The Daily Scrum is a Scrum Event which is performed on a daily basis during the Sprint.
As per the Scrum Guide, the purpose of the Daily Scrum is to:
- At it, the Development Team plans work for the next 24 hours. This optimizes team collaboration and performance by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum and forecasting upcoming Sprint work.
- The Development Team uses the Daily Scrum to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and to inspect how progress is trending toward completing the work in the Sprint Backlog.
- The Daily Scrum optimizes the probability that the Development Team will meet the Sprint Goal.
The Small Print
How the Daily Scrum is performed is open for discovery as with everything in Scrum the framework only sprinkles a few bread crumbs for us to follow…
…But never fear! It’s quite straight forward <cough>. Personally I favour walking the board – but that’s only if the team is using a Kanban board to visulaise all the Sprint PBIs. If not then you’ll going to ask questions but if not done right becomes a reporting exercise and not fun. Two things to avoid!
Duration
The Scrum Guide states: “The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team.”
Try not to get too rigid about this. To explain, if you’re doing remote Daily Scrums you’ll probably want to spend 5-10mins just having an informal chat to build relationships with the distributed teams. Conversely, if you’re all office based and the team are discussing some good points then don’t suddenly stop the meeting.
Who Can Attend
The Scrum Guide states:
“The Daily Scrum is an internal meeting for the Development Team.”
And
“The Product Owner and Scrum Master roles are not included in this count unless they are also executing the work of the Sprint Backlog.”
The Development Team – required to attend.
The Scrum Master – optional attendance, if not executing the work.
The Product Owner – if executing the work yes, but don’t rule out if not.
Other(s) – not usually but don’t rule out.
So what about the Product Owner? The Scrum Guide states: “…The Product Owner may do the above work, or have the Development Team do it…”
That’s clear then! If the PO is doing the actual work then they attend, if not then they do not. But wait! It’s not really that clear. You need to apply common sense here as they may be reason to bring the PO in to a Daily Scrum, even though they are not part of the dev team. They may have some important info to share, want to catch up with the team as been away for a while or convey their past progress and daily plan, etc…
Therefore whilst the majority of the Daily Scrums will be with the Development Team and the Scrum Master – don’t stop the Product Owner attending OR other stakeholders who may want to observe. Just make sure it’s not a reporting exercise and in advance The Scrum Master and Development Team should be made aware.
The Purpose
The Scrum Guide states: “The purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to:
-Inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools;
-Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements; and,
-Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work.”
How To Do It
As per the Scrum Guide “Some Development Teams will use questions, some will be more discussion based. Here is an example of what might be used:
- What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
- What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
- Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?”
This is where the Daily Scrum ‘could’ fall down. Be smart here and look at how other teams do this to keep it productive. Some examples here.
Time For The Scrum Master
The Scrum Master has a few objectives here as listed below.
- The Scrum Master ensures that the Development Team has the meeting, but the Development Team is responsible for conducting the Daily Scrum.
- The Scrum Master teaches the Development Team to keep the Daily Scrum within the 15-minute time-box.
- If others are present, the Scrum Master ensures that they do not disrupt the meeting.
- The Scrum Master should find out what Impediments there are and resolve them after the Daily Scrum.
The Outcomes
- The Scrum Team have made improvements to how they meet the next Sprint Goal.
- The definition of “Done” is updated if required.
- An improvement is added to the Backlog for the next Sprint.
General Tips
- Get a good meeting space booked out in advance.
- If the teams has a Scrum room, use that.
- Same place, same time, set a routine.
- Ensure all the Development Team attends and are prepared.
- Get to the meeting space early if need to prepare – update board (or during).
- Make sure no-one dominates the meeting.
- Make sure every Development Team member’s voice is heard.
- If there’s a facilitator, make sure it’s not command and control.
- Keep the meeting Lean, don’t over-run the time-box.
- Make use of extending the discussions in a break-out afterwards.
- Mix the Daily Scrum format up if need to keep the Development Team engaged.