Fixing the Daily Scrum

Scrum has proven itself through time and usage to be an elegant and effective way for software teams to work together. My teacher, Aaron Sanders, often remarks that Scrum is already distilled to the bare essentials and adding or subtracting elements would compromise its effectiveness. Just as water is fundamentally altered by adding or subtracting an oxygen atom.

That being said, nothing stops us from adapting the individual elements of Scrum to fit our teams. In this vein, another of my respected teachers, Gil Broza, taught me to experiment with the daily stand-up meeting.

Yesterday I…, today I…, but I...

Over a decade using Scrum, I’ve come to understand how people often judge Scrum and Agile on the basis of their experience in the daily stand-up. Quite simply because it’s a standard Scrum/Agile practice that they’re exposed to every working day. With so much riding on it, I'm consequently alarmed to see how many teams feel obligated to follow a rigid daily scrum format that resembles, “Yesterday I…, today I…, but I am impeded by....” in the order that team members happen to be standing on a given day. By using this script in our daily scrums, we hear the pronoun, ‘I’, repeated at least 3n times.

With the emphasis on ‘I’, where is the interaction?

We know and appreciate the Agile value about “individuals and interactions” and this scripted daily scrum format clearly conforms to the “individuals” aspect. But with the emphasis on ‘I’, where is the interaction? What binds together the information shared by individual team members? This was the same textbook script I followed when organizing my first ever scrum those many years ago and, looking back, the experience might have been just as awkward as my first dance in grade seven.

Team members can provide their input relative to a user story.

Instead, what if we use the occasion to inspect the user stories in our sprint goals? Team members may then provide their input relative to a user story. Start with Story A for contributing team members to anchor their input. Move on to Story B for its contributing team members to comment. Rinse and repeat for other stories in the current sprint’s goals. Showcasing the user stories as frames of reference not only contextualizes and binds the individual inputs but also invites interaction that affirms the sprint goals and the value being delivered by the team.

More natural in its discourse and more effective in its outcome. 

Having used this approach in my teams during the last five years, I can attest to its benefits making the daily scrum more natural in its discourse and more effective in its outcome. Give it a shot and you may find your daily scrums more impactful.

About the Author

Byron Jung is a proven and certified specialist in high-performance program and project management that is disciplined and agile.