Practices

Daily meetings are also known as scrum meetings [SCH04]. These meetings help check the heartbeat of the project. All team members are required to attend. The meetings are held in the same place at the same time every work day and should not last for more than 15 minutes. Usually, teams conduct the meetings with everyone standing up to keep them short (thus some call them "standup" meetings). Anyone who is directly involved can also attend the meeting as an observer, but care should be taken because too many people in the meeting may cause disruption or cause people to be uncomfortable in sharing information. Typical daily meetings should have 10 people at most.

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. What is impeding my work?

These three questions have a specific purpose [SUT06]:

• The first question tests the focus of the team. Anything done that was not work planned for the iteration is questioned.
• Answering the second question revises project strategy daily by reorienting the team according to dependency changes that were revealed by the response to the previous question.
• The third question will create issues that may result in new tasks in the Work Items list. The most important effect of this question is to create a list of issues that are assigned to the team or to managers. The team should expect management to help eliminate bottlenecks. 

These are the minimum number of questions that satisfy the goals of daily meetings. Experienced practitioners tend to add an additional question for improving collaboration among team members: "What have I learned or decided that is of relevance to the team?" [LAR03]. "What might help or hinder others in meeting their commitments?" [YIP]. Other topics of discussion (design discussions, chat, and such) should be deferred until after the meeting.

Value

For self-directed teams, the daily meeting is a mechanism to quickly inform the team about the state of the project and people. It supports openness and enables resolution of dependencies and conflicts in real time. It builds a team; effective teams are built by regularly communicating, sharing commitments, and helping each other. [LAR03]

What a daily meeting is not

The daily meeting is not a status update meeting in which the project manager is collecting information about who is behind schedule. Rather, it is a meeting in which team members make commitments to each other.

Neither is it a problem-solving nor issue resolution meeting. Issues that are raised are registered and usually dealt with by the relevant team members immediately afterward. It is the project manager's responsibility to resolve them as quickly as possible or to make sure that someone on the team does.