Daily Stand-up Variations

When trying to instill a new habit with a team I often find it useful to add a new question (or two) to the daily standup. Perhaps the team needs to pay more attention to Code Smells or Unit Testing. In those cases I ask team members to mention one thing they discovered (or better improved) related to that idea during standup everyday.  My goal is to make spotting these issues a daily habit, even when they can’t be fixed right mentioning them raises awareness. Non-coders please reinterpret questions 4 and 5 in your own context.

As a reminder here are the updated questions:

1. What did you complete yesterday?
2. What do you commit to today?
3. What are your impediments/obstacles?
4. What Code Smell/Missing Unit Test/… did you spot yesterday?
5. What improvement did you make to the code yesterday?

Even with the extra 2 questions teams should easily finish their stand-ups in fifteen minutes or less. I recommend that discussion be left until after the stand-up so people who’re not interested can sit down.

An additional trick I saw someone at my client us: pass the questions round on a piece of paper. You don’t need to read them but just holding the piece of paper is good reminder and helps people remain focused.

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