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The value of daily standup meetings

There you are, your whole team is working distributed. There are no talks at the coffee machines, less social interaction throughout your day and your colleagues are merely names in a chatroom. Human interaction and communication are key in improving the bonding of a team. Improved communication leads to higher awareness of the project status and more productive developers1.

Daily standup meetings provide a way to improve the communication within a team; in co-located settings but equally so when working distributed. During the daily standup, team members can express their thoughts, goals, and progress in a short but effective way. The members within a team are more aware of each other’s wellbeing, but also of the state of the project2. This blog post will dive into the use and importance of daily standup meetings, especially when working remotely.

Team challenges during COVID-19

The consequences of COVID-19 have pushed you and your team back into your homes. This introduces new challenges for your team compared to when you were working co-located.

Team members may start to become unmotivated when working from home. There are a lot of distractions and your colleagues might have the feeling that they are on their own. They are not able to just walk across the room to ask a questions and their house mates will probably also not be able to help them.

Misunderstandings happen because face-to-face meetings are not possible. Communicating online and in a written fashion is hard, and information transfer is simply lower3. Yes, of course you could do a video meeting, but nothing beats a good old meeting in person.

Unmotivated team members and misunderstandings lead to deadlines not being made. This is where the daily standups come into play.

The goals of a daily standup

We will discuss a general form of the daily standup here, which is used by many teams within KPMG4. This is based on the daily Scrum from the Scrum methodology. The daily Scrum is meant to be short, discuss the progress and identify impediments preventing to reach the team’s goal 5. During the KPMG daily standups, or check-ins, these elements are also included. A daily standup should adhere to the following points:

Be short, to avoid losing focus and willingness to attend the meetings. If the meetings are always set to be less than 15 minutes, no one will object to attending them and everyone can stay focused throughout the meeting.

Discuss progress made so that your team members know how you are doing on your part of the project and everyone is aware of the current progress.

Discuss you goals for today. Again, this is to inform your team members about what you are planning to do today so that they are aware of the progress of the project.

Discuss impediments preventing you from making the set goals. This can be anything from personal reasons to practical challenges. In this way, the team is aware that you might not be feeling well today or are running against a certain problem. This also allows other team members to offer help or for you to ask help.

Benefits of the daily standup

Multiple scientific studies have been done on the effect of daily standups. Dorairaj et al. indicate that ‘interaction and the building of a “one team” mindset’ is promoted when incorporating daily standups in your team’s work routine 6.

Also, doing a daily standup can improve the motivation and commitment of the team members, tackling one of the challenges introduced when having to work from home.

To conclude

Working remotely can introduce challenges for teams. The communication deteriorates, leading to unproductive team members. Team bonding is worse or non-existent and deadlines are not made. Doing daily standups can help tackle these challenges by allowing team members to discuss their problems and make the whole team aware of the current progress.

Wondering how to actually perform a daily standup while working remotely? Have a look at our blog post about useful tooling.

  1. Stray, V., Sjøberg, D. I., & Dybå, T. (2016). The daily stand-up meeting: A grounded theory study. Journal of Systems and Software, 114, 101-124. ↩

  2. Pikkarainen, M., Haikara, J., Salo, O., Abrahamsson, P., & Still, J. (2008). The impact of agile practices on communication in software development. Empirical Software Engineering, 13(3), 303-337. ↩

  3. Emiel Romein on team processes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3YnYQVpuB8 Retrieved 15 May 2020. ↩

  4. KPMG. ‘Keep the work going: 6 tips to work together as a team while working remotely’. https://home.kpmg/nl/nl/home/social/2020/03/keep-the-work-going-6-tips-to-work-together-as-a-team-while-working-remotely.html. Retrieved 15 May 2020. ↩

  5. Scrum Inc. ‘Daily Scrum’. https://www.scruminc.com/daily-scrum/. Retrieved 15 May 2020 ↩

  6. Dorairaj, S., Noble, J., & Malik, P. (2012, May). Understanding team dynamics in distributed Agile software development. In International Conference on Agile Software Development (pp. 47-61). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. ↩

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