Category: Daily stand-up
“If that team can find a way to revert to Waterfall, it will!” “Any team that can find a way back to Waterfall will find a way back to Waterfall!” These modern corollaries to Murphy’s Law haunt every Scrum transition and manifest themselves in the Daily Scrum. If the ScrumMaster lets it degenerate, the success of entire transition is called into question. 10 Warning signs that something is wrong in your Daily Scrum and what you can do to correct the problem.
The Daily Scrum is simple daily routine to help the team self-organize, focus, and identify and eliminate impediments to progress. As the backbone of the self-organizing team, the Daily Scrum has nearly nothing in common with a classical project meeting. Team members synch up with each other on what is being done and lay the ground work for self organization — which takes place after the Daily Scrum.
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Scrum is simple and Scrum is hard. The Daily Scrum is simple daily routine to help the team self-organize, focus, and identify and eliminate impediments to progress. How do you conduct the Daily Scrum and how do you know if the Daily Scrum is achieving its purpose?
When and Where to hold the Daily Scrum
Scrum defines basic rules for holding the Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum should be held at the same location and the same time every day, ideally in the team space in front of the team’s big visible task board. The task board displays the release and sprint burn down charts and the state of each task in the sprint backlog. Each task is represented on a card and moves through the columns from “waiting” to “in work” to “done”.
Before the meeting starts, each team member should update the state of his tasks and the sprint burn down chart on the task board. These make the current state of the sprint visible for all to see.
The Daily Scrum should be held first thing in the morning, so that team members use it to focus their planning for the day. Practical considerations, e.g.
decentralized teams working in different time zones, may require a different time or even changing the time from Sprint to Sprint.
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Last week I gave an introductory talk about Scrum to a group of people in Zürich. One participant asked if it would be OK to make the Daily Scrum a Weekly Scrum? My answer: No way!
The Daily Scrum exists to enable self organization. It helps the team focus, communicate and identify impediments. The team members communicate to each other their progress, goals and impediments. The team members identify how they can help each other to reach the shared goal of the sprint.
Each team member answers three questions:
- What did you accomplish yesterday?
- What is your goal for today?
- What is preventing you from accomplishing your goals?
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As Scrum, XP and Agile mature, Teams and ScrumMasters are increasingly confronted with the problem of handling multiple distributed teams, telecommuters or nomadic team members who aren't able to just co-locate. For instance, a recent project for the Dutch Railways[1] involved 3 teams with a total of 15 developers and testers from Holland and India. This constellation presents many special challenges in addressing impediments, assuring communication and collaboration despite language and time zone differences, and picking tools and technology.... Given these challenges, how does a distributed team perform the Daily Scrum?
Each project is different and has its own special needs and requirements. Is there a common language? If not, then how can communication over the language barrier be assured? Are there multiple teams at multiple locations or one team with scattered members? Project management is about the art of the possible, so how the Team(s) should organize itself/themselves will depend on their actual situation.
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Every Sprint,
the Team commits to deliver some functionality to the Product Owner. A
lot can happen during the course of a Sprint. How does the Team know how much it can commit, and how does the Scrum Master ensure that the Team actually deliver what it committed?
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Daily Scrum also known as daily standup meeting is an important element of the Scrum process. The structure of the meeting is quite rigid and fixed. Everybody has to stand up, meeting should take no longer, than 15 minutes and everybody should answer three questions: "What did you do since the last meeting?", "What are you going to do until the next meeting?", "What impedes you from being more productive?". The purpose of this rigidness is for making sure that daily Scrum is to help team members synchronize between themselves, not to solve problems.
Things to watch during the daily standups are:
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Over the course of long projects (and some short ones too), the shared understanding of the project, release, or even iteration goals can drift. Different team members remember or interpret project aspects differently over time. This drift can result in producing a final product that doesn't satisfy your client's expectations. So how do we counter drift throughout the life of a project? Some say "Write a vision statement and stick it on the wall?". I'm not a big fan of "statements". I think people get lost in them, and statements, over time, can be open to interpretation as well.
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"Standup Meetings" is one of the core practices in the Agile Software Development. Instead of meeting the team once in a week in a meeting room, daily 10 minute Standup Meetings are quite popular. Few teams - which do not have a clear idea of Scrum - consider these meetings as personally intrusive and intimidating. But what one can gain via Standup meetings are many fold then conventional meetings.
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