Everything you should know about “ Daily Scrum “

Author Comments:

Daily Scrum is one of the 4 scrum sessions, and in order to better understand the rest of the sessions, I preferred to start my writing career by describing the daily scrum session for the first.

I promise to review other scrum sessions in the next weeks.

A daily scrum session helps you to organize your daily tasks in order to achieve the goal.

What is the daily-standup meeting?

A daily stand-up meeting is a short, time-boxed team status check, held every day, usually at a set time. The Scrum framework calls the daily stand-up a ‘Daily Scrum’.

A daily scrum session that helps all members of the development team focus on one goal. Raise their potential problems and solve them. Get results faster

Also at the meeting, the Scrum Master Gets that team members focus exactly on what you have and whether or not they go right ahead.

Why Should we use daily-standup?

Although change may not always be easy for teams, and sometimes teams may complain about holding daily meetings, here we will refer to the values that a daily meeting has hidden within itself.

1. Increasing accountability:

When you tell your team you’ll do something, it’s harder to say tomorrow that you haven’t done it. Standups are about making commitments to your team members and to yourself. This helps the entire organization by having a daily reminder of all the people and tasks that make the company function. By enabling daily and transparent communication between team members, you help them stay accountable to themselves and to one another.

2. Celebrating accomplishments:

Announcing what you have achieved the previous day allows both you and your team to recognize your achievements and those of the team as a whole. When you try to think of all the things you did yesterday, you might be surprised at how much you’ve accomplished! It also helps with putting your achievements into perspective and boosting motivation: did I actually achieve what I wanted to? If not, how can I make sure that I do achieve it next time? Asking yourself these questions daily allows you to celebrate success while always striving to do better.

3. Retaining focus:

As the workday begins, it’s easy to just jump into tasks in no particular order or to lose yourself in the minutia of details without looking at the bigger picture. When you have to vocalize your tasks and listen to those of others, it’s much easier to plan your day and stay focused on how you are contributing to the larger goals of the team.

4. Identifying problems quickly:

A daily meeting where problems and roadblocks are defined and discussed allows the team leads or other team members to solve them quickly and effectively. By asking people to identify potential problems, team members are empowered to identify issues that they didn’t notice before or were too shy to mention. If impediments are defined and isolated, the team can meet directly after the standup and come up with resolutions, avoiding that small problems become too big to fix.

5. Fostering community:

If your colleagues know what you’re working on and struggling with, they’re likely to jump in and see how they can help. Since everyone on a team participates in the standup, it helps dismantle hierarchies by allowing everyone from the team lead to the entry-level employee to meet on an equal playing field. Whatsmore, some teams are quite large or have members who rotate in and out, so a daily standup can help keep members acquainted with the team members and their individual projects. The more unified and connected your team is, the better off the project will be.

Who leads, what is the focus and how should they take?

Organized and facilitated by the Scrum Master, the intent behind a daily stand-up is that the team come together for a status check — to make sure that everyone is aligned and has visibility over what is going on, good and bad. The traditional format is to gather in a circle near the relevant task board.

Although the daily stand-up session is a completely internal one and the team is responsible for holding it, Scrum Master will always be with the team and make sure that everything goes well.

Things not to do in the daily-standup meeting

According to research, teams often believe that stand-ups are a waste of time. But in fact, it is the team that is probably holding the meeting badly.

There are many reasons for stand-up to perform poorly, but in general, it will not be out of the following 8 issues.

1. Misalignment:

Discussing things that are not related to other people’s work in any way. Or perhaps something that only applies to 1 other teammate in a 6 person standup. So other teammates waste their time listening to non-relevant information, instead of focusing on meaningful work that’s potentially time-sensitive. And when you listen to a teammate discuss something that you don’t need to be present for, you may check out mentally for the rest of the standup, and miss important updates.

2. Too Lengthy:

There are a few reasons why standups can last too long:

Folks could engage in tangential conversations/water cooler chat (instead of work-focused updates).

Someone may start rambling and take 5 mins to find the end of the sentence (it’s pretty common for someone to overshare information and back up what they did with nonessential details to appear more impressive).

According to the Scrum Guide, and from our experience, standups should be kept to a 9 person maximum. When teams try to run standups with overly large teams, it tends to be ineffective/last too long.

3. Problem-Solving During The Standup:

Teammates could engage in problem-solving or get into elaborate discussions during standup meetings (instead of afterward).

4. Inconvenient Meeting Time:

The daily scrum may be scheduled at an inconvenient time that is disruptive (i.e. just as you’re coding and making progress on a difficult problem).

It’s difficult to coordinate schedules and take into account calendar clashes/time zone differences. There’s a time cost involved in getting the entire team to show up to stand up at the same time.

5. Standups Can Make Introverted Folks Uncomfortable:

While some folks overshare information, others are more introverted and don’t feel comfortable speaking in front of a large group. So they stay on the sidelines and either don’t share updates at all or don’t go into enough detail. Standups may provide a boost of energy for extroverts, but have the opposite effect on introverts.

6. Not Listening to Teammates:

Instead of listening to someone’s update, it’s common for teammates to rehearse what they’ll say when their turn comes after the next person. While this makes sense (since nobody wants to embarrass themselves) you can miss out on valuable information by not paying attention to other people’s updates.

7. Skipping Standups:

Not having an established daily standup routine and consistent meeting cadence (i.e. same place, same time) can lead to people skipping/forgetting about standups. If teammates show up late to a standup (or not at all), then they can miss out on important information that potentially affects their work.

8. Not Raising Blockers:

Team members may be too embarrassed or uncomfortable to raise the blockers/impediments they need help with. And facilitators often miss this.

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons for teams to think that standups are a waste of time. But as we said, it’s usually a function of them running standups the wrong way.

How we should hold daily-standup?

To begin with, select a recurring time for the daily stand-up meeting that is convenient for each person that is supposed to attend. I advise you to schedule it soon after the beginning of the workday. This will allow you to sync your plan for the day and avoid mistakes caused by a lack of communication.

basically, the daily session starts with 3 main questions, and If you want to focus on the team, during the daily meeting each person, with no exception, must be able to answer 3 fundamental

• What did you do yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• Are there any blockers or impediments preventing you from doing your work?

On the surface, the purpose of these questions may seem straightforward:

The team gets on the same page in terms of who completed specific tasks. You discover:

· What still needs completion?

· Based on yesterday’s results, do our plans change today?

· The team gets a clear picture of if they’re on track to complete the sprint goal.

· Teammates get a chance to help each other by removing blockers/impediments.

But the 3 standup questions provide non-obvious and unique benefits/insights that most teams miss.

How to determine the order of speaking?

To begin with, you need to determine who starts speaking first. A commonly-adopted practice is for the last person entering the meeting to have the honor.

How can we manage daily-standup sessions in corona time?

Most articles you’ll find about running standups remotely detail how to do it via video (i.e. Zoom). It seems logical: you normally do standups in person, looking at everyone’s faces, so why not do them remotely with a video call, also looking at everyone’s faces.

But posts about this topic often overlook the fact that video calls present several problems for remote teams who run daily scrums:

1. Different Time Zones:

Video standups require all team members to be there at the same time. But time zone and personal work schedule differences can make it difficult to schedule a daily meeting time that is convenient for everyone. This is especially true for larger teams (i.e. 12 people spread over 7 time zones).

2. Takes Too Much Time:

Video standups can run too long. Just like in-person standups, they often turn into lengthy problem-solving sessions. Or someone starts rambling about a trivial issue with no end in sight. So a 15-minute team meeting could turn into 30 minutes, leaving teammates frustrated since they just want to get back to work.

3. Sitting Through Updates That Are Unrelated to Your Own Work:

Standup attendees may have to sit through long updates that don’t apply to them (especially common in larger teams). For example, in an 8 person standup, someone may only need to hear an update from 2 people, not all eight. Naturally, folks get bored listening to info that doesn’t pertain to them. So they check out mentally for the rest of the meeting and stop listening or sharing. This of course cannibalizes the main benefit of standups: people getting in sync.

4. Network Issues:

It’s always frustrating when you experience internet connection issues during a video call. Folks keep getting disconnected from the meeting. And the audio may get so choppy that you can’t hear a teammate’s important update. So time is wasted… the teammate has to repeat the update again or just switch to chat if the connection doesn’t improve.

5. Video Standups May Intimidate Introverts & Exhaust Them:

Video standups can stress out introverts because they might not feel comfortable speaking in front of the whole team. They prefer sharing updates via text. Extroverts may leave video calls full of energy and excitement. But introverts could feel completely drained afterward and no longer able to focus on meaningful work.

6. Disrupts Workflow:

Team members may have to stop working and break out of a flow to attend a video call standup that is set at a specific time. There’s nothing worse than getting in the zone while coding… and then having to drop everything you’re doing to attend a meeting.

teammates on the same call at a specific time. Sometimes, it was just impossible due to calendar clashes & time zone differences. To add to that, we’d often get off track so our standup meetings would occasionally overrun by as much as 1 hour.

Clearly, standup video calls were a major pain point for us.

That’s why we generally preferred to bring our daily stand-up sessions to Slack.

Here are some good robots that will help you have better meetings with them:

1. 1.geekbot

2. 2.dailybot

3. 3.standuply

…

Finally, I must say that it does not matter what context you hold your meetings with, it is important that your meetings are correct and effective.

I hope this article is helpful to you, and also thank you for taking the time to read this.

References:

1.medium.com

2.geekbot.com

3.scrum.org

4.kanbanize.com

5.Agility.im