I have been working as a software consultant for more than 11 years. Because of that I am an eager supporter of lean principles and agile methods.
The daily standup meeting is a common method within agile development, but could be utilized regardless of development method.
The Scrum meeting is a short daily status meeting described in the Scrum method. The team gathers each morning for a standup meeting where each team member in turn gets to answer three questions
- “What have you done since the last meeting?”
- “What will you do until the next meeting?”
- “What obstacles are in your way for completing your tasks?”
The questions should be in relation to the backlog to always keep focus on the items on the backlog.
The reason that this works so well is that we expose problems as soon as possible. This is the same principle as the “Stop the Line” culture of the Toyota production system that the Lean Software Development is all about.
Read more about the daily standup meetings here:
Agile Meetings - a great article from the STQE magazine
Introduction to Standup Meetings – article from DSDM consortium
Lean Software Development – a gold mine of interesting publications by Poppendieck
Hi Jens
Another interesting thing with Scrum and other Agile methods is the way they check the progress. They ask how much effort that is left instead of much that have been used. I think this create a much better view and reduce risk form blaming games. A question I have to you is - do they ask this question during the stand-up meeting?
Anders Sixtensson
Left by Anders on May 3rd, 2006