The Daily Scrum as Status Meeting

Take a moment and consider how your most recent daily scrum went. Was it similar to the dialog at the beginning of this chapter? Be honest. We frequently see Scrum masters facilitate daily scrums by having each team member answer these three questions from The Scrum Guide, which on the surface seem helpful:

• 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 impediments that prevent me or the development team from meeting the sprint goal?

Unfortunately, these questions can turn the daily scrum—an alignment and planning event—into a status meeting. Why? Because the daily scrum should be team-centric. It’s an opportunity for the team to collaborate on a plan around the daily work that will lead to them achieving the sprint goal. But these questions make team members focus on themselves as individuals, not as part of the team. When the focus is on individual status updates, you’ve lost most of the value of the daily scrum.

During this type of daily scrum, collaboration is typically low. Issues stay hidden, impediments go unresolved, and the team members are never sure how they’re progressing. You lose transparency and put the sprint goal at risk because the focus is on individual statuses rather than on the development team’s progress on sprint backlog items, or toward achieving the sprint goal.

Joe asks:

What’s an Impediment?

An impediment is anything that could prevent the development team from achieving its sprint goal. These are typically problems that go beyond a Scrum team’s ability to self-organize around and solve. Some examples include:

• Lack of a vital skill set or key information
• Excessive pressure from management
• An absent product owner

People often apply the term “impediment” too broadly, using it to describe even the simplest speed bumps the team encounters, such as needing a meeting scheduled. These aren’t true impediments, as they can easily be solved with a little brainstorming and collaboration.

To break this anti-pattern, you need to shift the focus to the work itself, rather than the individual team members performing the work.

No one person owns the daily scrum. It’s an opportunity for the development team members to work together to develop a plan for the day based on their current progress, and on figuring out a path that leads to the best opportunity of achieving the sprint goal. By the end of the daily scrum, the whole team must agree on the plan and commit to working on it.

If the team discovers an impediment to achieving the sprint goal, they don’t point fingers. The team members swarm the issue(s) and respectfully help those who need it.

Every person is responsible for achieving the sprint goal—you don’t get partial credit for getting your individual work item done on time. The team succeeds and fails together. The daily scrum gives everyone a daily opportunity to align on what needs to be done to make success more likely.

So if your daily scrums are currently nothing more than status meetings, how do you guide your team toward more valuable, team-oriented daily scrums? Stop using the three questions we listed at the beginning of this section.

Wait…did you not know that the three questions are optional? It’s true: You don’t have to use the three questions. In fact, if your team is struggling to collaborate using the questions in The Scrum Guide, consider developing new questions that allow the team to explore the work collaboratively and form a plan for the next 24 hours. Here are a few examples of questions that we’ve used:

• Is anything stuck?

• If something is stuck, how can we all work together to get this work unstuck?

• Who needs help?

• What’s the most important thing we need to accomplish today?

• How do we increase the odds that the most important things get to done?

Another thing you can try is using a physical team board and asking the team to walk through each piece of work in the sprint backlog. Facilitate the conversation to include everyone to get different perspectives about the progress the team is making on each product backlog item, and input on what the team could do differently to increase its odds of getting to done by the end of the sprint, as shown in the figure.

Here’s how you can help your team members collaborate and make sure they’re ready to tackle the next day of their sprint:

• Focus on the work. Use your team board to guide the conversation. For each product backlog item, discuss blockers, progress, and the tasks the team will work on today. Seek insights from multiple team members. Doing so will give everyone a shared understanding of what work is in process, where the dependencies are, and how any risks will be mitigated.

• Keep the team board up to date. There are people in your organization who want true status reports. By encouraging the development team to keep their board current, you help create a tool that can provide valuable information to others. Management can walk by the board and see at a glance how things are progressing. This transparency into the work is a great way to build trust with stakeholders.

• Boot the peanut gallery. If someone outside the development team is overpowering the daily scrum, ask them to leave and have a member of the development team facilitate the discussion. You’d be surprised what a new voice can help bring to light. If the problem is you, then either force yourself to remain silent or simply don’t attend. (We talk more about this in the next section.)

• Keep the development team’s eyes on the sprint goal. The purpose of the sprint goal is to remind the team why they’re building the current increment of software. As new work, ideas, or decisions come up in the daily scrum, use the sprint goal as your guidepost to filter out the noise and keep the team focused on the high-priority work.

The daily scrum is meant to communicate so much more than just status updates. Try these techniques and see if they help improve your team’s daily scrum.

All Eyes on the Scrum Master

As we’ve mentioned, the Scrum master isn’t the focal point of the daily scrum. In fact, they don’t even have to attend the event. But if your daily scrum has turned into a status meeting, you might find yourself at the center of the event. If you notice that the development team is talking to you and not to each other, it’s time to make an adjustment.

Take a step back from the group to emphasize that you’re outside of the discussion. Turn away from the team and face the wall. Yes, it’s silly, but the message is clear—the daily scrum is for the development team, not the Scrum master.

Remove yourself from the center of the conversation and enable the team to collaborate with each other. This will help put the focus back on the sprint goal and help the team to self-organize and create a new plan for the day. This is yet another reminder to you, the Scrum master, that very little about the role is about you. Welcome to servant leadership.