Succeeding with Agile - Mike Cohn's Blog

Interview on National Public Radio about Daily Standups

Feb 24, 2012
by Mike Cohn
5 Comments

Following the article in the Wall Street Journal on daily standup meetings a few weeks ago, a number of other places have interviewed me about the topic of daily standups. I don’t know why they’re asking me, but the interviews have been fun so far. The latest was on the National Public Radio (NPR) Marketplace show on Monday, 20 February 2012. You can listen to the whole show but Sarah Gardner's interview with me begins at 18:50. Click on the link above if you want to hear my take on daily standup meetings.

Sarah Gardner asked some great questions which I have answered and these include:

What’s the point of a standup meeting and why am I recommending it?
What rituals I recommend to ensure standups are a success?
What rubber bats have to do with meetings?

You can read the full transcript of this interview at the link above and listen to me answering Sarah’s questions.

Hi Ryan-- I'm glad you enjoyed the interview. I can understand that point theoretically but I've never witnessed any tall/short issues in a standup meeting.
Posted by Mike Cohn on 2012-08-02 21:57:45 Mike, She brought up a great point about shorter fellows feeling inferior and taller fellows feeling superior. Since the interview have you noticed the teams you coach that implement stand up being on the taller side? Great interview I enjoyed it! Ryan
Posted by Ryan Sauer on 2012-08-02 08:58:53 Hi Michael-- Thanks. There are definitely successful teams around who do not do daily standup meetings. The idea of the daily standup (daily scrum) comes, of course, from Scrum. With Scrum it's important to realize that the few rules it has are generative rules--that is, rules intended to generate the right behavior. The rules are not always important themselves. It's the behavior they generate that's important. So, we have a rule that says "talk to each other for 15 minutes a day." Most (by far) teams need that rule. Even teams that think they talk to each other a lot may not have many opportunities where everyone is present. And so the daily scrum works well. But it's the behavior we're after more than mindless adherence to a rule. However, before you (or anyone else) abandons the daily standup altogether, I'd suggest trying a different approach such as going through product backlog items one a time rather than person by person.
Posted by Mike Cohn on 2012-02-27 13:11:26 Mike, Fun interview! It's too bad they didn't get into more detail about what happens at the standup (other than standing and rubber rats). But, I guess it wasn't that kind of segment...and in any case, the rubber rats bit is probably more interesting that the "big 3" questions anyway. Somewhat off-topic, but I have a (sacrilegious) question about daily standups: have you found successful teams that don't use them? Some background on this question. At a recent retrospective, one team decided to stop daily standups for a few weeks, and check our results. The reasoning behind this was that: * We're a small team (5 or 6 people). * We're all co-located and sit together in an open space. Most of the team members have been together for 3+ years. * Everyone pretty much communicates all day long, we all know what everyone is working on and rough status of those stories * Any "blockers" are typically reported immediately, and marked as such on the task board * It was rare that standup revealed any "new" information. Essentially, we've found that standups were almost never revealing anything new and actionable. We were just interrupting work for 10 minutes every day. At best, the meeting was useful to the 'chickens' (when they listened in) who weren't as "in the loop". Our first inclination was that we were not going into enough depth. So, we tried having everyone go into more depth about the story (or stories) they were working on. This became problematic with a 15 min timebox, and it occupied an ugly middle ground between check-in and actual problem solving. So, we went the other way and are trying no daily standups. Instead we are doing a single mid-sprint checkin, time-boxed to 45 minutes. At this check-in we go into more depth, including a quick demo of stories that are/were problematic, as well as looking at stories that may be at risk for the iteration. The jury is still out...but I was curious what your experience has been. Have you found teams that have adopted this pattern? Or, teams that didn't need standup? Or, any suggestions about how to deal with "Standup is not revealing anything new" syndrome? Thanks!
Posted by Michael Ball-Marian on 2012-02-27 09:14:30 Great hearing you over the airwaves!
Posted by J. D. Moore on 2012-02-26 21:48:37