No Boring Daily Scrum Anymore Just Valuable Standups Everyday
The Daily Scrum is one out of five events defined in the Scrum Guide. The purpose of prescribing those events is to minimize the need for other meetings. Because quite often even high-quality meetings operate on a meta-level of production. They rarely produce a direct value that a customer would pay for. Therefore, meetings often are another form of waste. On the other hand the Scrum Guide clearly states:
Failure to include any of these events results in reduced transparency and is a lost opportunity to inspect and adapt
Scrum Guide
Consequently each of the Scrum Events is designed to serve one of the three pillars of Scrum: Transparency, Inspection, Adaption. And now you might ask: How is the Daily then contributing to those pillars? Well, there are basically 4 reasons to conduct Daily Scrums:
- Inspect
- the work since the last Daily Scrum
- progress towards Sprint Goal
- how progress is trending toward completing the work of the Sprint Backlog
- Adapt as needed
It becomes obvious that the Daily is a cornerstone to Inspect & Adapt. But why is it then, that some teams struggle to see the value of this Event and feel annoyed by the Daily Standup?
Daily Scrum Anti-pattern: Having bad data for Inspection
A proper inspection of the work and progress requires some data to be collected. The Team at least needs to know for each Sprint: their total amount of work, the remaining work, and remaining capacity. How else could they evaluate their progress? If one piece is missing or not precise enough, you’ll not be able to measure for inspection. Therefore, Impediments might remain hidden and raise your risk to fail with your Sprint. Consequently, your team will just waste their time in your Daily Standup and won’t get any value.
Daily Scrum Anti-pattern: Inspection without Adaption
Sometimes Scrum Teams use the Daily Scrum to inspect their progress, but then nobody starts a discussion about how to adapt their plan. This Anti-pattern often occurs together with a unidirectional report to a manager. That behavior is a typical pattern from legacy Taylorism and quickly becomes annoying. But notice, that a report alone might contribute to transparency, but not for the primarily purpose of the Daily Scrum: Inspection & Adaption. And Inspection alone is worth nothing without reasonable Adaption.
So if you struggle to see the value of your Daily Scrum, watch out for these anti-patterns. A good way to avoid these are common practices that many agile teams are using:
Burndown Chart
Creating a burndown chart requires you to collect at least some data about your Sprint. It gives you a rough overview of your progress and in many cases is precise enough for revealing impediments.
Daily Scrum Moderation
Many teams conduct their Daily Standup in the way that is suggested by the Scrum Guide. By telling everyone what they did yesterday and what they will do today, they’ll inform their peers. But personally, I do not value this approach. I believe by using this approach, there is a high risk to fall into the anti-pattern of mere reporting. So instead of asking everyone for an update, I prefer going through each Item of the Sprint Backlog and have a look at the Burndown Chart. With that approach, you will focus much more on the work and the progress to be inspected instead of the people.
How are you conducting your Daily Scrum? Share our thoughts in the comment section and also check out my Scrum 101 article about the Product Backlog.
Key Takeaways
- The Daily Scrum is a key inspect and adapt meeting
- Proper inspection requires good data about the progress
- Inspection is worth nothing without reasonable adaption
- Use Burndown Charts to measure Sprint Progress
- Try out different styles for moderating your Daily Scrum
