Daily Scrum Best Practices from a Scrum Master Perspective | ICterra Information and Communication Technologies

Daily Scrum Best Practices from a Scrum Master Perspective

22 Ocak 2017

Author: Şahap DAYIBAŞ, Technical Team Leader – Embedded Systems

The Daily Scrum, aka the daily stand-up, is the 15-minutes meeting that helps scrum teams to be more productive and efficient, improving the quality of the project as well within the agile methodology.

Let’s take a brief look at the Scrum Framework itself firstly and then continue with the tips for conducting an effective Daily Scrum meeting.

Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework within people can deal with complex problems while delivering products effectively and creatively. According to Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland who are the developers of Scrum Guide, Scrum is (1):

Lightweight
Simple to understand
Difficult to master

Scrum Events

The following meetings must take place within scrum framework:

Sprint Planning
Daily Scrum
Sprint Review
Sprint Retrospective

Daily Scrum is one of the most important among the others because it is crucial for achieving sprint goal and enhancing collaboration among scrum team (Product Owner, Scrum Master and Development Team). In order to perform Daily Scrum effectively, we should prevent ourselves from doing some common mistakes during the meeting. Below, you can find some best practices and characteristics in order to conduct an effective scrum meeting and some of the common mistakes done during Daily Scrum.

Daily Scrum

The Daily Scrum is a 15-minutes time-boxed meeting for the Scrum Team to synchronize activities and create a short term plan until the next meeting. This is done by answering the following questions during the meeting.
- What did I do since the last Daily Scrum?
- What will I do until the next Daily Scrum?
- What blocking issues or impediments do I have?
The Daily Scrum should be held at the same place and time every day.
Scrum Team is allowed to attend Daily Scrum but the Scrum Master enforces the rule that only Scrum Team members participate in the Daily Scrum.
The Daily Stand-up meeting increases the chance that Scrum Team will achieve the sprint objectives and create the expected valuable increment within the Sprint. It also helps Scrum Team to understand the importance of being a self-organized team.

Daily Scrum Pitfalls and Misunderstandings

It is not a status or management meeting and not only for the Scrum Master. It serves to the whole scrum team. The main purpose of the Daily Scrum is to synchronize scrum team members and identify how well the team is progressing towards the sprint goal. For this reason, every scrum team member should present his or her statements to the whole scrum team rather than only to the scrum master in order to enhance the collaboration among the team.
It is not a technical discussion meeting. If there is a specific need for a technical discussion or detailed information, new meeting should be arranged just after the daily scrum including necessary team members.
It is not a planning meeting. Daily Scrum should not be transformed to a planning meeting on the way of conducting, discussing some new requirements and deciding which tasks will be dropped and picked up within the active sprint.
It is not the place to listen other members’ problem details. Every scrum team member should know that everything said in the Daily Scrum should be valuable to whole scrum team.
It should become the routine and habit of whole scrum team. There should not be any reminder to start the meeting every day.
Scrum team should be prepared for the meeting so that they cannot be searching for thoughts before presenting his or her statements.

Daily Scrums improve communications, identify impediments to development for removal, highlight and promote quick decision making and enhance the Development Team’s level of knowledge.

References
1.) Schwaber, K & Sutherland, J. (2016). Scrum Guide.