Stand-up Meetings - so simple, so rewarding, so why aren't you doing it?

I first came across mention of stand-up meetings after my manager lent me The Art of Agile Development.

From the word go it felt right to me.

Too often in our office, we can go the whole day without talking to each other. This has negative implications on both a performance and a social level.

We were guilty of not really knowing what each other was doing, whether anybody was stuck in a rut or if we possibly had a solution to a problem somebody else was experiencing.
Also, there were days we resembled ships in the night, with a spoken word count of two - hello and goodbye! Not great for building relationships with people you spend approximately 40 hours a week with.

I let stand-ups brew for a few days in my head - the more it fermented, the more convinced I became that I was onto a winner. I informed my manager that I was planning to introduce stand-ups (giving him due credit for lending me the book whence the idea came from). He was thrilled and very encouraging - nice to have that kind of management buy-in.

I took the plunge and informed the troops of my intentions, receiving a raptourous muted response of participation. There was no going back now - I had to follow through. And yes, the first one was nervous - for us all.

But after six months of hosting them, I can safely say that it has been one of the best things to happen to our development team since I have been there (nigh on 12 years and counting). And I highlight the term because that has been the number one outcome of this - we are no longer a group of developers but a team. Informing, discussing, joking, moaning, empathising - INTERACTING for at least 2 minutes every day!

If you are in a team leader/senior developer position and are not doing consistently regular stand up meetings, then I definitely recommend that you start. There is minimal overhead and the ROI is invaluable. There have been plenty of instances of somebody describing an issue they are investigating only to have another developer serve up a solution at the same meeting.

A few pointers from my own experience:

1. Be committed, be consistent - if you go down this path (and as the blog title asks, why would you not), YOU drive these meetings. That is, you call the meetings every day without fail. It doesn't matter if you're not in the mood for whatever reason (ahem, previous night's alcohol comsumption), the meet still happens. Do not assume for one moment that any of the other developers will initiate them - why would they, it takes them away from coding.
2. Do it in the morning. What time does your last developer walk in the door at? Add ten minutes to this and that's the time your morning meetings take place at. If you leave it to later in the day, then Murphy's Law dictates that something will happen to scupper the meeting. Also, there's less chance that you will be dragging somebody away while they are in the middle of the search for the unpaired bracket in a 20 line SQL statement.
3. Follow the format as per the user manual at first, say a few weeks, and then tailor as you see fit. Let the other developers know this and that you would appreciate their feedback over this settling-in period.

I should also point out that we are a team of four developers, all within the one office and starting work at roughly the same time each morning. Of course things may be different for other set-ups (e.g. distributed teams).

Do your fellow developers and your company/employer a massive favour and - stand up.