standups

Standups are brief, time-boxed meetings used in agile environments to synchronize a team's work. They are typically held daily and aim to provide a quick status snapshot, surface impediments, and align on next steps.

In the common format, participants answer brief questions about what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and any blockers. Meetings are usually 5 to 15 minutes and participants often stand to keep them short.

Participants are usually a cross-functional team, including developers, testers, designers, and sometimes a product owner and Scrum Master. The meeting can be in person or virtual, and teams often use a shared board to visualize progress.

Benefits include improved transparency, faster problem identification, and better coordination. Critics say standups can become status updates for managers or waste time if poorly facilitated, and they may be less effective for teams needing deep collaboration or very large teams.

Variations include asynchronous standups, where updates are posted in a channel or on a board, and walking the board, where teammates discuss next steps while updating tasks. Best practices emphasize brevity, sticking to the three questions, avoiding problem-solving in the moment, and relying on the board to surface issues.

Origin traces to agile methods in the 1990s, notably Scrum, where daily standups are a core ceremony. While common in software, standups are used by many knowledge-work teams to coordinate work.