How to stand out in a standup — reporting your progress without pain
By Maciej Płatek
Meetings to talk about your progress on a daily basis can be a bit scary for many developers. Sometimes it might look like it’s arranged to control all the team members but it is not. Well, at least in most cases ;). But seriously, there are no bad intentions behind those meetings. The reason for this is the synchronization of the whole team.
To make those meetings efficient you should remember a few things. The most important is that ‘there is no I in team’ and everyone contributes effort towards sprint goals. If there is a problem, your team will help you and in opposite situations, you should help them.
Three very important questions and how to start
Every day you have to ask yourself three very important questions. What have you accomplished since the last meeting? What will you do today? And finally — is there anything that hinders your progress? Yeah! That’s all, really!
But before that, you can take a deep breath to chill out. Stress is your first enemy when you approach a daily. How to fight it? Try small talk! Show up at the meeting a few minutes before and ask your colleagues some casual questions or tell them something you find interesting/funny. It defuses tension and can really work miracles. Just give it a try!
If you are struggling with composing your thoughts on the go you can try practicing it before the meeting. Just ask yourself a question about what you have done yesterday and what you are planning to do tomorrow. You can even write it down in the notepad. But on the other hand, there is no need to rack your brain over it. Just take your thoughts together and scribble some bullet points.
Something you may want to avoid is saying something like “Today I will continue yesterday’s tasks”, “Yesterday I was fixing some issues”, “I don’t remember what I was doing”, “The usual stuff”, “Nothing new, this meeting is pointless” or anything that is not specific.
Yesterday was a good day
Yeah, probably it was, but not all yesterdays were easy. Sometimes your work looks like there is no hope… but don’t worry, every programmer is facing such situations, so no one will judge you. Simply describe what was your focus. First of all, if you are referring to tasks from JIRA (or others) it is better to use titles or some keywords instead of ids, this will make your statements less confusing. Start with things that went according to your plan and smoothly go through some less successful parts. Never hide problems from your team, they are there for you as much as you are there for them. Often a small hint from a daily standup can solve your issues.
Today is gonna be a great day!
After telling your story, it is time for expressing your plans for the day. If you are continuing yesterday’s tasks try to guess if you are able to finish them and if so, what will you do next. Listen carefully to your colleagues, because there is a possibility that someone’s progress will block you, for example, if you are a front-end developer, finishing touches on endpoints on the API side can be delayed. It is better to know from the start how to organize your day.
Is anything blocking you?
I mentioned before that you should address all your problems in daily meetings, paying attention to a particular kind of problem — blockers. A blocker is something that totally stops you from making any progress, for example, a missing design for the feature you are implementing, an endpoint that is working in a different way than is in the documentation, or any kind of unexpected errors that don’t come from your code.
Why is talking about blockers so important? Because there is no point in stalling for most of your day. You can take other smaller tasks or even start something totally different and put the blocked task on hold instead.
There is one special kind of blocker though, when you don’t know how to progress, something is totally killing you, your app is stuck or the compiler is talking in an alien language. Try to calmly describe your problem and ask for help, it is in the best interest of the team to help you with your problems. So be confident, this is not a weakness, this is a necessary step. But at the same time keep in mind to not go too deep into details in daily meetings — it is meant to be short, so address your problem and ask to meet after the daily with whoever can help to solve your problem.
Sometimes blockers are dependent on external factors — systems, services, or even people outside the team. You should address such blockers in daily, so PO, SM, or maybe the Lead can push forward that information to the right person.
Conclusion
If you incorporate some of my advice into your daily life, scrum meetings will be a breeze. To keep it simple and easy to remember we can put them into a list. You can copy and paste it to anyone who feels a little lost in daily standups.
- Always be honest
- Speak specifically, as a reference use task titles or keywords
- Don’t use generalities
- Make a list of what you have done at the end of the day
- Speak up if you have a problem
- Inform the team about blockers
- Talk up if you can help someone with their problems
- Keep it simple, don’t get into details
- If you need to go into details — take it outside the meeting
