Are you looking to get the most out of your daily standup meetings with your Agile team? If so, you’re in luck. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of the best tools and apps available to help make sure that your agiler development efforts are consistently productive and running on all cylinders. From Slack integrations for tracking tasks to unique applications for sprint planning, we have everything you need to ensure that standups stay focused, organized, and efficient. Keep reading to learn more about the must-have technology options that will take your agile teams from mundane project management sessions into an innovative work session brimming with productivity!

In the world of Agile, the daily scrum meeting is an untouchable necessity. Thus for our team, as developers of the Agile Virtual Assistant Standup bot, it is hard to overstate how useful these Agile events are to keep everyone focused, productive, and pulling in the same direction.

For more than 5 years, we’ve been helping our customers use Slack effectively and automate standup meetings, retrospectives, and other agile processes to level up their productivity. Over years of experience, we’ve faced many questions regarding the role of daily standups in team productivity. 

Therefore, this article will discuss the main points of running daily stand-ups.

Key Facts about the Daily Standup Meeting

What is actually Daily Standup Meeting?

Daily standup meeting is short, regularly held gatherings where Agile team members come together, review progress, and triage new issues. This is the necessary practice among agile teammates.

But this short definition does not cover all the subtle details that distinguish an effective daily stand-up from wasting time!

The point is that running such kinds of agile daily meetings must significantly increase progress, allow you to identify problems quickly, and help maintain team communication.

So let’s dive straight in. According to the Scrum guide:

“The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work.”

Scrum.org

Hence we’ve found out that the effectiveness of the daily scrum lies not just in its fact of running but in the true organization of the Scrum Master’s work. So it is important to clearly understand what a daily stand-up is and why we need to gather our employees every single day and tease them with the same recurring questions.

There are project management and social media automation tools that offer collaborative features, but meetings are ones that set the base for the execution of the main plan. While committing to a time-saving meeting once every day might seem counterintuitive at first. But daily standup with straight-to-the-point agenda is more efficient than other meeting formats. It’s arguably more inspiring than longer meetings held less regularly.

Daily Standup Meeting: How, When, and Who

Scrum framework is one of the most popular product development frameworks — and for a good reason.

So, we have already figured out what daily stand-up is. Now it is essential to catch how to run it so that progress speeds dramatically.

That very desired effectiveness of team standup is achieved through various factors, such as time limits, sticking to a standup agenda, the correctness of the questions asked, and the brevity and capacity of the answer.

Here’s a typical example of a scrum board with daily standup questions that typically make up an effective scrum meeting :

See how one might respond to these questions:

What did you do yesterday?

Finished work on the article and published it on the blog.

What will you do today?

Gonna analyze the topic for a new article and discuss it with colleagues.

What blockers stand in your way?

I aimed the wrong writing strategy, next time, I should change it.

Get it? Sharp and concise. Then move to the next attendee 🙂

The time is right!

Another key fact about your Daily 

The Scrum Master as a facilitator of the agile stand-up meeting keeps the daily scrum within the 15-minute time box. These scrum events are not meant to be long, rambling get-togethers, but rather a quick, effective way to gather the scrum team and ensure every employee is on the same page.

To reduce complexity, it is held at the same time and place every working day, preferably in the morning. Since this will provoke people as soon as they come to work, the first thing to do is “tune up their minds”, remember the previous day’s tasks, and prepare a plan for the current day or even month. Daily standups are never canceled!

Who is welcome to join?

The main rule of all Agile teams: the strength is each individual member

According to the rules of the scrum daily meeting, only The Development Team, Scrum Master, and Product Owner attend and participate in daily standup events. But as practice shows, every team member can join and speak up! They could be testers, designers, marketing people, etc. If the entire team is comfortable and sees value in others’ presence, just go ahead!

Make your Agile Daily Standup Meeting in Slack Effective 

Stop Doing It Wrong! 

Our Standuply expert team has been monitoring various practices for a long time, and we’ve tried on some of them for ourselves. So now we’re ready to share.

Here are 7 top tips on how to get a hundred and ten percent out of daily stand-up meetings In Slack.

Don’t Sit Down

They’re called standups for a reason…

Remember, standup meetings should be short and to the point. Standing is one of the best ways to make sure your daily get-togethers don’t drag on for too long. So make sure there are no chairs or tables nearby. If possible, hold the meeting in an open space or a room without chairs.

Stick to the Three Questions

To help keep everyone on track, the best way to keep your stand-up meeting format focused is to stick to three main topics.

1. Accomplishments
2. Goals
3. Obstacles

This stand-up meeting template help to keep the meeting focused on individual tasks and how those relate to the larger group strategy. Anything that needs further attention can be dealt with between relevant parties after the meeting.

Keep it Short and Sharp

Stand-up meetings are inherently short as people generally don’t like standing for hours on end. Your goal is to keep the teammates aligned, so avoid detailed explanations about each task and stop team members who do so, of course, in a polite way.

Pace and Energy

A daily stand-up is meant to inject energy into its participants. Use the beginning and end of the meeting as a great opportunity to increase the energy even further. Here the sky’s the limit for your imagination. You can turn on a popular mood track while a team’s gathering, and offer breathing or physical activity before the start – it helps to run meetings on a lighter note. At the end clear the serious atmosphere by sharing a motivational quote or a good-natured joke. 

If your team works remotely, a trending gif or a funny meme that came in the feedback is also a great way to finish.

Have a Clear Standup Agenda

The most productive daily stand-up meeting has a clear and set agile daily stand-up agenda. Make sure your stand-up meeting has a set agenda and doesn’t go off-topic (unless there’s a good reason).

One example of an agenda:

1. Gathering. You can turn on the music, share the latest news, or include a presentation with a motivational quote.

2. Main body. Everyone begins to answer the holy trinity of standup questions in turn. Here you can come up with an unusual order of priority and use some stand-up best practices and ideas to determine the order of speaking at the team meeting, including:

• Round robin – the next person on the left/right has to continue;
• Passing the baton – the person who is done presenting passes a sacred item (it could be heavy enough so that a person has the desire to get rid of it as soon as possible) to a team member of their choice, and that person has to continue;
• Workflow state – go over the board and start with the Kanban cards that are furthest to the right, usually done or close to being finished. Respectively each card’s owner must talk about it.

3. Final. You can end on a cheerful note by telling a joke or sharing a funny meme in a presentation. Well, or just wish your colleagues a good working day.

It same Time, Same Place

No matter your team meeting cadence, your daily stand-up event must be at the same time whenever you meet, so your team can plan around it. 

It’s also important to choose a time when everyone involved is generally available. Many Agile teams opt for daily stand-up meetings first thing in the morning, but if you’re a remote employee in a different time zone, you may have to schedule it for later. Or just automate this process by using various daily scrum tools for scrum meeting events. They will easily solve the timezone problem and organize replies by sending them to Scrum Manager.

Make it easy to connect!

If your development team is spread out and connecting remotely for the daily standup meetings, ensure every team member has access to an easy-to-use video conferencing solution that works across multiple devices or uses other daily standup tools to automate your agile events.

Daily Standup Meeting Tools

Daily standup meetings in Slack and in Microsoft Teams are good practices coming from Agile that many Agile teams beyond the development teams have adopted. But the point is that companies worldwide tend to send their employees home to work online. And the need for team members to stay connected, maintain transparency, and foster collaboration is both a necessity and a challenge. 

For this reason, tools for remote and asynchronous work have grown in popularity. The solutions outlined in this article will help you to structure and facilitate a remote daily stand-up for your teammates. 

Best standup meeting tools that help to organize Project Management:

• Zoom
• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Trello
• Jira
• Standuply

We’ll look at these tools in more detail in the following.

1. Conferencing Software

The first type of daily scrum meeting tool is a team collaboration tool. There are many conferencing solutions available to choose from. There are intuitive, easy-to-use, and reliable video conferencing platforms on the market, many of which are helpfully built into our everyday devices. All this allows us to keep virtual eye contact, share the screen, demonstrate presentations, and discuss some issues in a working chat.

Zoom

Zoom is the most popular video conferencing software that helps us to gather together wherever we go. Ultimately everyone knows and has tried it in action at least once. Zoom is a great daily standup tool that amplifies the efficiency of remote teams through face-to-face meetings.

So here are strong Zoom pros you need to recap:

• zoom productivity app includes up to 100 participants to join
• High-quality video and sound.
• works on Android phones and tablets, other mobile devices, Windows, Mac, Zoom Rooms, H.323/SIP room systems, and telephones.
• Reach people instantly to easily send messages, files, images, links
• Create a public or chat channel
• up to 50 breakout rooms for separate discussions
• Screen sharing, video recording and sharing, instant link sharing, and private and group chat box access.

Slack

Statistics show that every agile team goes for Slack conversation and collaboration platform and settles down there as a workspace to interact. That makes sense as no third parties are needed – one single platform for any kind of internal communication. Slack as a daily standup tool performs excellently – all in one app (calls, chats, slack notification modes, plans, and standups).

Slack pros:

• calls/huddles are built-in the platform  
• public and shared “channel” within the company
• covers a long list of the best Slack integration Apps
• high level of user privacy and Slack account data protection
• functions on all types of devices with high-quality work
• customizable settings (slack status, interface, etc)

Microsoft Teams

Another top platform for remote teams with a built-in program for video conferencing software is MS Teams. This standup tool is a great alternative to Slack with its own interface and user-friendly management.

Microsoft Teams pros:

• all in one app (calls, chats, plans)
• free 60-minute meetings (up to 100 participants)
• signing in from a phone, laptop, or any other device
• all sensitive information is protected with data encryption
• excellent connection quality

2. Digital Tasks Tools

The following keystone instrument for daily standup meetings is digital task board tools. Like the physical world, utilizing a digital task board as the focal point of discussion during your remote daily stand-up helps team members connect with their work at a deeper level and think more deeply about a task, its requirements, and its commitments.

There are a lot of solutions on the market now, such as Trello, Jira, Click up, etc. All of them as an alternative to physical surfaces.

Trello

Trello is a web-based, Kanban-style, list-making application and one of the perfect standup meeting tools as well. Behind all scrum events stand task planning, so Trello is widely used in many scrum ceremonies such as daily standup, backlog refinement, planning poker, kanban standup, etc).

Trello pros:

• organize almost anything, from projects to daily tasks
• easy to collaborate as a team (assign a member to a given task, correct it, move it, etc)
• feature-rich with the help of plugins
• Customizable
• Good visual overview of tasks (attach images and URLs, rich details in a tile, etc)

Jira

Jira acts as an excellent alternative to Trello in bug tracking and agile marketing fields. Ultimately it has become commonplace to implement these task trackers in scum processes as essential standup tools.

Jira pros:

• supports roadmap requirements
• integrates with popular third-party software (over 1,800 apps from the Atlassian Marketplace)
• highly customizable
• great software for project tracking
• free/Freemium Version
• estimate stories, adjust sprint scope, check velocity, and re-prioritize issues

3. Standup Bot for Daily Meetings

And last but not less critical among daily stand-up meeting tools are standup bots for Slack and MS Teams. It is your digital Scrum Master, which integrates with relevant conferencing tools. So, Slack users can automate practically all Project Management processes within Slack, such as daily standups, retrospectives, backlog grooming, planning poker, sprint planning, simple polls, and more. 

This daily standup tool is a virtual scrum master assistant for remote and office teams. Even the top certificated scum masters by axelos limited, PeopleCert, or Exin mention that today every development team tends to use a standup bot

📌Learn more about the best standup bots in our top articles. We’ve made an in-depth comparison of standup bots in 2022 for Slack and Microsoft Teams workspaces. Read and choose the best one for your team!

Slack Standup Bot: Features, Benefits, and Strengths

The bots are taking over

Scheduled Reports

Users can run multiple reports on a schedule or asynchronously with a stand-up bot. They can pick a schedule to run online daily meetings with the team.

Doesn’t matter what your time zone is

Daily standup events can be tied to any time zone or to each member’s local time. At the scheduled standup time, Bot will reach out to selected people in Slack or MS Teams and ask them pre-defined questions.

Automation of the process

The Bot then collects all the answers and delivers reports via Slack, direct message, email, or webhook. Team answers can be configured to arrive as separate messages or packed in a thread.

Voice/Video Attachments

Users can attach voice or video messages to the standup reports. The recorded message will be uploaded to the bot’s webpage, and the link is shared with the Slack team.

Templates, Custom Questions, Agile Charts, Metrics, Integration Apps, and more

The Bot allows users to try pre-defined templates or create their custom questions. It can track team performance by building a Jira burndown chart, project flow diagram, and team analytics dashboard. Users can enrich the report with data from Google Analytics, Salesforce, Stripe, and Trello, in one single report.

Benefits of Remote Daily Standup Meetings in Slack with tools

No time zone pain – It doesn’t matter what your time zone is; all runs asynchronously. 

Short Meeting – Online asynchronous daily standup requires even less time than a typical offline daily scrum meeting (2-3 minutes).

Automation – All responses are well-structured and quick-sent to the direct message of the Scrum team leader, Slack channel, or email.

Slack App Integration List –  Daily Stand up tools integrate with various apps such as Google Calendar, Slack, MS Teams, Google Analytics, Jira, any mobile app, etc.

Tracking Progress – It is easy to see which stage in the project every employee is in and how you and your team are arriving at your goals.

Responsive Customer Support – All task management solutions for remote daily standups offer quick chat /email/video conference responses in case you need help.

Ease of Use – Slack interface or other workspace is perfectly designed for remote mode! Many solutions on the market will help you. They can be used by beginners and expert project managers alike. They can be adopted by any remote team as well.

All-in-one – Run daily standups, sprint retrospective, backlog refinement, planning poker, 360-degree survey, employee onboarding, and all scrum events in one App.

“We love Standuply because it’s got deep roots in the world of Agile. Contrary to popular belief, this extremely collaborative, hands-on way of working remotely translates well to a number of other industries, however.

Article: Standup Bot for Slack and MS Teams: Best Choice for Remote Teams