Daily Scrum

Daily Standup in My Notes

Purpose

According to a pile of evidence shown in the Daily Scrum in the Scrum Guide, such as

The Daily Scrum optimises the probability that the Development Team will meet the Sprint Goal.

and

This is a key inspect and adapt meeting.

, I would say the fundamental purpose of Daily Scrum is

to help the team meet the Sprint Goal

through

inspecting progress since the last Daily Scrum

and

adapting the way of working during the upcoming Sprint work.

Basic rules

Five essential rules of Daily Scrum have been concluded in the playlist of Daily Stand-up Meeting (aka Daily Scrum), within which you can dive in the detailed explanations of these five basic rules. Although there are quite a lot of controversies about some of the rules, I do agree with all of them which are listed as follows.

  1. must do daily stand-up
  2. must do stand-up
  3. same time every day
  4. keep it short (not simple, but efficient and effective)
  5. stand up

And there is one additional rules that I would like to add to the list, which is

6. Each turn, only one person talks

As far as I’m concerned, why this rule is deemed as one of the bases can be answered from the following prospectives. Firstly, one of the Scrum Values guides the team members should respect each other, and one of the specific ways of respect is listening and not interrupting others’ speaking. Secondly, uninterrupted speaking ensures the meeting finished in the fix timescale, rather than lengthening the meeting duration in order to in-depth discussions. Then, the whole team would focus on figuring out the progress and blockers toward the Sprint Goal in this manner. Lastly, the clearly identified issues could improve communication and collaboration after the meeting accordingly toward completing the work as a team in the Sprint Backlog.

Attendees

The Daily Scrum is an internal meeting for the Development Team. If others are present, the Scrum Master ensures that they do not disrupt the meeting.

The Scrum Guide

Speaking Order

This is an often ignored but important point of the Daily Scrum. An appropriate mechanism of speaking ordering will facilitate the Development Team members concentrating on what others are presenting as opposed to preparing speaking or thinking of other things, so as to improve communications, identify impediments and promote quick decision-making efficiently and effectively and so forth. Therefore, I suppose if the speaking ordering of each attendee would not reveal until he or she speaks, it should be working well to conflict with this potential tendency. The detailed discussion can be found in The Talking-in Order during the Daily Standup.

Being Late Penalty

In order to the agreement that the Daily Scrum MUST start on time, there may be attendees showing up late for the meetings. With regards to the penalties for the late arrivals, there are some of the most common rules including gold coin penalty, singing or doing push-ups, etc. However, Kym Gilhooly has recognised the drawbacks of these penalties and pointed out that these penalties cannot eliminate the problem of arriving late ultimately in 6 basic things you shouldn’t be doing during daily stand-up. Hence, the punishment for individuals being late is not a rather good solution. Conversely, it is better to let participants fully relieve their anger due to their time not being respected.

Structure

The Three Questions

The first one is the classic three questions (Yesterday-Today-Obstacles) around the work has done and will do, and the identified blockers. This is the most commonly used structure that has been introduced as a typical example in the Scrum Guide. And I also found an example IBM Agile Academy: Daily Stand-up Meeting that an Agile team conducted the meeting in this manner in IBM. The three-question structure provides a process for the meeting keeping participants pay attention to the work toward the Sprint Goal, as opposed to talking about all kinds of things that don’t relate to the team.

The Kanban-style

Kanban-style daily stand-ups focus more on:

  1. What obstacles are impeding my progress?
  2. (looking at the board from right to left) What has progressed?

In the episode Agile Daily Standup – How To Walk the Board (aka Walk the Wall), the interpretation of looking at the board from right to left has been indicated.

The Combination

It was pointed out that the three questions structure may cause members to focus more on their personal work, while the task-based structure may lead to the scattered speaking content. I reckon the combination of the two structure could eliminate the concerns. The specific process is each participant answers three questions sequentially according to the relevant tasks on the board from right to left.

In this manner, the three questions may still be used but will be from the perspective of the work item, rather than the person. As a result, knowledge transfer and internal communication would be greatly promoted and the Development Team members could take more opportunities to ask for help or collaborate ultimately.

The Three Questions again

The order

Let’s go back to see the purpose of Daily Scrum. I found this to be a progressive process, which is from reviewing the work that has been done to plan the next work in turns to optimising the possibility of achieving the Sprint Goal similarly to the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop introduced in the Lean Startup framework. Consequently, I would say that the plan for the next work produced during the Daily Scrum should consist of two parts: the developing work and adaptations. In this case, the done work has been done and the spotted impediments need to be clarified before the plan is determined. So the priority of the three questions I suggesting could be:

  1. What did I do yesterday that helped the development team meet the sprint goal?
  2. Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the development team from meeting the sprint goal?
  3. What will I do today to help the development team meet the sprint goal?

The Fallacy

When I read some introductions and guidances of Daily Scrum, there may be something wrong I feeling. The above screenshot is the example indicating the three questions used in Daily Scrum. Will all questions be answered around the individual work? This is a misleading utterly. Although there is only a nuance between the questions displayed on some websites and the questions on the Scrum Guide literally, working as a team and helping to team meet the Sprint Goal should be strongly emphasised. This has been proved by the comment left by Dwayne Stroman in one of the misleading introduction episodes of Daily Scrum.

The 3 questions can easily lead this into a status meeting. The team should already know progress through collaboration. The daily scrum is about a new plan for the day, not a report of what I did and what i’m going to do. The questions should be “what progress did we make as a team?” and “what should we focus on today as a team?” and “What impediments do we face as a team?”

So, just use the version of the three questions presented in the Scrum Guide and keep working as a team in mind.

  1. What did I do yesterday that helped the development team meet the sprint goal?
  2. What will I do today to help the development team meet the sprint goal?
  3. Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the development team from meeting the sprint goal?

The Talking-in Order during the Daily Standup

When I search for some cases of Daily Standup, there is a very interesting point that people usually concern with, which is the talking-in order. Two questions emerge from it commonly as follows.

WHO IS THE FIRST?

and

WHO IS THE NEXT?

The Scrum Guide introduces the rules of Daily Standup meetings so simply, in which there is even no emphasis on the speaking order. So why? Are the answers to these two questions important? I reckon YES.

Firstly, I would say if there is no team member who has considered these kind of questions, there must be a fallacy among the Agile team. Who can decide which one’s speaking triggers the current Daily Standup meeting? And who can take charge of prioritising the speaking sequence of the development team members? Nobody can, not even the Scrum Master, but only the Development Team itself. The Scrum Guide indicates that

The Scrum Master ensures that the Development Team has the meeting, but the Development Team is responsible for conducting the Daily Scrum.

As a self-organising team, the Development Team should make an agreement on the speaking order. If each member is asked to talk in sequentially by the facilitator, then it would be a bureaucratic report meeting.

Secondly, The Scrum Guide defines the Daily Standup is a 15-minute time-boxed meeting. The Development Team should inspect the work and plan for the next in such limited timespan in order to optimise the probability of meeting the Sprint Goal. Hence,

conducting Daily Standup meetings efficiently and effectively

is a crucial work the entire team has to contribute to, as opposed to performing simple status meetings. This is also the fundamental purpose of raising the two issues mentioned above.

Let’s have a look at some widely used approaches applied for the speaking order introduced by Jason Yip. Who is the person talking in first? One conventional solution is that last arrival speaks first, while Jason has also pointed out a tendency that “the last arrival is also likely to be the person who is least prepared to start off the meeting well“. With regard to the priority techniques (also includes picking up the first speaker), Jason lists three of them in his post It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings, which are predictable ordering, unpredictable ordering and ‘Take a Card’ game. The detailed rules, benefits and drawbacks have been identified in the post. Although Jason did not point out the shortcomings of ‘Take a Card’ game, I do not think that this approach can help the team accomplish the fundamental purpose proposed above. There may still be a tendency to prepare or think of other things rather than pay attention to what others are saying in this manner.

As far as I’m concerned, a simple random system could be considered to build. Since the team has been formed ready, the Scrum Master input the names of all development team members into the system. At the beginning of Daily Standup meetings, the last arrival presses the button to produce a member’s name randomly who will speak first. After he or she finished, press the button to introduce the next member to talk in, and so on. I suppose the system could help each member focus on the current speaking and facilitate the efficiency and effectiveness of the meetings. Any suggestions?