Most meetings, I loathe. Often they are drawn-out, not really useful except to maybe a few attendees and there are always those who seem to enjoy the platform to give their long-winded speeches. That said, meetings I actually enjoy and find very useful are Stand-up meetings.

Stand-up meetings are brief meetings held daily and typically at the same time and place where team members can report on their status on a given project. Typically, each member reports on three specific items. These are:

1. What did I accomplish yesterday?
2. What am I going to attempt to accomplish today?
3. What problems am I facing?

Stand-up meetings are deliberately kept short, usually from 5-15 minutes. When meetings go beyond 15 minutes, it is usually an indicator that there is too much discussion. It is important to remember that stand-up meetings are not the place to solve problems or to elaborate on project specifics. Rather, they are the time to report status and identify potential issues that might hinder a developer’s progress.

To get the most out of daily stand-up meetings, each team member must be prepared with his or her status report. In other words, they should come to the meeting with perhaps a written statement of their status. Having to write the statement is a good discipline to help one from dragging on, yet allows for a meaningful status report. I like the idea of a 3x5 rule. That is, if what one has to report cannot fit on a 3x5 card, they are saying too much. As an example, one might report the following:

“Yesterday I installed our repository, restructured the submission services and finished the submission logic. Today I am going to finish the retrieval logic and configure the CI server to run test scripts on the XYZ project. The problems I am facing is that I’m not sure what to use as test data and there is no documentation on the database”

Note, that the report was brief and did not include details as to how the tasks were accomplished or other unnecessary discussion. Finally, the developer stated a possible problem. At this point it is appropriate to identify people who can help mitigate the issues that developer is facing. Note, this is not the time to actually solve any issues, only to identify who can help solve them. Therefore, a likely response might be:

“I can help you with the db structure, see me after the meeting” or “See so and so after the meeting, he has already come up with test data.”

Keep in mind that it is often, it is necessary to schedule another meeting.

With such a limited scope for a meeting, one might wonder why have them at all. Why not just email the PM status? Here are a few reasons why stand-up meetings are important.

1. Stand-up meetings increase accountability by surfacing commitments and responsibilities to the entire team. Not only do developers report status but so does the PM. Since these meetings are held daily, everybody becomes aware of the overall project status by tracking with what others are doing.
2. Stand-up meetings help detect and reduce bottlenecks to the project quickly. Since these meetings are held frequently, problems are quickly identified and addressed. In my experience, weekly meetings are not frequent enough to accomplish this. By practicing this daily, risk mitigation becomes a priority.
3. Stand-up meetings help developer commit to realistic goals. It is much easier to commit to a days worth of work than to try to guess what one might accomplish in a week. This also helps the PM in knowing how much work the entire team can actually get done which results in better estimates given to management.
4. Stand-up meetings unify the team by getting team members on the same track with the project and encouraging communication and team effort in dealing with problems.

There are many more benefits to the stand-up meeting and you find numerous articles on the Internet and in most books on the Agile development process. Here are a few links on stand-up meetings:

It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings

Daily Stand Up Meeting

Stand-up Meeting Antipatterns

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Development teams know that estimating is one of the more difficult tasks to get right. One of the frustrating things about estimating is that it often takes quite a bit of research to derive a fairly close estimate of a task’s required effort (usually given in time). Furthermore, estimating is not a quote. It is not intended to be accurate and we all know that…well, except the people asking for the estimate. Sometimes deriving an estimate takes just as much time as it would to simply implement the feature. Finally, estimates are always based on the best information had at the time which, most likely will change.

Story point estimating

Story point estimating (feature point estimating) helps to alleviate some of the frustrations of units of time estimating. Rather than trying to derive how long something will take, a developer can focus on the overall scope of the task and assign it a value relative to other tasks. In other words, it is an estimate of a feature’s size and complexity as perceived by the developer.

For instance a simple feature might carry the value of 1 whereas a feature twice the size might carry the value of 2, and so on. Over time, a team gets a sense of how many points they can complete in a 1-week or 2-week sprint. Here’s an illustration; consider the following questions:

How long will it take you (in hours) to mow your front lawn?
How long will it take you (in hours) to add another room to your house?

Which of your answers do you think is more accurate? Now consider the following questions:

On a scale of 1 to 10, how difficult is it to mow your front lawn?
On a scale of 1 to 10, how difficult is it to add another room to your house?

There is a good likelihood that both answers are reasonably correct based on your experience and know-how.

There are some real benefits to this type of estimating. Some of these are:

• A team can better predict how much work they will get done in a sprint because they are targeting points rather than specific features.
• It is a self-correcting model. As the team develops, they will only improve their estimating and eventually be able to confidently say how many points they can achieve for a sprint.
• It promotes breaking apart larger, complex features into smaller, less complex tasks to be estimated against. Overall, this reduces uncertainty and risk.
• Estimating happens more quickly because it is not intended to be precise.

Fibonacci points

There is a variation of estimating points that takes into account risk and uncertainty. Instead of using a uniform distribution of points to effort (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) a team can use points based on the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …). It was stated earlier that as the feature increases in size, so does its risk and uncertainty. In a sense, this model enforces that risk and uncertainty are taken into account in estimating (something developers are not prone to doing when estimating). For instance if a team considers a task to have a 6 on the proportional scale, it would need to be assigned a value of 8 according to this model. Hence, risk and uncertainty are taken into account

So just tell me how long will it take?

The key here is to ask the team the following question: How many points can you typically achieve in the given period of time? The answer is not when it will get gone, but how much will be done within a given time frame. This is a much better and more accurate way of determining what it is going to take to accomplish the overall goal.

Stay tuned for a future post on team-based estimating while playing Poker.

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