A deeper understanding on…
The Daily Scrum
Road to PSM III — Episode 18
The Daily Scrum serves to create transparency over the progress towards the Sprint Goal and provides the Development Team an opportunity to inspect and adapt.
🥅 Purpose.
“The Daily Scrum optimizes the probability that the Development Team will meet the Sprint Goal.” — The Scrum Guide
The Daily Scrum enables the team to stay focused and committed towards achieving its Sprint Goal. Not only that, it enhances the Development Team’s ability to self-organise and remain creative, productive and flexible.
“Daily Scrums improve communications, eliminate other meetings, identify impediments to development for removal, highlight and promote quick decision-making, and improve the Development Team’s level of knowledge. This is a key inspect and adapt meeting”. — The Scrum Guide
🤔 Who?
The Development Team.
The Scrum Master may help facilitate this event (as requested or needed).
Often Product Owners (or others) want to participate in the Daily Scrum. However, the Development Team needs to be as open and technical as needed to align on their plan for the next 24 hours. This enables the team to use the language required to be as effective as they can.
If the Product Owner wants to say informed and aligned, he or she could for example help the team prepare the Daily Scrum by providing valuable input, and collaborate with the Development Team after the Daily Scrum. Remember the Development Team and Product Owner collaborate throughout the Sprint on refinement of the Product Backlog. That said, the Development Team may invite others (like the Product Owner) to observe the Daily Scrum, as long as this isn’t disruptive.
“If others are present, the Scrum Master ensures that they do not disrupt the meeting.” — The Scrum Guide
Participation
As with any group or team some members will be less loyal to showing up or being timely. Perhaps team members will argue it’s a “waste of time” to listen to their fellow team members, or perhaps they believe they have nothing of value to contribute.
Sometimes they will say they are already ‘aligned’ so “why the need” for this quick get-together. Often teams will find it difficult to start the Daily Scrum on time as everybody is dripping in, getting settled, grabbing coffee/tea, rounding up a conversation, or ‘quickly finalising’ whatever it is they are doing. This is really detrimental to the ‘team spirit’ and ‘team interest’ and reduces transparency.
Individual members (in these scenarios) put their own interests above that of the team. They value whatever it is they are doing over the time of their teammates. Sometimes team members will suggest to “start without me”. This also implies the team member is valuing his own activity over the opportunity to align with his team on the team’s collective Sprint Goal. This means the team member isn’t showing commitment (one of Scrum’s 5 values) to either the team or the Sprint Goal. In fact, these team members are introducing risk and waste as transparency is reduced.
A Scrum Master will help the team understand the purpose of the event. He or she will work with the team to make these 15 minutes (if that) fun and super worthwhile. Hey, maybe the Scrum Master will even facilitate the coffee/tea upfront.
Daily Scrum or Daily Standup?
No, you do not have to stand up during the Daily Scrum. The Standup actually originates from XP. In Scrum, it is up to the Development Team how they proceed with the Daily Scrum.
🗓 When?
Every day of the Sprint. Even if the team has an additional Scrum Event planned for that day.
“The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity.” — The Scrum Guide
🕗 How long?
15 minutes.
Even when Development Team members argue they are already aligned and have their next 24 planned towards achieving the Sprint Goal, it still is essential this brief event takes place to inspect if this is actually the case.
Many Development Teams run through a complete board of tasks one by one… They argue they cannot keep it short as they have many many more tickets or issues to run through. I’ve also observed a common anti-pattern where the Daily Scrum is used as a status report *cough* to the Scrum Master or Product Owner. This is also referred to as ‘Zombie Scrum’ by Christiaan Verwijs and Johannes Schartau.
If this too is the case for you, I’m sorry to say, but you are doing it wrong. It is sufficient to stick to addressing the Sprint Goal during the Daily Scrum and align on how fellow Development Team members are going to work together the next 24 hours. They can quickly pinpoint risks and opportunities.
If during this event the Development Team discovers it needs to deep-dive and re-plan, it can. After the event.
“The Development Team or team members often meet immediately after the Daily Scrum for detailed discussions, or to adapt, or replan, the rest of the Sprint’s work.” — The Scrum Guide
✅ Preparation.
It pays to have the following prepared for the Daily Scrum.
- The Sprint Goal
- An (updated) highly visible Sprint Backlog.
- Expected capacity of the Development Team
- New input from the Product Owner
- Progress, risks, and opportunities in relation to achieving the Sprint Goal.
❓ What?
But what is it the Development Team should actually be doing during the Daily Scrum?
At the end of a Daily Scrum The Development Team should have transparency over the following:
- Progress towards the Sprint Goal
- Impediments to achieving the Sprint Goal.
- An action plan for the next 24 hours on how the team is going to work together towards achieving the Sprint Goal.
- How it is going to adapt to new learning since the previous Daily Scrum.
The Development Team inspects how progress is trending toward completing the work in the Sprint Backlog.
Impediments too should be made visible and be dealt with in a timely manner. No need to wait for the Daily Scrum to pull the Scrum Team together to getting these resolved!
After the Daily Scrum, the Development Team is not excused from further collaboration. Team members continue to collaborate throughout the day. If the insights collected during the Daily Scrum require changes to the plan and continued alignment, Scrum Team members often collaborate directly after the Daily Scrum.
The Development Team can choose how it organizes this event. Some will use a predetermined set of questions each team member answers, but this is not prescribed. In any case, Development Team members will learn to exchange information relevant to the Sprint Goal and generally revolves around aligning how to collaborate that day. I hope to hear team members asking questions like:
- “Do you want to take a look at this together?”
- “Who can help me with this?”
- “Can I assist you with that?”
- “Can you let me know what you think about this?”
- “I’ve come across this, what can we do about it?”
- “How shall we approach this?”
- “What is the first next step?”
📉 Make progress visible
At any time during the Sprint, the Development Teams make the progress towards the Sprint Goal or work done on the Sprint Backlog visible. They also make remaining work visible.
“The Development Team tracks this total work remaining at least for every Daily Scrum to project the likelihood of achieving the Sprint Goal.” — The Scrum Guide
The Daily Scrum can be used to inspect if this is the case. Often they make use of a Sprint Burn Down chart to do this, but this is not prescribed. The best way to inspect progress is to inspect the actual work done on the Increment. So if your team wants to stay updated, it should frequently inspect the Increment they are working on and continuously verify if what they are delivering meets the team’s definition of “Done”. This can too be made visible on the Sprint Backlog.
Getting the best out of the day
What I personally really value about the Daily Scrum is that, under whatever conditions, even shitty ones, it will enable the Development Team to still perform well.
The Road to PSM III is being reformatted to The Road to Mastery! Part I: Down the Rabbit Hole is now available.
Try these 10 tips to improve your Daily Scrum by Scott Oliver!
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