The daily stand-up meeting: A grounded theory study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2016.01.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The first study fully devoted to the daily stand-up meeting in agile projects is reported.

  • Data from interviews with 60 people and observations of 79 daily stand-up meetings.

  • Benefits include information sharing and opportunity to discuss and solve problems.

  • The meetings were also perceived as a waste of time and an interruption of the workflow.

  • Organizations should use our results and guidelines to improve their daily meetings.

Abstract

The daily stand-up meeting is one of the most used agile practices but has rarely been the subject of empirical research. The present study aims to identify how daily stand-up meetings are conducted and what the attitudes towards them are. A grounded theory study with 12 software teams in three companies in Malaysia, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom was conducted. We interviewed 60 people, observed 79 daily stand-up meetings and collected supplementary data. The factors that contributed the most to a positive attitude towards the daily stand-up meeting were information sharing with the team and the opportunity to discuss and solve problems. The factors that contributed the most to a negative attitude were status reporting to the manager and that the frequency of the meeting was perceived to be too high and the duration too long. Based on our results, we developed a grounded theory of daily stand-up meetings and proposed empirically based recommendations and guidelines on how to organize them. Organizations should be aware of the factors that may affect the attitude towards daily stand-up meetings and should consider our recommendations and guidelines to make this agile practice as valuable as possible.

Introduction

Common to all agile methods is an emphasis on communication and the human side of software development (Merisalo-Rantanen et al., 2005). Conducting a daily stand-up meeting (DSM) is an important practice in the agile methods Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) to improve communication in software projects. The DSM is often conducted as a 15-min morning meeting to share information that is supposed to be relevant to the teams’ progress. The term DSM used in this article originates from XP. Other names of the practice are frequent, short meetings (Rising, 2002), morning roll call (Anderson, 2003), daily huddle meeting (Paez et al., 2005), daily meeting (Pikkarainen et al., 2008), and daily Scrum meeting (Sutherland and Schwaber, 2013a).

The software development industry has extensively adopted agile practices, many of which have been thoroughly investigated (Dingsøyr et al., 2012). However, little research has been conducted on the DSM, which may be surprising given that the DSM is the most used agile practice according to a 2014 survey (VersionOne, 2015). In that survey, the DSM was used by 85% of the organizations that employed agile development. The global cost of conducting the DSM is immense if one supposes that the majority of the software development teams in the world daily interrupt their development tasks to spend 15 min on the DSM.

In this article, we report a study on how DSMs are conducted and what affects the attitude towards them. We propose a theory of DSMs that includes propositions among DSM constructs, with explanations grounded in data. The data was generated from 79 observations of DSMs of eight software teams in three companies and 60 interviews with team members, Scrum Masters and product owners that worked in these teams and an additional set of four teams.

A few studies have investigated the DSM as one of several agile practices. Pikkarainen et al. (2008) studied the impact of agile practices on communication and found that DSMs kept developers, project leaders and customers aware of the project status and helped the developers resolve design issues faster. Paasivaara et al. (2008) examined agile practices in global software development and found that DSMs helped reveal problems early and improved transparency between sites. Moe et al. (2010) studied the nature of self-managing agile teams and found that DSMs were mostly used by a Scrum Master to obtain an overview of the progress and ongoing project activities. McHugh et al. (2012) examined how agile practices impact trust and found that DSMs helped the teams function more cohesively. Dorairaj et al. (2012) studied dynamics in distributed teams and found that the practice promoted team interaction and the building of a “one team” mindset. Yu and Petter (2014) argue that the DSM may contribute to build shared mental models within a team. The results of an experiment conducted by Hasnain et al. (2013) suggest that introducing DSMs may be a powerful way to improve trust in agile software teams.

The DSM was the primary study topic in some of our earlier research. In a longitudinal study, DSMs led to a greater commitment to a failing course of action (Stray et al., 2012b). In another study, we investigated the proportion of time spent on different topics. The largest topic category was discussing problems and possible solutions (Stray et al., 2012a). In yet another study, we identified thirteen obstacles to efficient DSMs and suggested ways to overcome them (Stray et al., 2013).

Much can be learned from case studies by doing a secondary grounded theory analysis (Glaser, 2001, p. 97). This study builds on our previous research. Among the 60 interviews of this study, 7 were reused from the study reported in (Stray et al., 2011), 17 were reused from the study reported in (Stray et al., 2012b) and 9 were reused from the study reported in (Stray et al., 2013). The remaining 27 were new interviews for this study. We reanalyzed the case study material and iteratively compared it with newly collected material. This study also contributes to increasing the understanding of the costs and benefits of DSMs, which is important for improving agile software development. Finally, our work answers a call for more empirically based theories in software engineering (Herbsleb and Mockus, 2003, Hannay et al., 2007, Sjøberg and Dybå, 2007).

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines relevant background literature. Section 3 describes the research methods used. Section 4 reports our results. Section 5 discusses the results, limitations of the study and future work. Section 6 concludes.

Section snippets

Background

This section gives a brief introduction to the field of meetings in general, the DSM in agile development and daily meetings in other disciplines.

Research method

The motivation for our research was to increase the understanding of which factors contribute to effective teamwork because teams are the fundamental organizational unit through which agile software projects are executed. We chose grounded theory as our research method because it is considered suitable for pursuing a general understanding of a phenomenon; that is, when a researcher asks “What is going on here?” (Glaser, 1978).

Results: an initial theory of DSM

This section describes the principal results of the study in the form of an initial theory of DSMs, shown in Fig. 5. The theory is summarized in Table 7 using the four-component structure outlined in Sjøberg et al. (2008). The constructs are the basic elements of the theory, the propositions are the interactions among the constructs, the explanations describe why the propositions are as specified and the scope of the theory describes the universe of discourse in which the theory is applicable.

Discussion

On the basis of our findings, this section provides a normative definition of what we now will denote a stand-up meeting and a set of guidelines for how to conduct such a meeting. This section also discusses limitations of our study and issues for future research.

Conclusion

Most views and claims about DSMs reported in the literature are based on anecdotal evidence. In contrast, we conducted a grounded theory study of 12 agile teams in three companies. An initial theory of DSM was proposed that consists of seven constructs and six propositions.

We identified factors that affected the DSM attitude positively and negatively. Considering the popularity of DSMs, it is surprising that we found participants to be almost neutral about DSMs on average, although slightly

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Yngve Lindsjørn, Nils Brede Moe and Øystein Ingebrigtsen for assisting with data collection and to the many participants who shared their experiences with us and generously welcomed us for observations. We thank the anonymous referees for valuable comments. This work was supported by the TeamIT project funded by the Research Council of Norway through Grant no. 193236/I40.

Viktoria Stray received the MSc degree in computer science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 2007 and the PhD degree in software engineering from the University of Oslo in 2014. She has three years industry experience from working as a consultant at Accenture and is a certified NLP Master Business Coach from the Norwegian Coaching and NLP Academy. Currently she is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo. Her research interests include software development

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    Viktoria Stray received the MSc degree in computer science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 2007 and the PhD degree in software engineering from the University of Oslo in 2014. She has three years industry experience from working as a consultant at Accenture and is a certified NLP Master Business Coach from the Norwegian Coaching and NLP Academy. Currently she is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo. Her research interests include software development methods and socio-technical factors influencing software project success.

    Dag I.K. Sjøberg received the MSc degree in computer science from the University of Oslo in 1987 and the PhD degree in computing science from the University of Glasgow in 1993. He has five years of industry experience as a developer and group leader. In 2001, he formed the Software Engineering Department at Simula Research Laboratory and was its leader until 2008, when it was number 1 in a ranking by the Journal of Systems and Software. Since 1999 he has been a full professor of software engineering at the University of Oslo. Sjøberg was an Associate Editor of Empirical Software Engineering from 2002 to 2009 and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering from 2010 to 2014. His main research interests are the software life cycle, including agile and lean development processes, skill assessment, and empirical research methods in software engineering. Sjøberg is a member of IEEE and ACM.

    Tore Dybå received the MSc degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1986, and the Dr. Ing. degree in computer and information science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2001. He has eight years of industry experience from Norway and Saudi Arabia. He is a chief scientist and research manager at SINTEF ICT and a professor at the University of Oslo. For the period 2001–2012, he was ranked as the top scholar worldwide in agile software development by the Journal of Systems and Software. He was on the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering from 2007 to 2013. Since 2011 he has beeneditor of the Voice of Evidence column in IEEE Software, and since 2013 he has been on the editorial board of Information and Software Technology. His research interests include evidence-based software engineering, software process improvement, and agile software development.

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