Ask HN: How to Improve Daily Standups?
I feel like everyone had a chance to be part of a team with a boring/useless stand up. How did you improve yours?
Currently ours (20 person team) is asking what we did yesterday, what we plan on doing today, and what are the blockers. The problem, I feel, is that it's just noise, nobody really pays attention, and it's just waste of 15-20 minutes for everyone every morning.
Comments
20 people is too big for a single scrum team: break it up into two (at least) smaller teams.
Do not use it as a status update ("what I did yesterday" and mostly "what I'm doing today" are noise), but do use it as a means to raise visibility on blockers, for members working closely on the same tasks or features to schedule follow-up meetings (sometimes known as "break out" meetings), to update the team on a shift in priorities for deliverables, and possibly to prioritize newly created bug tickets (though often this is more appropriate out of the standup).
If nobody wants to do it, stop doing it.