A few thoughts on standing meetings

On the surface, the standing meeting appears to be one of the most basic and straightforward components of an agile process. At a specified time, and on a regular (daily) interval, the team gathers and each person states what they did since the last standing meeting, what they will do by the next standing meeting, and identifies anything that stands in their way.  The meeting itself is designed to take 5 minutes or so.  However just about anyone that has worked in the software industry for more than two weeks will tell you, things are seldom as they seem on the surface.

Among other things, an effective standing meeting will:

-         allow all team members review what the remaining tasks are for the current iteration on a regular basis throughout the iteration, and track the progress regularly

-         identify potential problems (sooner rather than later) and prevent thrashing

-         constantly reminds the team as to what the customer deemed were the most important stories to work on for the iteration

-         prevents gold plating or working on non-priority user stories by constantly updating the team about your progress.

The standing meeting will not:

-         magically ensure that iterations goals will be met on simply because we’re meeting daily

-         replace the design/inspections/review discussions that need to take place

-         increase the overhead on a project (if they are executed appropriately).

In order for standing meetings to be effective, a lot of other things have to be in place. Things like user stories that can be broken into tasks for planning the development and then tracking the iteration. Testing (both unit and acceptance) to ensure that when a developer feels they have implemented a task, the code can be tested to ensure that it is in fact working and didn’t cause any unanticipated problems. The team has to be trusted enough to be able to have open and candid conversations about the project. The meeting has to be consistently scheduled so everyone knows when and where it is and so they can accommodate it (attendance is critical). The meeting has to follow a consistent format, so the necessary information is delivered in the shortest time possible. If issues or problems are identified during the standing meeting, they should be addressed in a separate conversation with the appropriate parties. (The entire team may not be involved).

During the iteration review, the effectiveness of the standing meeting should be discussed by team to see if there are any changes that need to be made.  During the iteration planning, the tasks should be broken down in such a way that they’ll lend themselves to supporting the standing meeting. (Having five fifteen hour tasks does not lend itself to iteration tracking as 14 four hour tasks). 

As stated a lot needs to be in place in order to be effective, but in order for a project to be optimally successful, having regularly scheduled and formatted standing meetings is crucial.