I have seen both sides of this.  I've been on teams which put daily standups to extremely good use, coordinating interdependent team members and maintaining focus on the iteration goal, but I've also been on teams for which daily standups were a largely unhelpful "status reporting" meeting with no established objectives and no apparent stakeholders.

If we have clearly-defined and well-disseminated iteration objectives, I am in favor of daily (or otherwise frequent) standups.

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Kevin Smith <ksmith@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks Max. I have a few follow-up questions, to get a better sense of your position.

Do you think they aren't needed because of the current size of your sub-team (2 people), or because of the nature of the work you are doing right now (prototyping)? Is your opinion likely to change in a month?

Also, have you been on a team that had daily standups? If so, were they effective there, or did they seem like a waste of time?



Kevin Smith
Agile Coach
Wikimedia Foundation


Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make it a reality.

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:12 AM, Max Semenik <maxsem.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't think we're at a point where daily standups are needed.

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Kevin Smith <ksmith@wikimedia.org> wrote:

What will be the best way to reach consensus on whether/how to have daily standups? It's a pretty important topic, and one that seems to have a fair amount of disagreement so far. Would a meeting be the most efficient way to discuss options? Or perhaps an IRC chat? Or an email thread (like this)? I'm open to whatever the group feels most comfortable with. I'm also open to individuals opting in or out of this discussion, based on your personal interest level.

Daily standups are a core practice of Scrum, and are generally seen as an agile best practice. So if we don't have them, it should be a very conscious decision, and we need to  accomplish their objectives in other ways. The benefits of daily standups that I can think of include:
  • Raising blockers (including to the Product Owner and process facilitator[1])
  • Helping developers stay focused on priority work
  • Informing the Product Owner of status from day to day
  • Team cohesion; daily social connection
There are concerns about having daily standups with remotely distributed teams in multiple timezones, but other WMF teams have managed to work around those. Another argument against daily standups is that each sub-team is too small to get much benefit. However, that discounts the importance of frequently sharing information with other stakeholders (notably the PO and process facilitator).

So....how should we proceed?

[1] If we were doing Scrum, this would be the "Scrum Master".


Kevin Smith
Agile Coach
Wikimedia Foundation


Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make it a reality.

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Best regards,
Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])

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