Agile teams should strive to ensure the daily stand up is firmly established as their focal practise - but that can be a challenge and while it is something else more amenable needs to take its place.

For teams who are running SCRUM there will be a daily stand up meeting that is the most sacrosanct artifact of their process. That stand up meeting supplies the whole team and the customer with good, up to date information about progress and risks for the current sprint.

However there are many teams who, although are trying to implement agile practises who for what ever reason are failing to maintain the daily stand up. I've seen teams where only the project managers attend, some where only the developers attend, some that are held not every day but when ever its possible or three times a week. To the hardened SCRUM implementer the answer is apparently simple - "just make sure it happens the way Jeff Sutherland tells us it should". I agree that should be the target for the team; to move into a space that is driven by having a daily stand up. Its a shift in mind set that's required - its not about finding the time to have a stand up its about seeing the importance of having a stand up and making everything else revolve around it. This shift of mind set is easier for some than others. Normally daily stand up doesn't happen as it should simply because it isn't practical to get everyone together at the same time because of other pressures and commitments. Fixing that is another story.

In situations such as these there is something simple that can be done to gather a similar level of information by drawing a Comfort Line.

In the stand up there are three special questions - in the Comfort Line there is only one and each individual can answer it at their relative convenience without the need for a meeting. Each producer/developer is asked to list their outstanding tasks - completed tasks should not be on the list. On the list there is a horizontal line drawn half way down and this is the Comfort Line. The producer must put all remaining tasks that are in good shape above the line - those he is comfortable with. And all the others, those he isn't comfortable with, below the line. Above the line the items should be in order of attack and below in order of comfort. It might look like this:

Input the property data

Write the queries to bring back the search results

I haven't received the style guides from John yet - they're late

Write the CSS for the results table

Create the expanding div for each result row and  populate by j-query

This is easy to maintain if each producer owns their list and the project manager asks them to supply an update every day. If the update doesn't change from day to day this immediately indicates that the producer isn't managing their work properly or isn't making progress. The project manager can use this to determine how the team is performing - for example (above) we would expect John to have the supply of the style guide below his comfort line too as he hasn't given it to this guy yet. If John has that above his comfort line something is wrong. But either way this allows the project manager to go to John and find out what's going on. If this team was just having ad-hoc meetings this might not come to light for several days when it only requires a simple intervention.

And when the team does get together to have their meetings they can bring their comfort lines along and before long they may realise that it contains the answers to the three special scrum questions (more or less) and hopefully the success of the easier to implement Comfort Line might inspire the team to realise they should just get on and make room for a daily stand up.