Stand-up meeting


A stand-up meeting is a meeting in which attendees typically participate while standing. The discomfort of standing for long periods is intended to keep the meetings short.

Notable examples

By tradition, the Privy Council of the United Kingdom meets standing.

Software development

Some software development methodologies envision daily team meetings to make commitments to team members. The daily commitments allow participants to know about potential challenges as well as to coordinate efforts to resolve difficult and/or time-consuming issues. The stand-up has particular value in Agile software development processes, such as Scrum or Kanban, but can be utilized in context of any software-development methodology.
The meetings are usually timeboxed to between 5 and 15 minutes, and take place with participants standing up to remind people to keep the meeting short and to-the-point. The stand-up meeting is sometimes also referred to as the "stand-up", "morning rollcall" or "daily scrum".
The meeting should usually take place at the same time and place every working day. All team members are encouraged to attend, but the meetings are not postponed if some of the team members are not present. One of the crucial features is that the meeting is a communication opportunity among team members and not a status update to management or stakeholders. Although it is sometimes referred to as a type of status meeting, the structure of the meeting is meant to promote follow-up conversation, as well as to identify issues before they become too problematic. The practice also promotes closer working relationships in its frequency, need for follow-up conversations and short structure, which in turn result in a higher rate of knowledge transfer – a much more active intention than the typical status meeting. Team members take turns speaking, sometimes passing along a token to indicate the current person allowed to speak. Each member talks about progress since the last stand-up, the anticipated work until the next stand-up and any impediments, taking the opportunity to ask for help or collaborate.
Team members may sometimes ask for short clarifications and make brief statements, such as "Let's talk about this more after the meeting", but the stand-up does not usually consist of full-fledged discussions.

Three Questions

-style stand-ups convene daily to re-plan in-progress development. Though it may not be practical to limit all discussion to these three questions, the objective is to create a new sprint plan within the time box, while deferring discussions about impediments until after the event is complete. Team members briefly address three questions as input to this planning:
  1. What did I do yesterday that helped the development team meet the sprint goal?
  2. What will I do today to help the development team meet the sprint goal?
  3. Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the development team from meeting the sprint goal?
Whereas Kanban-style daily stand-ups focus more on:
  1. What obstacles are impeding my progress?
  2. What has progressed?