What is a standup meeting?
A standup meeting is a short, regular check-in, usually daily and usually no longer than 15 minutes, where each member of a team says what they have finished, what they are working on next, and what is blocking them. Its job is coordination between teammates: spotting who needs help and who depends on whom, early enough to act on it.
Why it is called a standup
The name comes from the practice of holding it standing up. People who are standing do not settle in, so the meeting stays short. Plenty of teams now hold standups sitting down or on a video call, and the name has stuck anyway. "Standup", "stand-up", "daily standup" and "daily huddle" all refer to the same thing.
What happens in a standup
The most common format is three questions, answered by each person in turn:
- What did I finish or move forward since the last standup?
- What am I working on next?
- Is anything blocking me?
Answers should be a sentence or two each. Anything that needs a longer conversation is noted and picked up straight afterwards, with only the people it concerns. That one habit is what keeps a standup at 15 minutes instead of 45.
How long should a standup be?
Fifteen minutes is the widely used ceiling, and small teams often finish in five. As a rough guide, a person needs about a minute. A team that regularly runs over is usually either too large for one standup, in which case it can split into smaller groups, or solving problems in the meeting rather than just naming them.
Standup meeting vs Daily Scrum
The Daily Scrum is the Scrum framework's own version of the standup, and the two terms are often used interchangeably. The difference is in what the official definition requires. The 2020 Scrum Guide describes the Daily Scrum as "a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team", focused on progress toward the Sprint Goal, and it deliberately stopped prescribing the three questions: the team may use whatever structure works, as long as the meeting ends with a plan for the next day of work.
A standup is the general practice and exists outside Scrum. Marketing, operations and support teams run standups without sprints or sprint goals. A Daily Scrum is the specific event inside a Scrum team.
Who should attend
The people doing the work that depends on each other. For a Scrum team that means the developers. For any other team, it is whoever shares the day's work. A manager can attend, but a standup where everyone reports to one person has turned into a status meeting, and it loses the thing that made it useful: teammates hearing each other's blockers and offering help.
What should be discussed, and what should not
Belongs in a standup:
- Work finished or moved forward, stated concretely.
- What each person is picking up next.
- Blockers, with the name of the person who could clear them.
Does not belong in a standup:
- Problem-solving. Name the problem, then solve it afterwards with the people involved.
- Detailed status for a manager. That is what a status report is for.
- Updates that change nothing. "Same as yesterday" tells the team nothing they can act on.
Async standups
An async standup asks the same questions in writing instead of in a meeting. Each person posts their answers at the start of their own day, usually in a shared Slack channel or through a bot, and everyone reads them when they can. For a team spread across time zones this is often the only fair option, because no shared hour works for everyone.
The trade-off is that nobody is in the room to ask a follow-up question, so written answers need to be more specific than spoken ones. Async standups vs daily meetings covers when each makes sense, and how to run an async standup in Slack covers the setup.
A template to start with
The standup meeting template has the three questions, examples of useful answers next to filler ones, a written version for distributed teams, and an agenda for the live meeting. You can fill it in on the page and copy the result.
Where Eodly fits
Eodly runs the written version for you. It asks each person for a short update in Slack, Telegram or Discord (Microsoft Teams coming soon), weighs each answer against what actually moved in GitHub and Linear, and sends the team lead one page each evening showing who shipped, who is silent, and who is slipping.