Standing up an hour or so after the day starts is one of the (first?) changes I’m trying to introduce into the team I’m working with now. Well, not just standing up around a water cooler, but also talking about what everyone did yesterday, what everyone is going to do today, and if there are some blocking issue that are preventing work to proceed correctly. This is not something I invented, it’s called “Standup Meeting” and is one of the first steps for introducing some kind of Agile into a team.

There is a lot of literature around that specific practice so I won’t explain here what a Stand up meeting is, but I’ll just point you to other links I found interesting.

• Daily Stand Up Meeting – Directly from the Extreme Programming site, the definition of what a Stand up meeting is.
• Daily Standup Meetings - Introduction and 5 useful tips – From Five Whys, the new Roy Osherove’s blog dedicated to aspiring managers, and introduction of the standup meeting and some (actually 5) tips to get the most out of it.
• Daily Stand Up Meeting Guidelines – Another introduction about it: it has a different approach, is a bit more “technical”, so worth reading.
• Getting Started With Agile - Daily Standup Meetings – Another nice intro, this time with a video, from Atlassian series on Agile.
• It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings – Martin Fowler explains how Stand up meetings can evolve into, and how to detect wrong approaches and correct them. A more advanced reading then the previous ones, but very useful if you want to make the most out of the Stand Ups and, more importantly, don’t make them become yet another loss of time
• Stand-up Meeting Antipatterns – This post outlines the bad habit that can make your Stand up meeting fail.
• The Stand Up Meeting - Aya Raafat El Gebeely talks about is experience taking part in stand up meetings. Nice read, and some nice cartoons.

We have introduced this new practice into the team only 2 weeks ago, and so far the things are going fine. The biggest benefit is that now people have an official moment in time to talk about blocking issues, while previously it was more difficult to try and get the attention of the team.

Let’s see how this turns out in a month or so.