Over the past month or so we’ve been trying to institute stand-up meetings a la extreme programming within the team I work in. In my old job, working with one of the other members of this new team, we did these meetings pretty much daily for the two and a half years I was there, so I guess for me the whole thing has long since become a habit. It has been rather interesting being in a reasonable size group where most people haven’t had these sorts of meetings in the past, and I wonder if we aren’t taking the wrong approach.

Back in the day, or format was basically to go around a circle (half of which was usually at the other end of a speaker phone) and rundown what you did yesterday, and what you were planning for today. This is really a pretty simple format, which means that everyone should have something to say at some point in the meeting, but in many cases we’ve run into multiple days categories with high level ‘I was working on project X and will be continuing to do that today’. I have to admit I’ve been guilty of this myself on occasion, though I think I’m a little better at disguising it with unimportant details.

I suspect maybe it’s the format which is at fault here. Ideally it would just be a freeform problems encountered and problems solved sort of thing, but I suspect we would end up with to many false ‘noting interesting to report’ reports. Unfortunately I’m not sure how to solve this one. Putting out an arbitrary number (the three biggest problems you met/solved yesterday) doesn’t feel right, but it’s obviously critical to keep everyone involved.

Maybe we just need to get a little more pushy asking for more detail when we get too high level. I wonder if anyone else runs into these sort of problems. It’s not noted in Charles Miller’s list of standup meeting anti-patterns but I imagine it might be quite a common problem.