How to Run an Effective Stand Up

In talking with some of my students I notice that the topic of Stand Ups has not been fully comprehended. Agile is an important topic, but one that can easily fall by the wayside as you are learning design or development topics. It doesn’t feel as immediately necessary as writing code or building wireframes. I get it. Producing assets for your portfolio is rightly at the fore-front of everything you think about. So what is a Stand Up and what does that have to do with your work in tech.

Agile is the common language of software development, and thus will be encountered in the majority of the careers involved in design and development. A main “ceremony” (that’s what events or meetings are called in Agile) is the daily Stand Up. Now, you can Stand Up or sit down. You can run them daily or weekly, but essentially. The Stand Up (also known as the daily scrum) is rightly named because it is meant to be short, hence, standing. “Don’t bother to sit, this will be quick.”

In the Stand Up team members, report on three very specific things. It’s the scrum master’s job to facilitate the reporting process which should take approximately 2–3 minutes. Here are the questions that the members is asked to answer:

What did you do yesterday?
What will you work on today?
What roadblocks do you have?

It’s the scrum master’s job to facilitate (though not necessarily solve) the roadblocks as reported. Sometimes, the scrum master can coach the member to…