How this little known tool can transform your daily standup meetings?

Do you despise your daily standup meetings? Are you bored with it? Here is a little tool that can help you.

Story

It's almost 9 o'clock in the morning. My last colleagues reach the office. Two minutes later, we enter the adjacent small room for a daily standup meeting. Just before doing so - from my terminal - I type git log - to have an idea of what I did yesterday.

The information is, however, too verbose for me to make sense of. I quickly switch to SourceTree, a beautiful Git GUI client - but by the time the application opens, my colleague gestures me to enter the room.

One at a time, they begin explaining what they did yesterday and their intentions for today. Meanwhile, I am lost in my thoughts trying to remember what I did on the eve. Only a few key terms flashes in my mind - such as drag and drop, table and menu. I pay barely any attention to what they are saying.

As my turn arrives, I describes a bit of what I worked on and even though I am  a talkative person, I struggle keeping stringing together more than a few words. I personally prefer this moment planning the day and/or working on a complex problem.

Git Stand-up

As a craft-person in the quest of improvement, while looking for some ideas online,  I stumble across an interesting command line tool called Git Standup (https://github.com/kamranahmedse/git-standup).

With a couple of commands, you have a summary of what you coded yesterday. You can also filter by author and date. I usually write my commits in a clear and concise way so as to have a basic idea of what I am working on. In my previous projects, I also added the task number so that it's easier to reference if need be.

Before heading to the meeting, I glance through the git standup results. With a clearer idea of what I worked on, I communicate better.

Fortunately, the physical daily routine has been replaced with an online application providing us the ability to check it, write about what we did yesterday and what we are going to do.

I personally think this type of accountability system is great for productivity.

How to download and use it?

You can give this tool a try if your daily standup sessions are too boring. I've enjoyed using it for a few years now.