Liz Keogh's blog

There’s a standard format for stand-ups that goes:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?

As well as this, it helps to keep the focus on things that are interesting to the team.

Sometimes this can lead to stand-ups becoming little more than status meetings, or updates for a team leader’s benefit. So here’s something that I’ve been doing both for myself, and with teams, that seems to liven things up a bit.

• What did you learn yesterday?
• What do you hope to learn today?

Participants who’ve used this as well as or instead of the usual format have talked about contacts they’ve made in other teams, difficulties they’re having with particular technologies, puzzles they’re trying to solve, domain knowledge they’ve picked up or are looking for, etc.