Once upon a time there was a DevOps team and they lived in a little place called The Environment. And every day they met together in a magical space called the Standup. When they walked away from the Standup they all knew what each other was doing and were energized to take on their work with vim and vigor. The End.

This is not a fairy tale—an effective Standup is possible! It is in fact, necessary for the agile/scrum method to truly function well.
But how many of us have been frustrated by Standups? If so, it’s usually the result of losing sight of these main goals:

Standups need to be short, focused, and informative.

If these rules are broken, team members are in danger of losing faith in the meeting, and that can lead to a lack of productivity down the line.

Short: Standups are normally set to a maximum of 15 minutes; this is a restriction that beautifully exposes any chinks in the project’s “armor”: if it takes longer than 15 minutes for the team to communicate its work for the day, there are too many people on the team, the project is too broad, or the leader is not leading. The responsibility rests on the shoulders of the speakers and the facilitator.

Focused: The purpose of a Standup is for everyone to know what everyone else is doing. It is designed to communicate what was done the day before, what will be done today, and what will get in the way of getting that work done. But the speaker has to narrow the focus down to very small tasks. “I worked on bug fixes yesterday and I will be working on bug fixes today,” does not provide good information to the team.

Here’s a better, more focused, scenario: “Yesterday I fixed the code for the ‘apply now’ button that was taking users to the wrong page. Today I will fix the shopping cart bug that wasn’t allowing people to change the amount of items in the cart. Obstacles would be if I can’t replicate the issue.”

The facilitator’s magic comes in handy now: she can ask the speaker what he needs in order to remove the obstacle and a short conversation and action item ensues. But the magic dies when someone wants to provide “context.” This is not time for context or history-gazing; it’s a time for taking action. The Standup is a microcosm of the agile framework: small, actionable chunks of information only. A good facilitator will spot a “context” time-hog a mile away and redirect adroitly. This is less about time and more about focus.

Informative. The Standup is meant to inform. Those on the operations and development teams need to know what has to be done and understand what each team member requires in order to get that work done. That means there has to be a culture of clarity around terms and technical lingo. “Today I’m going to land the plane on the API issue” is fine if everyone knows what that means, but if not, people will be shaking their heads and wondering why one guy gets to fly a plane while the rest of them are sitting in cubes writing code.

Effective Standups are indeed possible! It all depends on everyone pulling together—the members of the DevOps team and whoever is leading the daily Standups—to keep the meetings short, focused and informative. And your team will leave that magical space each day feeling ready to take on the work of the day, feeling heard, understanding their team member’s work, and part of a collaborative and informed group.

And you will all live happily ever after!