The Daily Stand-Up Meeting for Testers

The daily stand-up meeting is one of the key features of an Agile project. It lets everyone in the project stay abreast of one another and get an overview of the project and the product increment. The ideas and skills of the different team members converge in this quick, single meeting, and can open up opportunities that would let teams develop their products better.

Testers help make the daily stand-up meetings by providing their insights and expertise in quality assurance. This article will discuss how daily stand-ups work, and what it means for testers in an Agile project.

How a daily stand-up works

A daily stand-up is a quick meeting where developers, analysts, testers, and other members huddle together to communicate their progress and needs to one another. It is called a “stand-up” because attendees stand around as they give their inputs, which will help ensure that the meeting won’t take unnecessarily long. Usually, they would stand around the task board or the Sprint backlog, to serve as reference for the meeting. For distributed Agile teams, on the other hand, rely on video conferencing and a web application tool that will manage the backlog and tasks.

Daily stand-up meetings can take place in almost any project, regardless of framework, but for Scrum, it is one of the mandatory ceremonies to be part of. Also known as the Daily Scrum, this meeting has a prescribed time-box of 15 minutes, and is for the developers to collaborate and discuss on their progress by answering variations of the following questions:

1. What did I complete yesterday?
2. What will I complete today?
3. What’s blocking my work?

The Scrum Master makes sure that the daily stand-up takes place, while the Product Owner is there to observe. If the customers want to attend this meeting, they may do so but at most, they can also just observe.

What the daily stand-up is for?

The daily stand-up is not a place where team members simply give updates to the project manager or the Scrum Master and Product Owner. It is a place where they realign on how they are meeting the Sprint goals. An important part of daily stand-ups is when the developers collaborate on the impediments of each member. While the brevity of the meeting won’t leave any room for problem-solving, being able to inform everyone of the help needed gives a sense of purpose and urgency for the team.

Once the daily stand-up time-box has expired and everyone has answered the three questions, the members can use their take-away from the meeting as the priority for the day. Since this meeting is not long enough for discussions, a safe option would be to hold separate follow-up meetings or huddles where anything that needs further solving and discussion can be done.

For example, if a member expressed during the stand-up that the application data currently seems to be outdated, they could work with the back-end developer after the stand-up to check and refresh the environment. Or perhaps, the tester followed up on their question on the expected behaviour of a feature, so the Product Owner and the involved developers can collaborate with the tester in clarifying this after the stand-up.

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