Standup
STAND-up
A brief daily team meeting where each member shares progress, plans, and blockers.
A standup (or daily standup) is a brief agile meeting, ideally under 15 minutes, where each team member answers three questions: What did I do yesterday? What will I do today? What is blocking me? The name comes from the tradition of standing up to keep the meeting short.
Standups are not status reports for managers. They are coordination meetings for the team. The purpose is to surface blockers early and help team members synchronize their work. If someone is blocked, the standup is where help gets offered. If two people are working on conflicting changes, the standup is where they find out. Good standups keep the sprint on track.
Bad standups are long, unfocused, and feel like a chore. They happen when people give detailed technical updates instead of brief summaries, or when the meeting becomes a discussion forum. Good standups are crisp, actionable, and end with everyone knowing what matters today.
Examples
A standup surfaces a blocker.
During standup, a developer mentions they have been stuck for a day because the staging database is down. Another developer says they reset it an hour ago and forgot to notify the team. The blocker is resolved in 30 seconds. Without standup, the first developer would have waited another day.
A standup keeps the team aligned.
Developer A mentions they are refactoring the authentication module today. Developer B, who planned to add a new login method that touches the same code, suggests they pair on it to avoid merge conflicts. They would not have coordinated without standup.
A standup has become ineffective.
The team's standup takes 30 minutes because each person gives a 3-minute technical monologue. The manager changes the format: each person gets 60 seconds maximum, detailed discussions are taken offline. Standup drops to 8 minutes and becomes useful again.
In practice
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Frequently asked questions
How long should a standup take?
Under 15 minutes for a team of 5-8 people. Each person should take 1-2 minutes. If standups consistently run longer, the team is either too large (split into smaller standups) or people are going into too much detail (save discussions for after standup).
Are standups necessary for remote teams?
Many remote teams replace synchronous standups with asynchronous updates posted in Slack or a standup bot. This works if the team actually reads the updates and follows up on blockers. The format matters less than the outcome: is the team synchronized and are blockers surfaced quickly?
Related terms
A fixed time period (usually 1-2 weeks) in which a team commits to completing specific work.
A software development methodology that delivers work in short iterations with continuous feedback and adaptation.
An Agile framework that organizes work into fixed-length sprints with defined roles, ceremonies, and artifacts.
The prioritized list of all planned work that a team has not yet started.
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