Daily Standup

Definition

A daily standup is a short, time-boxed daily meeting where team members briefly share progress, plans, and blockers to keep the team synchronized during a sprint or iteration.

Overview

The daily standup — also called the daily Scrum — is one of the most widely recognized Scrum ceremonies, though teams using Kanban and other agile approaches use versions of it too. It is deliberately short, usually 10-15 minutes, and often held standing up to encourage brevity, hence the name. The classic format has each team member answer three questions: what did I do since the last standup, what will I do before the next one, and what is blocking me. The goal is synchronization, not status reporting to a manager — standups surface blockers early so they can be resolved outside the meeting, and they keep the whole team aware of who is working on what. A common failure mode is letting standups drift into detailed problem-solving discussions; well-run standups instead flag issues briefly and take deeper conversations "offline" with just the people involved, immediately after the meeting. Many distributed teams now run standups asynchronously in chat tools rather than live, trading real-time synchronization for flexibility across time zones. It is often mentioned alongside Sprint Planning in this space.

Key Concepts

• Short and time-boxed, typically 10-15 minutes
• Held daily during an active sprint or iteration
• Classic three-question format: done, doing next, and blockers
• Focused on team synchronization, not status reporting to management
• Deeper discussions are deferred to smaller, focused follow-up conversations
• Can be run live, standing up, or asynchronously via chat for distributed teams
• Facilitated lightly by the scrum master to keep the meeting on track

Use Cases

Frequently Asked Questions

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