The original idea behind standup meetings is that everyone actively working on a piece of software would get together in a room at the beginning of the day and communicate 3 simple items - what they did yesterday, what they plan on doing today and if there is anything blocking their progress.  Meetings should be short.  All participants would be required to "stand up" for the entire meeting (and, thus their name) which helped to keep them short.

Assembla's online standup tool gives each team member a form that they can fill out in one minute: 

• Using the StandUp tool provides at least four benefits:
• It makes a daily scrum chat or call much shorter;
• You can easily see who has needs or obstacles, and help fix them;
• Teams are more unified because each team member sees what the others are working on;
• You can see what each team member is working on today.  If those tasks do not sound like the most important tasks, you can get together and set some new priorities.

Software teams have found these standup meetings to be ideal forquickly communicating the essential information that is required to keep both software developers and software development teams moving forward.  In fact, they have worked so well that other types of projects have adopted them as well.  Today marketing projects, finance projects, even sales projects have borrowed the idea of standup meetings and have made them their own.  The Assembla StandUp tool is perfect for any distributed or virtual team.

Using our Standup / Scrum Meeting Meeting Tool is simple.  Anyone from a team can sign up and invite their fellow team members.  The project manager or team leader will usually set a daily deadline by which everyone has to file their standup report (for example 9:30 AM Headquarter's time). Then, continuing the example, everyone would get together on the phone or via chat client at 10 AM and briefly discuss the day's work and the things that are blocking the team members from moving forward.