If empiricism is the foundation of Scrum, the Daily Scrum is the most critical event enabling empiricism’s practical implementation. It brings transparency about how the team works, allowing it to inspect the areas of concern and then adapt to the challenges and impediments to ensure a successful Sprint. This article will explain all the aspects of the Daily Scrum in detail.
Table of Contents
Daily Scrum Purpose
A potentially shippable product increment is the expected output of a Sprint. A Sprint Goal defines what the product increment should be. From that perspective, the Scrum team is expected to achieve the Sprint goal at the end of the Sprint.
Daily Scrum meeting is the Scrum event when the developers assess their progress towards the sprint goal. Given its frequency, it allows the developers to take action to ensure they are always on track to achieve the sprint goal.
Who Attends The Daily Scrum?
The Daily Scrum is an event for the developers. Therefore, only the developers participate actively during the Daily Scrum. Rest all, including the Scrum Master and Product Owner, are not required to participate unless the development team invites them to for specific objectives.
However, anyone, including all stakeholders, can “attend” the Daily Scrum. They cannot “participate,” though. Instead, they will be in a listening mode.
Role of Scrum Master Before, During, and After Daily Scrum
Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the Daily scrum meetings occur at the pre-determined time and place. The consistency of the time and location removes the uncertainty around planning, and the developers can plan their activities efficiently.
Before The Event
The Scrum Master is the one that ensures that these meetings take place. It is also Scrum Master’s responsibility to ensure that these are effective. To ensure this effectiveness, Scrum Master must coach the developers in conducting these meetings. They must educate the team members on the purpose of the Daily Scrum and guide them continuously on making these daily interactions more effective.
During The Event
For the actual conduct of these meetings, Scrum Master must ensure that;
1. All the developers are participating in the meeting.
2. These meetings do not turn into status reporting meetings. The sessions must focus on ensuring progress towards the sprint goal and successfully responding to impediments.
3. The meeting finishes in the timebox (Scrum Guide defines a maximum of 15 minutes daily for the Daily Scrum).
4. The issues and impediments raised by the developers are parked during the meeting, to be followed up later. The team should have detailed discussions on such issues after the daily Scrum.
5. No one out of the developers participates. External stakeholders can attend.
Post The Event
1. Ensure that appropriate people have resolved the issues parked during the daily scrum meeting.
2. Assess which impediments will require their participation and act to remove those.
3. Work out a plan with the Scrum team to implement any process improvement in response to challenges identified by the developers. While Sprint Retrospectives are meant to determine the process improvement scope, there might be minor improvements that the team can implement quickly without endangering the Sprint goal. The team can utilize the daily meetings for quick decision-making on such improvements.
4. Address any clarity issues with Project Owner or other key stakeholders.
5. Identify the scope to adjust Scrum implementation if any deviations are identified.
How Should The Team Conduct Daily Scrum?
There are no correct answers to how the team should conduct this event. While the three-questions format is the most popular, it is not mandatory. The three-question structure goes like this;
Everyone tells the team about;
1. What did they do yesterday?
2. What are they going to do today?
3. Are there any impediments stopping them from completing their work?
The origins of this three-question format are in Extreme Programming (XP). XP has a Daily Standup meeting and recommends discussing these three questions. On the other hand, the Scrum Guide doesn’t mandate, prescribe, or indicate any formats for the Daily Scrum meeting. The teams are free to choose what works best for them. The goal is to inspect the progress towards the Sprint Goal and adapt to overcome challenges. In practice, teams use both these terms interchangeably.
Some Variations
Many people and teams have experimented with the format successfully, given the context of the teams. For example, Mark Levison suggests tweaking these three questions and adding two more while conducting these daily events.
Andy Cleff provides a few more exciting variations for the teams to ensure that their daily meetings are meaningful yet engaging.
You can find a few more variations, with their roots in Kanban, in this LinkedIn post.
However, in the end, the team should decide what format works best for them to ensure that they progress towards delivering a valuable product increment at the end of the Sprint.
Effective Daily Scrum
Despite being the most known and participated event, there are many instances where daily Scrum has not been effective. Following are a few factors you should keep an eye on to ensure that that’s not the case with your team.
1. Don’t turn it into status meetings.
2. Don’t let anyone outside the Scrum team take over the discussions.
3. Ensure that these events are exciting and engaging. For example, bring gamification or story-telling into the daily Scrum to ensure engagement.
4. Keep them consistent.
5. Ensure that you followed up on parked issues, identified the scope of improvement, and took them to their logical conclusion.
6. Ensure equal participation of the entire team.
7. Ensure brevity.
8. Keep the discussions focused on the user stories and Sprint goal.
9. Finally, ensure that the team is engaged, interested, and contributing. The team’s engagement will ultimately determine your development efforts’ success or failure.
Finally
Daily Scrum meetings can be valuable for uncovering and resolving challenges. If you can conduct them effectively, they ensure efficiency and allows the team to provide a valuable product increment to customer sprint after Sprint.
However, keep looking out for signs of disengagement and boredom. If the boredom is setting in or the team is not engaged, it’s time for you as a Scrum Master to work with the team and do course correction.
A daily scrum is an essential tool for agile teams. In this article, we’ll go over the basics of what makes a successful daily scrum.
