Investigating Daily Team Meetings in Agile Software Projects

An increasing amount of time is being spent at organizational meetings. One common type of meeting in software projects is the daily team meeting, which is the most important forum for coordinating and planning daily work. To better understand how software teams make decisions, communicate, and coordinate their work, we must uncover the micro-level interaction processes among the team members at these meetings. We analyzed transcriptions of eight daily meetings from two software development teams. The agile literature states that the daily meeting should focus on answering questions such as "What have I done? What will be done? What obstacles are in my way?" However, on average, only 24% of each of the meetings that we studied focused on this task. We found that 35% of the meeting was spent on elaborating problem issues and discussing possible solutions. Very little time was used for coordinating tasks. Our results indicate that many project decisions are made in daily team meetings and that this quick decision making requires team members to be experts. These experts need to have a shared understanding of who is responsible for what and of the information and requirements needed to solve the tasks.