Daily Standup
In short
A daily standup is a short daily meeting, usually 15 minutes or less, where a team checks progress toward its goal, plans the day, and raises blockers.
What is a daily standup?
A daily standup is a brief meeting, held every working day and usually lasting 15 minutes or less, in which a development team coordinates its work. The name comes from the habit of standing up during the meeting, which keeps it short. In Scrum the event is called the Daily Scrum, and its purpose is for the Developers to inspect progress toward the sprint goal and adjust their plan for the next day.
The standup happens at the same time and place every day, in person or on a video call. Many teams answer three questions: what did I do yesterday, what will I do today, and is anything blocking me. The 2020 Scrum Guide no longer prescribes those questions, so teams can use any format that focuses on the sprint goal; some walk the board, discussing each item on the task board starting with the ones closest to done. Detailed problem-solving is moved to a follow-up conversation right after the meeting with only the people who need to be there.
A standup is like a team huddle before the next play: it is not the place to redesign the strategy, just a quick check that everyone knows the plan and nobody is stuck. Blockers, often called impediments, are raised so the team or the Scrum Master can clear them quickly. Distributed teams sometimes run asynchronous standups, where each person posts a short written update in a chat channel instead of meeting live.
A daily standup is often mistaken for a status meeting. A status meeting reports progress upward to a manager, while a standup is the team coordinating among itself. It is also different from a retrospective, which happens once per sprint and looks back at how the team works rather than at today's tasks. When standups regularly run to 30 minutes or more, it is usually because status reports or problem-solving have crept in.
Key takeaways
- A daily standup is a short, daily coordination meeting of 15 minutes or less.
- In Scrum it is called the Daily Scrum and focuses on the sprint goal.
- Blockers are raised in the meeting and solved afterward.
- It is for the team to coordinate, not a status report to a manager.
Example
Daily standup: Sprint 14, day 6 Sprint goal: password reset by email
Ana: Finished the reset-token API. Today: expiry handling. No blockers.
Ben: Email template is in review. Today: connect it to the API.
Blocked: waiting for access to the email sending service.
Chen: Wrote the E2E test for the main flow. Today: error cases.
Follow-ups (right after the meeting):
- Ben and team lead: get email service access today
- Ana and Chen: agree on error codes for expired tokensReaders ask
What are the three standup questions?
The classic questions are what did I do yesterday, what will I do today, and is anything blocking me. They are a common format, not a rule, and the current Scrum Guide lets teams choose any structure that serves the sprint goal.
Is the daily standup the same as the Daily Scrum?
The Daily Scrum is Scrum's official name for the event, and standup is the everyday name used by many teams, including those that don't use Scrum. The idea is the same: a short daily meeting to coordinate work.
Why is it called a standup?
Teams originally stood during the meeting so that nobody got comfortable and the discussion stayed short. Many remote teams keep the name even though everyone is sitting.
See also
- ScrumTeams & Process, p. 21Scrum is an Agile framework in which a small team delivers a product in fixed-length cycles called sprints, using defined roles, events, and artifacts.
- SprintTeams & Process, p. 26A sprint is a fixed-length period of one month or less, often two weeks, in which a Scrum team works toward one goal and produces a usable product increment.
- Scrum MasterTeams & Process, p. 22The Scrum Master is the Scrum accountability that helps a team and its organization use Scrum well by coaching, facilitating events, and removing impediments.
- RetrospectiveTeams & Process, p. 20A retrospective is a team meeting held at the end of each sprint to reflect on how the team worked and agree on concrete ways to improve next time.
- KanbanTeams & Process, p. 10Kanban is an Agile method that visualizes work on a board of columns and limits how many items can be in progress at once to keep work flowing smoothly.
- Burndown ChartTeams & Process, p. 3A burndown chart is a graph that shows how much work remains in a sprint or release over time, so a team can see at a glance whether it is on track to finish.
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