How I run my daily standup meetings

Introduction

Daily standup meetings (Daily meetings) can be one of the most important meetings that we can have as a team. It is in these meetings where we can understand what each team member did yesterday, what they will do today and if there are roadblocks to solve. If you research this kind of meeting on our good friend Google, these three questions always come up.

However, the goal of this article is not to talk about the concept of the daily standup meeting. Instead, I want to share with you how I run this kind of meeting, because I have some approaches that my readers might find useful. I will lay out my methods in the following sections. In the end, I can share some useful links about the subject for you to research and understand more about the concept.

Scheduling the meeting

Scrum Guide and other resources will recommend you to book 15 minutes to do your daily and we started with that in our team. However, when we moved to a remote approach, we decided to book 30 minutes instead of 15 minutes. Why did we decide to do that? Well, I will explain later :D

First let’s talk about the first 15 minutes of our daily meeting.

So the meeting is booked.

Now, you are asking yourself some questions like:

• How can we start our daily meeting?
• Where do we need to start to look?

Looking at the Jira Board…

Well, to answer the previous questions, in our team we look at the board from right to left. We have seven columns described below, and we start by asking ourselves what we delivered the previous day.

Because I can’t show you my real Jira board with our tasks, I decided to mock up a board on Notion with the same columns that we have in our Jira board, just to give you an idea of how we view our board.

The idea is to start on the right with the Live column, and to move left, addressing each task in the column before moving onto the next one. This is what it would look like: we start by looking at the Live column and see what we delivered the previous day. After that, we move to the next column where we have some stories to talk about, for example the Code Review column. Duarte starts to talk about his task and if he has people available to do the code review in his code or who are not following our work agreements. After that we move to John’s task, and so on. After finishing that column we move to WIP Dev and Jorge starts to talk about the progress of his story and if he is blocked with something, etc. We don’t usually talk about the Ready for Dev or In refinement columns in the daily meeting. We try to have these columns updated asynchronously.

Questions that we ask …

During the daily, we ask questions such as:

• Do we have any roadblocks?
• Is there someone who needs help to deliver their task, or has questions?
• Do we have a lot of stories blocked in the same column? If yes, then why?
• How many stories do we have in the WIP column compared with the number of people?

These questions can vary depending on the day.

Post daily

Because we are working remotely now, we sometimes have some topics to talk about that happened the previous day, like someone bothering us or other stuff. This is where we use another 15 minutes to talk about subjects that occurred unexpectedly and we want to give them some visibility. Now you understand why we book 30 minutes for our daily meeting ;) We don’t always use this time but other times it can be useful. We might review the columns Ready for dev or In refinement at this moment if necessary. So this time slot is for whatever we need.

Asynchronous Daily Meetings

There are some days that we have some mandatory meetings booked by the company and we cannot move them, so at these times we do the daily meeting asynchronously on our communication tool, which in this case is slack.

We have a reminder in our team slack channel where every weekday at 10 AM a slackbot is shown with the link for the meeting. When we do this asynchronously we use the threads to give feedback about what we did and what we expected to do next or deliver.

Wrapping up

Well that’s my approach to running the daily meeting. To recap, we book 30 minutes for the daily, the first 15 minutes is for looking at the board starting on the right hand side and the last 15 minutes is for post-daily topics . Sometimes we can do asynchronous dailies when there are scheduling conflicts.

Thank you for taking the time to read my article and I hope you enjoy the ideas and use these ideas with your team.