The Purpose of Standups
There are a few reasons to hold a standup meeting and/or chat thread:
- To report up the chain of command (ie: dev to managers).
- To communicate across the whole team (ie: dev to devs).
The Standup Thread
Posting in a thread like this should be required. Especially if you work fully remote like I do (more about the importance of written communication here). What you say in your report is up to you, but here are the guidelines I try to follow to make my standup post as clear and valuable as possible:
- Always post any blockers you’re experiencing with any of your tickets.
- Always tag relevant people to keep progress moving. For example:
- Tag the dev who you think is best suited to review your PR.
- Tag the TPM about cross-portfolio-team blockers (like an FDR process that isn’t happening).
- Tag the QA teammate about a ticket that is now “Ready For QA“.
- Never only post the ticket number. It takes too much time to lookup each ticket in Jira in order to understand what you’re working on. Instead, give a brief description of the ticket.
- Bad example: “Working on JIRA-TICKET-1234”.
- Good example: “Working on fixing the broken login endpoint in the user service (JIRA-TICKET-1234)“.
- In my opinion, the ticket number here is optional. It’s more important to describe what you’re working on for all to understand. If you do include the ticket number, consider making it a link to the ticket in Jira. This saves people a lot of time if they want to see the actual ticket.
The Standup Meeting
This meeting should be optional. Only join if you have something to talk about with the group or want to better understand what others are involved in (like maybe you have capacity to help). But yeah, in general, if you want to skip this meeting in favor of deep work that should be encouraged.
Conclusion
Try to make your daily standup reports more accessible and clear. Doing so will improve the collaboration and unity of your team 🌞 🌈 🦄.
Kev's Blog 