Traditional wisdom says the way to run a daily standup meeting is to go around the room and ask 3 questions: “What did you do yesterday?”  “What do you plan to do today?”  “Do you have any impediments?”

I’ve found a few problems with this approach: First, there’s the deer-in-the-headlights effect.  The three questions are wide open and they call for a certain amount of creativity.  It’s sometimes hard to know what to say to a depth that will be meaningful to the other team members.  So, it’s common to watch someone stutter at first, figuring out what to say and where to begin.  The first person called upon will feel especially under the gun.

A second, related, issue is that by going around the room in order, the team members will anticipate when it’s their time to speak.  So, instead of paying attention to what the others are saying, they’ll tend to be thinking about what they are going to say when it’s their turn.  The big problem here is that, since everyone is given an equal amount of time, it’s too easy to compare one person’s report to the previous, and to the next.  So, everyone feels obligated to not only give a thorough report, but also figure out how to make sure it sounds like they are being personally productive.

The third problem is that this format tends to focus on the facilitator, as if he or she is the only one who cares about the information — collecting status reports — rather than focus on sharing knowledge.

Walking the Board

A better approach is known as “walking the board.”  This technique calls for going through the current stories of the iteration one by one, rather than going around the room team member by team member.  As each story is brought up, anyone involved with that story speaks up: mentioning its status, any impediments, and any other significant developments.  Any particular team member, therefore, might speak up several times during the standup meeting, if they are involved with multiple stories, or just once.  Or, if the work is being done through pair-programming, then one pairing partner might speak for both, and the other might remain silent and not speak at all during the standup, which is perfectly fine.  So, where the traditional go-round makes it too easy to compare how much someone has to say to what the team member before them just said, this divides up the discussion and makes it impossible to compare perceived efforts.