The Daily Stand-Up Meeting: A Grounded Theory Study
Viktoria Stray2016, Journal of Systems and Software
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Abstract
The daily stand-up meeting is one of the most used agile practices but has rarely been the subject of empirical research. The present study aims to identify how daily stand-up meetings are conducted and what the attitudes towards them are. A grounded theory study with 12 software teams in three companies in Malaysia, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom was conducted. We interviewed 60 people, observed 79 daily stand-up meetings and collected supplementary data. The factors that contributed the most to a positive attitude towards the daily stand-up meeting were information sharing with the team and the opportunity to discuss and solve problems. The factors that contributed the most to a negative attitude were status reporting to the manager and that the frequency of the meeting was perceived to be too high and the duration too long. Based on our results, we developed a grounded theory of daily standup meetings and proposed empirically based recommendations and guidelines on how to organize them. Organizations should be aware of the factors that may affect the attitude towards daily stand-up meetings and should consider our recommendations and guidelines to make this agile practice as valuable as possible.
Key takeaways
- To obtain a quantitative measure of the interviewees' attitude about meetings, the first two authors studied all interview transcripts and independently scored the attitude towards DSMs on a "I think the most important in stand-up meetings is when people try to say if they have any problems"
- The DSM theory is proposed a starting point for understanding the key constructs and relationships of DSMs in agile software development projects, adhering to the principle that a grounded theory is readily modifiable (Glaser, 1978, p. 129).
- Explanations for each of the propositions E1 (a) When team members are not in control of the DSMs, it is easy for authoritative managers to use the meeting to obtain status information that is mainly useful to themselves (b) Team members with specialized expertise or roles are uninterested in hearing about what others are doing because it does not concern them E2 (a) When using a board or other visualization tools, it is easier for the participants to relate what the other participants say to the tasks for the iteration (b) In a distributed DSM, the participants pay more attention and communicate better when using video than when using phone (c) When the number of DSM participants is low, the information shared is perceived as being more relevant to all of them (d) Sit-down meetings last longer than stand-up meetings, probably because standing is less comfortable than sitting E3
- In Beta 3, after a while, the DSMs were more about informing team members about what was relevant for the whole team rather than reporting status to the Scrum Master, which was the case to begin with.
- Furthermore, the Scrum Masters and team leaders were often the facilitators of the DSMs, which is another explanation for why they were slightly more positive than the team members.
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