Sprint-centric vs people-centric daily stand-up meetings

A daily stand-up should focus on the sprint. But it should also be about the team members.

In January, I read Critter's (Mike Crittenden) blog post Zombie standups? Try walking the board. Since then, we have been practicing sprint-centric daily stand-ups in our team. Instead of going person by person, we go ticket by ticket.

I think it was a step in the right direction. Previously our daily stand-ups were more chaotic, often not focusing on the sprint enough.

But there's a but. The downside is that there's no good opportunity to discuss ad hoc things. Critter does cover this in his blog post:

But what about general announcements the team needs to hear? After you walk the board, ask "any general things we need to discuss?" and let people speak up.

...but that hasn't worked well. Maybe opening your mouth at the end is just too difficult. For example, some people are shy.

This week we changed back to people-centric daily stand-ups. To help us keep the main focus on the sprint and its goals, I created quick filters in Jira for each person. For example, when it's my turn to speak, I activate the "Matias" quick filter so that only tasks assigned to me are showing on the board. Then it's easy for me to talk about my tasks plus state any other things I have on my mind because I'm already speaking.

The upside so far has been that there has been more ad hoc discussion, meaning more sharing of information relevant to the team.

We'll see in the coming weeks whether this "new old" way of doing daily stand-ups is better or worse.