A Complete Guide for Conducting Effective Daily Scrums

I am pretty sure that you are familiar with the term "Daily Scrum." Most probably, if you use Scrum, you are holding Daily Scrums, as the name suggests, daily.

But, are you doing it right? Is the event being productive or a burden?

To tackle this, let's go through this step-by-step:

• first, let's see the basic concepts of a Daily Scrum.
• second, let's answer commonly asked questions on Daily Scrum, based on knowledge from practice and science.

Basic concepts

(If you are already familiar with the basics of Daily Scrum, you should skip this section.)

The Daily Scrum is the most popular agile technique, used by 86% of agile teams according to The State of Agile Report. It is also an Extreme Programming technique, in which it was called The Stand-up Meeting. You can read this awesome post by Jeff Sutherland, one of the creators of Scrum, telling the story of how he came up with the Daily Scrum.

According to the Scrum Guide, the main responsibility of the Daily Scrum is to

"inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and to inspect how progress is trending toward completing the work in the Sprint Backlog" (Scrum Guide).

Its ultimate goal is to

"optimize the probability that the Development Team will meet the Sprint Goal" (Scrum Guide).

The Scrum Guide presents some straightforward?rules:

• be time-boxed (or have a maximum duration) of 15 minutes;
• all members of the Development Team (including developers, testers, designers, and others) must attend. The Scrum Master and Product Owner can attend as listeners;
• held every day within sprints;
• held at the same time and place;
• complementing the Scrum Guide, Jeff Sutherland recommends that the team must be standing up.

The point is: is this enough for having a productive Daily Scrum? The answer is NO! Especially, if you are still an agile apprentice, you will need much more information than that!

And that is what we are covering from here on! We are going to answer some common doubts about how to execute Daily Scrums in practice!

What do we talk about during Daily Scrums?

It is commonly accepted that teams structure the event around answering the 3 questions presented in the Scrum Guide:

1) What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?

2) What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?

3) Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?

But, beware! Only following this might lead to dysfunctional Daily Scrums! Actually, many experienced teams don't follow such a strict structure.

First, the Daily Scrum is NOT a status meeting. How many Daily Scrums have you seen that follows a monotonous flow in which each member reports their individual progress like this: "I've finished this, and today I will work on that; no impediments." Passing turns to another member that follows in a similar fashion.

To enforce focusing on the future, researchers from the University of Oslo and SINTEF recommend dropping the first question, because it might lead the team to focus on reporting status and wasting time!

Other sets of questions have been suggested by Thomas Cagley, Mark Levison, Jonathan Rasmussen, and many others. I've added some links here for you to take a look and, if valuable, adapt them to your context.

Takeaway: The Daily Scrum is NOT a status meeting.

Worse than only reporting status in the Daily Scrum is saying something such as: "Yesterday, I?worked on bug fixing, and will?continue with that today." Wow, very specific, don't you agree? You might as well say that yesterday you woke up, eventually opened your eyes and, later, went to sleep! Unfortunately, I've seen this type of behavior a lot during Daily Scrum with novice or dysfunctional teams!

Takeaway: Don't share shallow information on Daily Scrums!

Being shallow is bad, but being too specific too! The Daily Scrum is a time-frame reserved to synchronize work, raise problems, and ask or offer help. But, science has shown that discussing solutions during Daily Scrum can be very valuable too! It all depends on the level of the discussion.

For instance, a team member might plan to work on automating tests for a file-sharing feature. At this point, someone on the team might already have experience with that. If it is a quick discussion such as recommending a specific test automation framework, he can recommend it during the Daily Scrum. If not, he can offer help to make the team go faster, and discuss the details only with the interested people after the Daily Scrum.

Or consider the case in which someone reports difficulties configuring the parameters for an Optical Character Recognition algorithm. During the Daily Scrum, he should raise it as an impediment, which should be registered by the team (for example, using an?Impediment Board). If another team member has experience with such an algorithm, he should offer help. Since this issue is very specific and, probably, more complex, they should probably discuss the solution, separately,?after the Daily Scrum.

Takeaway: Only discuss solutions during the Daily Scrum if it is quick and relevant to the whole team! Leave these discussions for separate meetings, with a subset of the team!

Let's wrap up this section with the indicators that the content of your Daily Scrum sucks:

• lasting more than 15 minutes;
• reporting status and progress;
• sharing shallow information;
• people not paying attention;
• Scrum Master allocates speaking turns.

Remember: the structure is just the means to an end! The end goal of the Daily Scrum is to optimize execution! We want to see people revealing problems, asking for help, providing assistance, solving problems, and processing useful information.

Who attends the Daily Scrum?

The Development Team must attend the Daily Scrum, and they are the only ones with an active voice.

The Product Owner, Scrum Master, and other stakeholders might participate as listeners. The Scrum Master ensures that they don't disrupt the Daily Scrum.

It is important to further clarify the role of the Scrum Master during the Daily Scrum. Well, the Scrum Master's only responsibility regarding the Daily Scrum is to make sure that it happens and to teach the team to conduct if effectively.

At the beginning of the process with novice teams, the Scrum Master should observe the Daily Scrums and be quick to point out issues (e.g., the team is reporting shallow information). The faster the Scrum Master's presence during Daily Scrums becomes useless, the better he did his job!

In what order should the team speak?

This question looks like a simple question, but this is a very sensitive topic. Messing up here might mean messing with the teams' autonomy!

Many teams have the Scrum Master (or even worse, a Project Manager) allocating turns. As a consequence, the Daily Scrum naturally turns into status reporting! Worse than that, a status reporting to the facilitator!

So, what to do?

Stray and colleagues recommend

"using a round-robin approach and having a designated first speaker position in the room".

With this, communication improves because team members know the order of speaking without any intervention. Also, it is a good idea to rotate the role of the facilitator.

Where to conduct the Daily Scrum?

The Daily Scrum cannot be conducted anywhere. It can be conducted in a War Room, meeting room, or office space, having enough ventilation, space, and comfort for the participants.

It is vital that the Daily Scrum is performed using a visual board. The board might be physical or virtual (using a monitor or projector) Kanban board.?The board should visually present the Sprint Goal, tasks, burndown charts, impediments, and other relevant information.

Ideally, have all the members collocated. If the team is distributed, there are plenty of tools that can be used to facilitate Daily Scrums such as?Meet,?Skype,?Slack,?Discord,?Zoom, and many others. Whenever possible, try to use tools that support video interaction --using only phones or instant messaging apps is not as engaging!

Also, independent of team distribution, have the Daily Scrum in a?standing format.?Scientific studies?have shown that having Daily Scrums seated makes them last longer!

When to conduct the Daily Scrum?

I've seen many people recommend the Daily Scrum should be held at the beginning of the day, but this by no means should be a rule, and should only be the case if people arrive at the same time. Plus, some countries have a cultural issue of people arriving on time =(

So, what to do? Schedule at 8h30? 8h45? From my experience, it is worse. The people that arrive at 8h00 will check e-mail, talk, read news or social network, waiting for the Daily Scrum. Or, if they start working, they will feel disturbed to have to stop what they are doing because of the Daily Scrum. The others, who used to arrive late, believe it or not, will continue arriving late!

Stray and colleagues recommend that, if people don't arrive at the same time during the morning, schedule it just before lunch. It has two benefits: avoids having the Daily Scrum as the start of the actual workday, and hungry people are motivated to finish the event faster :)

But, should the Daily Scrum really take place daily??Some teams don't conduct them daily, because they have enough informal communication outside the Daily Scrum that reduces its necessity.?Stray and colleagues?reported that some teams hold them?three or four times per week. I recommend teams, following the?Scrum Guide, to do it daily. Only allow changing the frequency if you are dealing only with advanced Scrum practitioners, all agreeing that reducing the rate would be beneficial for them. But, this must be the last thing to be changed with regards to Daily Scrums! Before changing this, check if the causes of having Daily Scrums with low value are the antipatterns discussed previously. When you have a problem, always target the root causes.

Takeaway: schedule the Daily Scrum at the least disruptive time!

To wrap up this topic, if people are late, don't wait for them! If someone can't attend a Daily Scrum for a particular issue, don't postpone it! Always, always, start and finish them on time!

What are the desired consequences of Daily Scrums?

If you are doing Daily Scrums well, you will increase:

• shared leadership;
• team cohesion;
• shared mental models;
• trust.

As a consequence, you will increase the team's performance by canceling other superfluous meetings and synchronizing work, making the team more efficient. Each team member will be more satisfied with their work and will also feel more capable and productive. Finally, you will increase the chances of conducting successful Sprints.

What to do if you have BAD Daily Scrums?

First, the problem might not be the Daily Scrum itself, but the team characteristics. Teams with?low levels of autonomy and self-management?will end up seeing the Daily Scrum as a boring status meeting.

Further, teams with?low knowledge redundancy?tend to see the Daily Scrum as a waste of time. In theory, ideally, everyone should work on everything, but, in practice, people work on what they know well. So, this reduces the relevance of each individual's solutions to problems. So, ideally, you should avoid forming and managing teams that lead to?knowledge-silo,?reinforcing collective code ownership. If this is not possible, during the Daily Scrum, the team members shouldn't focus on solutions to problems, but on giving an overview of the problem to the team and asking for help, if necessary.

TLDR

To wrap up this article, I will list the main takeaways that you can start applying today on your Daily Scrums:

• The Daily Scrum is NOT a status meeting.
• Don't share shallow information on Daily Scrums.
• Only discuss solutions during the Daily Scrum if it is quick and relevant to the whole team! Leave these discussions for separate meetings, with a subset of the team.
• Use a round-robin approach to allocate turns, rotating the event facilitator.
• Conduct the Daily Scrum with Visual Information Radiators.
• Schedule the Daily Scrum at the least disruptive time.
• Conduct the Daily Scrum standing.

Final words

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