Daily Agile Scrum stand-up meeting guidelines

Followers of the Scrum method of project management will typically start their day with a "stand-up meeting". In short, this is a quick daily meeting (30 minutes or less) where the participants share the answers to the three questions with each other:

• What did I accomplish yesterday? 

• What will I do today? 

• What obstacles are impeding my progress? 

Some people are talkative and tend to wander off into Story Telling. 

Some people want to engage in Problem Solving immediately after hearing a problem. Meetings that take too long tend to have low energy and participants not directly related to a long discussion will tend to be distracted.

These are the minimum number of questions that satisfy the goals of daily stand-ups. Other topics of discussion (e.g., design discussions, gossip, etc.) should be deferred until after the meeting. 

Here are few tips for running a smooth daily meeting: 

• Everyone should literally stand-up and no one should sit down on chair. Assuming that team is co-located & no team member has any physical problem

• Do limit problem solving. It should not be fully Problem Resolution Meeting. You can conduct separate huddle for Problem Resolutions.

• Whoever joins last to this meeting would start first

• ScrumMaster is responsible of removing obstacles in the path of the team, so that they form no hindrances in their regular work stack.

• If required, ScrumMaster will note down the MOM and circulate/share the MOM with rest of the members by End of Play (EOP).

• All members should be present on time for Standup meeting.

• Request all team members to refer the MOM/list of issues and risks before attending the Standup.

• Any member who can’t attend the Standup should give his updates to fellow teammate. Teammate will give the updates on her/his behalf in her/his absence.

• Don’t update tasks with new estimates at the meeting. It takes too much time, for one thing. The other reason not to do this is you can get a feel of the team members being accountable to the ScrumMaster. What you really want is a self managed team that is accountable to each other, not the ScrumMaster.

• Do make sure the tasks are updated with estimates before the meeting and the burndown is present at the meeting.

• Do make sure the individual tasks are descriptive and granular. It’s ideal when estimates for individual tasks are around one day. If the tasks are large and vague, it takes a long time for the team member to describe what she’s doing and for the rest of the team to understand.

• If a team member doesn’t burn down any time for a task because she discovered a new predecessor task that wasn’t accounted for, make sure the new task gets added to the sprint. That way you have a better history and a more accurate burndown chart.