Effective daily standups are crucial to software development especially for remote teams. And in this new world with many more people working remotely there are suddenly many more people forced into daily standup video calls.
I’m lucky to have worked remotely by choice for the last few years and it has taught me one thing about standups: There is no one correct way to do them!
The project I’m on is fairly big. Way too big to cram everyone into one call. So we’re split into different teams. And the teams have self-organised with subtly different culture around things like programming style, peer review, and daily standups. The teams have very different sizes even which is already enough reason structure things differently. Sometimes people move between teams or spend time straddling two different ones and ideas spread between them.
One of them is that the last person to join the call starts with their update and once you’re done with your update you nominate the next person to give theirs. This reduces the awkwardness where no one’s sure when to start or when the previous person is done and who should go next. It also means you don’t need anyone leading the call so even if there’s a clear team lead things can still continue as normal if that person cannot make it. It cuts out a lot of dead time between people talking and helps to keep things moving along quickly.
As a general rule of thumb standups should be quick. Typically you would just mention what you did yesterday, what you’re going to do today and whether you have any blockers. Any tangents or discussions get taken “offline” meaning on slack or in a separate zoom call afterwards so you don’t end up holding up the entire team on a topic only two or three people are interested in.
All of this might make it sound that standups should be as quick as possible and usually this is the case. But for remote teams this might be the only time in a day that people speak to each other. People could be quite isolated otherwise. So there’s a balance to strike between chit-chat before you start and joking around vs being all business all the time. In my experience no team ever fully agrees on where that balance lies - standup length is a frequent retrospective meeting topic.
One thing I’m pretty sure of is that standups shouldn’t be your only meetings. We have regularly scheduled grooming, planning and demo meetings where we can go into more depth. And you can always jump on a quick call if you need to.
How many meetings are too many? That’s a whole other topic..
