Stand-up Meeting

A stand-up meeting (or simply "stand-up") is a daily team-meeting held to provide a status update to the team members. The "semi-real-time" status allows participants to know about potential challenges as well as to coordinate efforts to resolve difficult and/or time-consuming issues. It has particular value in Agile software development processes, such as Scrum, but can be utilized in any development methodology. The term "stand-up" derives from the practise of having the attendees stand at the meeting, as the discomfort of standing for long periods helps to keep the meetings short.

The meetings are usually timeboxed to 5–15 minutes and are held standing up to remind people to keep the meeting short and to-the-point. The stand up meeting is sometimes also referred to as the "stand-up", "morning rollcall" or "daily scrum".

There are three questions to ask and answer in the daily stand-up. Though it may not be practical to limit all discussion to these three questions, the goal is to stick as closely as possible to these questions:

1. What did I accomplish yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. What obstacles are impeding my progress?

The meeting usually takes place at the same time and place every working day. All team members are encouraged to attend, but the meetings are not postponed if some of the team members are not present. One of the crucial features is that the meeting is intended as a communication vehicle for team members and not a status update to the management or other stakeholders. Although it is sometimes referred to as a type of status meeting, the structure of the meeting is meant to promote follow-up conversation, as well as to identify issues before they become too problematic. The practice also promotes closer working relationships in its frequency, need for follow-up conversations and short structure, which in turn result in a higher rate of knowledge transfer - a much more active intention than the typical status meeting. Team members take turns speaking, sometimes passing along a token to indicate the current person allowed to speak. Each member talks about progress since the last stand-up, the anticipated work until the next stand-up and any impediments, taking the opportunity to ask for help.

Team members may sometimes ask for short clarifications and make brief statements, such as "Let's talk about this more after the meeting", but the stand-up does not usually consist of full-fledged discussions.