Identifying opportunities to collaborate - Daily Stand-up.

In Scrum, on each day of a sprint, the team holds a daily scrum meeting called the “daily scrum.” Meetings are typically held in the same location and at the same time each day. Ideally, a daily scrum meeting is held in the morning, as it helps set the context for the coming day’s work. These scrum meetings are strictly time-boxed to 15 minutes. This keeps the discussion brisk but relevant.

Three Questions

In turn each team member gives an update to the team addressing three questions:

• 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 impediment that prevents me or the development team from meeting the sprint goal?

Stand-up’s done badly

Over the last 5 years I’ve been involved in many daily stand-ups and during this time I’ve seen lots of different behaviours during the ceremony which has meant the team haven’t been able to fully benefit from having the ceremony.

Ive seen teams/team members:

• stating they felt the ceremony was a waste of time
• whole teams giving updates directly to the ScrumMaster
• switching off until it’s their turn and not listening to others
• giving very brief updates, i.e. “Yesterday working on ticket ABC123, Today picking up ticket DEF456, No blockers”

Identifying opportunities to collaborate

The updates are for the team, the ScrumMaster is there to take note of any issues to help un-block the team of any impediments and to ensure the ceremony sticks within the 15 minutes timebox. The stand-up is held to get team members in sync and identify how well the team is progressing toward the sprint goal.

When giving a stand-up update, be transparent. Share information around what you did yesterday, what you plan to do today and if you have any impediments. In being transparent with each other the team can help to identify opportunities to collaborate. Maybe a team member has the skills or knowledge in order to help you think about your current task/story differently, maybe helping you to see a potential issue enabling you to fail fast, or to simply just make you think of something you hadn’t.