communication in general.
That’s why I believe is important to be conscious about what happens during them. A stand-up meeting may hide problems if:
- It doesn’t have an exact time to start
- It doesn’t happen because someone is not present
- It’s a trigger for technical discussions
- It’s not focused on to the plan
- It doesn’t contribute to continuous improvement
- It’s a report for a single person, not the team
- People don’t stay close to each other
- It’s frequently interrupted
- It doesn’t include the whole team
- People don’t remember what they did on the last day
- It’s moment where most of the problems are raised
- It takes more than 15 minutes
- It doesn’t happen every day
- It doesn’t feel good
These are all simple issues which can easily be addressed. In fact, most of the items on this list are discussed on Jason Yip’s article about stand-up patterns. The most important thing is that it may as well be the a good starting point to identify and improve other aspects of a project.