What Is Daily Scrum Meeting And How To Have An Efficient One
What Is Daily Scrum Meeting
Each day a development team sets aside 15 minutes to synchronise their activities and develop a plan for the next 24 hours. This is known as the Daily Scrum Meeting. It involves an inspection of the work that has been done since the last Daily Scrum and then taking look at work that needs to be done before the next one.
It is essential that the time and place of the Daily Scrum remains the same each day, as this will bring down any complexity. In the meeting, the development team will explore:
- What was done yesterday that helped the team to meet the Sprint Goal
- What was done today to help meet the Sprint Goal
- What impediments may be preventing team´s ability to meet the Sprint Goal
This means that the Daily Scrum is like a tracker for progress inspection of the Sprint Goal. It ensures that work is on track and based on the Sprint Backlog and makes it so much easier to meet the goal.
The benefits of the Daily Scrum meeting are numerous including improving communication, reducing the need for other meetings, identifying impediments to development, quick decision making and elevating the overall knowledge of the development team.
My Experience With Daily Scrum
Every time I join a company I hear developers saying the Daily Scrum Meeting are boring and they are a waste of time.
For me, it´s always fun to hear this kind of debates, because 90% of the cases the root causes are always the same. People think the purpose of the Daily Scrum Meeting is to provide the status report to the scrum master; they believe Scrum Master is the most interested party in the Daily Scrum Meeting. Unfortunately, they do not understand the Daily Scrum Meeting is for the team itself :)
Another quite common problem with Daily Scrum Meeting relies on the fact that stories are not End to End. As a result, people will work in silos within the team, some people will work in FrontEnd tasks others will work in Backend tasks. Of course, all team members work independently not having dependencies on each other making the Daily Scrum Meeting quite boring since people can work independently.
Of course, all team members work independently not having dependencies on each other making the Daily Scrum Meeting quite boring since people can work independently.
As a rule of tumb, one of the basic things that teams/companies should do is to create End to End stories, this will create a lot of dependencies between people, and the Daily Scrum Meeting will shift from reporting towards alignment.
Of course, this is not always so simple, but this is a quite common problem that I faced during all my life in different companies.
Another good way to make Daily Scrum Meetings more interesting is to follow the steps that I describe below. I think when people perform these steps the Stand Up Meetings will be much more interesting and useful.
Script For An Efficient Daily Scrum Meeting
What stories did I work on yesterday?
Did I finish something?
Yes:
- Completion of a known dependency?
- Resolving someone’s blocker?
- Did I change the interfaces, the design, or infrastructure?
- New experience, process, practice?
No:
- What problems did I face that blocked me to finish it?
- Did I find something unexpected that others should know?
What stories will I be able to complete today?
Did I finish everything from the previous day?
Yes:
- Before I start a new story can I help someone with his tasks?
- Is the Sprint Goal in Risk? What can I do to help the team with the Sprint Goal?
No:
- Someone’s dependencies on me?
- My dependencies on the others?
- The expectation of early story completion?
What’s getting in my way (blocking me)?
- My dependencies on the others?
- Did I change the story/task order?
- Not a blocker but risk or difficulty or a slow-down factor?
What do you think about this approach? Do you think it will help you?
Leave some comments below :).
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