It was only a matter of time, I know. But here it is, Scrumhipster about the daily scrum, or daily standup or just standup. I don't care how you call it. A nice, 15 minutes of conversation with your team, discussing what we are going to do and how we are doing.
What you are supposed to do
The "development team synchronize activities and create a plan for the next 24 hours". Simple as that. We will tell each other what we have done, what we will do and if we having impediments related to our sprint goal. The scrum master makes sure we are able to have the daily scrum and the scrum master learns the team how to do the best daily scrum. And...only the development team.
http://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#events-daily
In reality we do this :(
Such a simple meeting but in reality for some mysterious reason so difficult! A top 3 of things we are doing wrong.
- Only the development team: In reality I see not only the product owner attending but even project managers, account managers, stakeholders from the customer. You name it... And worse, they all want to say something. And that is very annoying because they often say nothing relevant of related to our sprint goal and they keep us from being quick. So scrum masters...enforce this rule!
- Talk to each other! They care. The scrum master (if he helps you with the daily) does not necessarily. We often only talk only to the person who is the chairman of the daily scrum, but there should be no chairman. You should tell each other what you are going to do.
- Deep technical complex discussions. The daily scrum is about identifying problems and progress, not about solving it. It will result in more than 15 minutes talk and is not relevant for everybody. Keep in mind that everything you say should be relevant for everybody. There is room enough after the daily to have discussions. No rule in scrum prevent you from communication next to the daily scrum :)
Ow great scrum hipster...how can we do this?
No panic! I will give you some tips:
- Tell your scrum master that you want him to learn you (and the team) how to do a proper daily scrum.
- Tell your scrum master (or do it yourself) to remove everybody from the daily who is not in the development team. A good practice is to have a separate meeting with the removed people now and then to keep them informed about the progress, but this can be done by the scrum master and not the whole team.
- Start forcing a group conversation. Start with identifying the problem: tell the team there should be no chairman and scrum master, stop acting like one! In my experience it is best for a scrum master to really learn the team how to do this. At least don't let anybody decides who will talk. This creates some sort of chairman and you don't want this.
- Watch your time (15 min.)
- Everybody should help each other to only say relevant stuff. There is no room for technical blabla.
- Talk about your daily in your retrospective meeting.
One final thing. If somebody will say something like "I will work on the backend code today", during the daily scrum, kick him. This makes no sense and is not giving the team a chance to inspect or adapt because you still have no clue how the team is doing.