The daily standup — formalized in scrum as the "Daily Scrum" — is a brief (15-minute maximum) daily team synchronization meeting. The classic form uses three questions for each participant: What did I do yesterday? What will I do today? What obstacles are in my way? The "standup" convention (meeting on one's feet) is a physical cue to brevity.
ken-schwaber and jeff-sutherland incorporated the Daily Scrum into Scrum from its earliest formulations, drawing in part on the "daily meeting" practices of Japanese product development teams documented by hirotaka-takeuchi and ikujiro-nonaka in new-new-product-development-game (1986). The connection to scrum-guide formalized it as a required Scrum event.
Intellectual Contribution
The daily standup's intellectual contribution is the operationalization of inspect-and-adapt at the shortest time scale. Rather than discovering impediments at the end of a sprint (or a project), the standup surfaces them daily, allowing the team to respond within hours rather than weeks. This is the Agile argument against planning as a substitute for feedback.
The three-question format encodes a specific information structure: it distinguishes yesterday's actuals from today's commitments, and it surfaces systemic problems (impediments) that individual developers might otherwise work around silently. In the empirical-process-control model, the standup is the high-frequency inspection event; the sprint review is the low-frequency one.
The meeting's brevity is not merely practical — it reflects a principled choice about meeting costs. In traditional project management, status meetings could consume significant time and were often one-directional (reporting to managers). The standup is peer-to-peer: developers synchronize with each other, not with a supervisor.
Evolution and Critique
The daily standup is the most widely adopted Agile practice — surveys consistently find it used by teams that have adopted little else from Agile. This ubiquity is double-edged: it is evidence of genuine usefulness, but also of superficial adoption. dark-agile manifestations include standups that become status reports to managers (inverting the peer-to-peer intent), standups that run 45 minutes (abandoning the timebox), and standups that are purely ritual, with impediments named but never resolved.
The scrum-guide 2020 revision moved away from the three-question format, describing the Daily Scrum's purpose as creating a plan for the next day's work, allowing teams to choose their own structure. This reflects the broader Scrum project of distinguishing the practice's purpose from its particular form.
Related practices: sprint-planning, sprint-review, retrospective, timeboxing.