Daily Standup Meetings

(Originally posted 2003.Mar.29 Sat; links may have expired.)

Laurent Bossavit writes: I regularly hear from people who have experimented with daily meetings such as Scrum ("Daily Scrum") or XP "Stand-up meeting") recommend. With no exceptions, everyone says that such meetings are incredibly effective in getting issues solved quickly, gathering momentum within the team, etc. My experience is about the same, although I prefer brief, informal "huddles" to formal meetings.

With a three person team, I tried daily standup meetings, but didn't find them that useful, since we were co-located anyway. An attempt at doing combined standup meetings with two unrelated teams was even less useful. It seems that having a common goal and related work makes daily meetings productive. That's probably why weekly "status meetings" of unrelated teams reporting to one manager are very unproductive. Like Laurent, I prefer brief huddles whenever information needs to be shared.