We are doing this every day, it’s part of the routine. After some time it becomes a second nature. Our daily stand-up…

Over the times I worked in teams with stand-ups organized in both ways: around team members and stories.

With stand-up focussed on team members’ work, you get more or less detailed report on work done by a person. And that is fine, you can see what they worked on (whether that work was a part of current sprint or not). That is especially handy when you have a designer in team that works a bit ahead of the sprint (and not necessary have a story on it’s own). However from time to time, especially with bigger (or more chatty) team, you can lose the most important bit - progress of sprint. You can say that team actually is talking about the sprint, but what about stories that are not being worked on? Can you remember what is the progress of developed stories? And what about the one story that’s blocked for a longer while by something? I experienced it many times before, when after all the talking I need to actually check bug tracker or board to see what is the state of sprint to have a clear picture.

With stand-up focused around the stories in sprint it looks a bit different. Not everyone will necessary need to have own turn to talk. But is it important? We are there to work on stories in sprint, so they are the most important. It’s easier to go though stories according to priority, including stories that are not getting worked on at the moment. In my opinion that build way better image of progress made (or lack of it). They are of course some downsides. It’s harder to fallow up on something that is not a story like designer tasks or did scrum master actually fallowed up on some problems with stake holder. Additionally some people might not do what they should and it’s easier to missed that. However in long run there is no place to hide any way.

To sum it up. For me stand-up focused on team members is the way to have a closer look at them, while stand-up driven by stories gives better overview on state of the sprint.