How the IT standup is evolving

Lokesh Karanam’s update to the team used to be one sentence:

I’m working on ticket number 100. I am working on creating a tracking UI, and everything is going well.

That’s how a “standup”—a standard developer check-in—was meant to be, after all: A quick, right-down-the-line progress update short enough to spare everyone from having to sit down.

These days, as staff software engineer at marketing and business-services firm RRD, Karanam leads the daily meetings, but leaves more room for updates than in the past. The 13 or so developers and product managers arriving from different time zones onto the morning call are encouraged to give everyone a more comprehensive view of their workload. Karanam himself, in his work summaries, describes his situation, the task he’s responsible for, actions taken, and their result—a “STAR” method that takes at least a paragraph to go through.

Though the standups go from 9 to 9.30 a.m. CST, a recent morning meeting even left room for an engineer to share how their dog had been bitten by a bee.

Standups traditionally have covered three main questions: What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? And what are your blockers?

“I think the core of the stand-up has remained the same,” Karanam said. “The thing that changed is just how elaborate you can be when you are explaining.”

Karanam and other standup leaders revealed how this decades-old practice is evolving.

Standing up the standup. The Agile Manifesto, created in 2001, laid out a philosophy for building software with speed and flexibility—including regular standups where developers and other IT pros could walk the team through their next stretch of work.

Extreme Programming, which predated the Agile Manifesto’s release but is considered by many to be an Agile framework, breaks down the daily standup: “During a standup meeting, developers report at least three things: What was accomplished yesterday, what will be attempted today, and what problems are causing delays. The daily stand up meeting is not another meeting to waste people’s time. It will replace many other meetings giving a net savings several times its own length,” reads guidance from Extreme Programming.org. “Everyone stands up in a circle to avoid long discussions.”

Egon Rinderer, SVP of commercial enterprise and public sector growth at unified IT operations platform NinjaOne, is a fan of standups for his teams, although a weekly check is more common these days than a daily one. He’s worked in places where standups occurred every eight hours, and he sees the standup as an effective way to spot a systemic problem quickly.

“It’s just a phenomenal way to make sure that everybody remains aware of any outage,” he said. A team might learn of a problem like that through ticket flow, Rinderer noted, “But it may have been two or three days before we made that realization, versus the first three minutes of the day on Monday.”

Stand down. For every IT leader who finds the standup phenomenal, there’s probably at least one who finds them unnecessary.

Abisola Areola, project manager for transformation and change at CX outsourcing partner Senseé Limited, sees activity tracking tools like Jira boards making many aspects of the standup—like stating what you’re working on—redundant. Since those technologies cover aspects of the standup, the meeting is more likely to become a platform for “theatrics” than real assistance.

“There’s no need for you to come to list out everything that I can literally see on your board,” Areola said.

Karanam suggested that some developers may also feel nervous about not having real progress to share in their progress report.

If those weren’t enough reasons for some teams to chuck the standup, every IT leader today likely deals with remote teams and different time zones, so gathering everyone at 9 a.m. sharp can transform into a struggle.

Areola has started a weekly meeting that covers what a Jira board can’t show, which she refers to as “the human angle.” Her meetings, still capped at 30 minutes, allow developers to voice their highlights, lowlights, and any need for support.

“It just makes you understand the mindset of your team,” Areola said. “What their morale looks like, and what the psyche looks like.”

Srinivas Chippagiri, a senior member of technical staff at Salesforce, keeps the daily standup but has added “async” options, where staff in other time zones can write in their updates.

Come together. StackOverflow’s most recent annual survey found that just under a third of surveyed developers work remotely—and 28% of all developers reported being unhappy at work. Those kinds of figures make a standup important for developers like Karanam, even if tools are changing and people are sitting down.

“I personally look forward to my standups because that’s the only time in the day where I see everyone,” Karanam said.