Joffrey Zehnder
Principal Consultant
A daily standup meeting, according to The Scrum Guide, is a 15-minute scheduled event for the development team to organise themselves for the next 24 hours.
The team answers three standard questions: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Is there anything blocking your progress?
What are the common pitfalls for the success of dailies?
Time use efficiency
This factor is not only based on the communication habits of the team but also on the moderation skills of the Scrum Master. Some of the team members’ problems require more time for discussion. Here the Scrum Master has to decide whether the topic should be discussed to the end or if he should stop the discussion and continue after the daily. From our practice, we tend to use the second solution – the so-called “16th minute” to discuss the issues only with the needed team members.
Sometimes team members cannot get their thoughts to the point quickly. In this case the Scrum Master must help.
The “16th minute” usually lasts another quarter of an hour and can already be scheduled by the Scrum Master, i.e. sent out as an appointment.
Alignment of the time of the dailies
If several teams are working together, e.g. in a Scrum of Scrums or SAFe® setup, and there are dependencies between each other, the dailies should take place within the same time window. In our experience, in the morning from 9 to 11 is a good time window. This ensures that the required information from all teams is available for a possible Scrum Master exchange later.
In addition, 9 to 11 is a time window that suits most developers, especially those who start later.
Unprepared team members
For a daily to be efficient, team members should be prepared. This means that the tasks and stories are updated before the daily, the cards are moved to the correct status and each member is already thinking about what he or she wants to say.
In our experience, it’s also a good idea to change the order of speaking to ensure the daily is dynamic.
Scrum Master only as a moderator, not a micromanager
The Daily is there so that the team find out from each other who is working on what. It is explicitly not meant as an opportunity to report the status of the team to the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is “only” the coach and moderator. This also means that he does not assign work to the team and that the team members are not accountable to him. The team should be self-organised and the Scrum Master supports and coaches the team on this.
