Tool

For standups we tried a couple of different options, but we ended up settling on Standuply, a Slack bot that automatically prompted us to do standups. We tried a couple of other options (Standupbot, Geekbot, Standup Alice) but none were quite right for us so we ended up deciding on standuply. Basically what it came down to is that standuply was free for an unlimited period and the other two only had a month free before you needed to buy a paid option.

Structure

We ran our standups 3 times a week doing a modified agile scrum that worked for our team. Every class period started with a 5 minute block for us to type up a standup, and we had another one Sunday late mornings.

We asked the 3 standard scrum questions:

• What have you done since the last standup
• What will you do before the next standup
• Is anything blocking you.

Lessons Learned

Through experimentation, we found a balance between standups over Slack and standups in person. Slack was nice for remotely touching base, like on Sunday, and provided innate documentation. On the other hand, there is no higher bandwidth and lower latency communication than talking face to face, so whenever possible, we also went through standups out loud.