Daily Standup Myths

How to avoid these!

Steven Curtis
3 min readMay 28, 2023
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

The standup

A daily standup meeting is performed during Sprints, and functions to keep members of the development team aligned in order to reach the goal of the sprint. This Sprint Goal should be negotiated between the Product Owner and Development Team and this should be SMART (Specific - Measurable — Achievable — Realistic and Time-Constrained) during the Sprint Planning meeting.

However there are a host of bad practices that can occur in these short but important meetings that log the progress of the team.

Myth: You must stand up

You don’t need to stand up in a stand up! The idea behind the stand up part is that the meetings are kept short.

You need to distinguish between a short productive meeting and a waste of time, but the distinguishing feature of a productive meeting certainly isn’t whether you are physically standing up.

Myth: The individual focus

Many organisations let the daily stand up degenerate into “I did this…I will do this…” which certainly isn’t ideal.

The analogy often used for stand up meetings is that they should be like the huddle of a sports team, the energy is important as well as the focus on the whole team.

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