Several agile software development methodologies prescribe the use of daily “stand-up” meetings (usually time-boxed for 15min) where each member of a development team can keep each other up-to-date by answering 3 questions:

What did you do yesterday? What did you do today? Is there anything blocking you from moving forward?

Simple right? However, anyone thats been practicing agile development for a significant amount of time will agree… it can be a bit more involved. Stand-ups can go over time due to large team size or long-winded answers (i.e. tangents). They can be difficult to coordinate if people are working from home/offsite or in a different timezone. There’s no history of the discussion for new or existing team members to reference at a later time. Further, many organizations with several teams use a “scrum of scrums” (meeting about meetings) approach to propagate information to other interested parties.

Some teams have resorted to planking in order to keep stand-ups on track and prevent any unnecessary discussion.

Long story short, conducting consistently smooth synchronous stand-ups can be a challenge.

What are synchronous stand-ups?

Synchronous stand-ups are probably the type you’re most familiar with. At a specific time of the day, a project team will stop what they’re doing and get together so each person can answer the 3 questions mentioned above. If anyone has any “blockers” specified by answering the last question, a subsequent discussion may take place after the stand-up (or sometimes in the middle of stand-up 😬).

Please tell me this is an all-hands meeting and not a stand-up!

Agile development suggests that team sizes are no greater than 9 people (ideal size being 5–8). For large organizations stickin’ to the agile code, that means there may be multiple synchronous stand-ups happening throughout the day. But what happens when:

One or more team member’s insight is needed in additional stand-ups?

Someone has an interest in what another team is working on and wants to listen in on that team’s stand-up? Given the nature of synchronous stand-ups, attending more than one can easily take about an hour chunk out of one’s work day.

How can knowledge be effectively transferred throughout teams and the organization as a whole with the synchronous approach?

With a few of these questions in mind… lets consider asynchronous stand-ups.