The Daily Scrum [Scrum Series]

The Sprint is like a chess game. The development team is using different pieces to achieve the Sprint Goal which is “Checkmate“. It is easy to get carried away and want to take out all your opponent’s pieces and not consider how each move may or may not get you closer to that checkmate. When you have different people playing in one game you will need a shorter feedback loop to be certain each person’s move is pointing towards a checkmate.

Another Sunday, I will be going over the daily scrum, you know that meeting you have most likely every morning. I will be covering things like what the daily scrum is, the importance of the daily scrum, and different styles of conducting the daily scrum.

The Scrum Guide (Revised) described the daily scrum as

A 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team. The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint
Backlog as necessary.

Time-boxed at 15 minutes, the daily scrum is expected to give a transparent view of the progress the team has made toward the sprint goal. The Sprint goal set during the Sprint planning should be the North Star of the Scrum Team for the next week or two based on the duration of the Sprint.

In the previous Scrum guide, the Daily scrum was described as

A 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team to synchronize activities and create a plan for the next 24 hours.

The older Scrum guide went further to say that during the meeting, the Development Team members explain:

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?

Both editions of the Scrum guide are fundamentally pointing towards the same thing but the older edition almost felt like it gave a template, which kind of defeats the point of being agile. There is no one way to do this, as long as the Daily Scrum is focused on the Sprint Goal. Why can’t we go live today? What is stopping us? How far are we from the Goal?

Most teams are deep into how the daily scrum is being run that they do not focus on the WHY. “The Developers can select whatever structure and techniques they want, as long as their Daily Scrum focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day of work”. Developers have the freedom to select what way to drive the meeting as long as it focuses on the progress towards the goal.

Different teams have multiple ways that work for them, some teams walk the board and some teams use the three questions, and some teams just discuss the sprint Goal. There is no best way but having an agile mindset means finding ways to improve your current process.

The Sprint Goal (Checkmate), which we will talk about in another post, is what guides the Sprint and is the reason behind all the work and is so important that even the Scrum guide says that “A Sprint could be cancelled if the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete“. What this means is that if at some point it is realized that the sum of the work in the Sprint Backlog does not equal the Sprint Goal then there is no point in having a Sprint around that Goal.

It is important that while you focus on meeting the Sprint Goal do not cut quality and create technical debt, how you are meeting that goal is equally important.

And that is it for today. gotta run now 🙂