What is a Daily Scrum for?

Did you already miss the daily scrum on purpose? If not, you are lucky. Did you never get afraid of a daily scrum? If not, you are lucky. In my years of experience, I have seen all those types of issues with daily scrums. Does your team always start the daily scrum on time? If yes, you are lucky. There are two types of questions for trying to find the issue. What is wrong with you? or What is wrong with your daily scrum? To answer that we need to first check what a daily scrum is for. Let’s look at what the scrum guide says and the commom mistakes when doing a daily scrum.

Mistake number 1 — Extrapolate the Time Box — Every event in scrum is timeboxed and one of the mistakes is to extrapolate the meeting time. When you don’t respect people’s time, you are giving a bad message to them, the message is that your team is not organized. That leads to not predicting time every day and people can start to get anxious and sometimes angry, since they have a schedule to deliver sprint backlog items.

Mistake number 2 — Losing daily focus — Losing focus on the meeting agenda and using it for another purpose will kill the meeting objectives and will turn it into an unuseful meeting. Keep focus on your agenda and do not let it lose focus.

Mistake number 3 — Solving issues during the Daily — A common mistake is trying to solve the issue during the daily with everyone. That takes too much time for the team and takes out its purpose. Schedule another meeting to discuss that with a subgroup of the team.

Mistake number 4 — Not creating actions plans — Issues will be reported in the scrum daily and the team must create an action plan to resolve, otherwise they will not accomplish the sprint goal. Schedule another meeting to discuss that with a subgroup of the team.

Mistake number 5— Scrum Master and Product Owner in the Daily — Developers are responsible for how to do things in a sprint, if Scrum Master or Product Owner are in a Daily, for sure, they will have some questions or doubts because they are outside of the job and not completed integrated with current tasks in the sprint, these questions will disturbing the meeting. Also, it can transform the in a daily status report meeting and turn it into a micromanagement meeting.

Start by the scrum values commitment,focus, respect, openness, and courage and scrum pillars transparency, inspection, and adaptation, otherwise you will end up in the same old management process with a bad working environment. Focus on building a team before just following a process guide, because a process without a team is nothing.

Using dynamics and building an agenda to make your team’s meetings more fun. Some examples are described in (Caroli P. and Coimbra, 2021), for instance, you can use energized or checking tasks, like Paulo Punctual, Security Verification or One word. In Paulo Punctual you start saying your name and one adjective that starts with the first letter of name, for instance, “Hi, I’m Felipe Focused”. It helps the team to remember each other’s names.

Products are made by people and for people. If you just look at the process and process´s results, you will never reach a place where people feel comfortable to work, your team will never become a team and you will keep trying the runway of the Daily Scrum Meeting.

Caroli P. e Coimbra, T. “FunRestrospective: Atividades e ideias para tornar suas retrospectivas ágeis mais envolventes”, Rio de Janeiro — Ed. Caroli, 2021.

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