The story-driven standup
The following is just my observation on the nature of daily standup meetings in SCRUM. If my views offend anyone then I do apologize.
I’ve tried hard to find an existing article on this subject. The only reason I wrote this is that I could not find anything describing this style of daily standup meetings. If everyone already does this and I’m the only one just now “getting it” please let me know!
Everyone learns early on in SCRUM that the daily standup consists of three parts:
- What did you do yesterday?
- What will you do today?
- What’s in your way?
We all know these questions and they are well practiced. For many these questions are sufficient for daily team meetings. I have come to call this style of standup the Status-Driven standup. The problem I’ve encountered is that daily status updates do not necessarily contribute to a team effort to complete a story. Status updates have a tendency to be individual oriented rather than team oriented. As noted in many references on Agile and SCRUM a team is self organizing and self managing. Daily standups are not intended to prove a team is doing work, it is intended to facilitate team work. Status-driven standups tend to justify individual effort as opposed to facilitating team effort. Status-driven standups tend to keep individuals focused on “their work” rather than on the teams work.
What is a story-driven standup? It is a change in focus and format. Rather than focusing on individual task status we now focus on story status. This naturally changes the format of the standup. Now the questions become:
- If we could only get one story done this sprint which one should it be?
- What do we need to do to get this story done?
- What else can we do today?
We ask question one everyday because priorities may have changed from the last standup. The story chosen may be a story in the current sprint or it may be a story not in the sprint that needs to be pulled-in. We also ask question one to keep the team focused on the most important work.
Question two asks the team both the status of the story and what work the team will do today to move the story closer to completion. The team concentrates on whatever is needed to make this story happen. This might include removing any obstacles to the work. This would also be an opportune time to set a goal for the day.
Question three provides the opportunity for finding another story (if there’s time and/or resources) on which the team can work today. If there is another such story the team asks question number two regarding this story. Then question three is asked again and so on until the team cannot commit to anymore work for the day.
The benefits of the story-driven standup are:
- The team operates as a unit
- The most important work is worked on first and often
- Individuals concentrate on team accomplishment
- Teams stay focused
3 Responses to “The story-driven standup”
1 Ryan Cooper 4 October 2006 @ 4:31 pm
It’s exciting to see that I’m not the only one coming to this conclusion about normal Scrum daily meetings! We have been using Scrum for some time now, but have had recurring problems caused by lack of visibility into the status of our stories. I’ve written about it recently here: http://on-agile.blogspot.com/2006/09/scrum-pitfall-i-focusing-on-people.html
A few of us are now hoping to move towards a story-driven stand up to help improve the situation. We have experimented with it a few times, but have not transitioned to it yet.
If you’re interested, I would enjoy collaborating on an article/paper about this idea. It would be interesting to submit it to a more widely-read outlet and get some more feedback. Let me know what you think.
2 Mad Scientist Designs » What makes Agile agile? 6 October 2006 @ 4:03 pm
[…] Team - Story driven standups tell the team right away where the most important story is at and what it will take to get it done. This has been very valuable to my team. Additionally, it’s alot more fun than the boring narratives you hear in status driven standups! […]
3 Larry Port 12 October 2006 @ 9:49 pm
Hi Jody:
Great idea. This makes a lot of sense to me and is more team centric than the individual status updates. In our team we usually have several stories in place at the same time. For us, it would make more sense to ask for the first question, “Are the stories in the work-in-progress column the most important stories right now?”
One thing this does not cover however is the work of our customers, who are trying to keep a sprint ahead building requirements via acceptance tests. It’s important to hear what they are up to, even though their work is not captured in stories per se.
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