Engineering Leadership

A pattern shows up on almost every team I’ve worked with, regardless of how disciplined the process otherwise is: Dev, QA, and Product each walk away from the same requirement holding a slightly different picture of what’s being built. It rarely surfaces at the moment the requirement is written. It surfaces later, and by then it’s expensive — a bug report that turns out to be a misunderstanding, a scope argument in the middle of a sprint, a story that stalls because QA and Dev quietly disagreed about what “done” meant and neither noticed until the story was in review. ...

Some teams have quietly turned the daily standup into a status report — going around the room instead of walking the board, and asking for updates from people who aren’t touching a single story that sprint. Here’s what the Agile literature actually says a standup is for, and a few small structural fixes.