Event: Daily Scrum

Table of Contents

3 min read

The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work. - Scrum Guide

When we talked about empirical process control, it was mentioned that its mechanism was based on continuous inspection and adaptation cycles in an environment where transparency is promoted at all levels.

These cycles apply to both the product and the process and are put into practice through Sprints.

It was also mentioned that the Sprint Plan was a tentative plan and that part of it was going to emerge during the Sprint itself as the team works on building the Increment.

Therefore, this means that the Sprint itself is not a predictive plan either, so we cannot control it by using a predictive approach such as comparing progress against the plan and measuring progress in terms of time.

Thus, we need an empirical process control approach, which brings us to the Scrum values of transparency, inspection, and adaptation. These control cycles at the product and process level are carried out every four weeks and are called Sprints, but when we talk about controlling progress towards the Sprint Goal, the control cycle lasts 24 hours and is carried out in the meetings we call Daily Scrum.

The Daily Scrum meeting should not take more than 15 minutes. For this to happen, use the meeting time to bring up what has been done and not try to solve problems during the Daily Scrum. If anyone has issues or concerns, you can reach out to other team members to ask for help right after the Daily Scrum, and not all Developers should necessarily participate, but only those related to the situation. Additionally, I recommend doing the Daily Scrum every day at the same time and in the same place to reduce complexity.

Daily Scrum is Developers for Developers only meeting. It is ok for the Scrum Master to facilitate it at first but, as the Developers get more comfortable, the Scrum Master can transfer the facilitation so that Developers can do it themselves.

A Scrum Master or Product Owner can also have the Developer’s role, and if you do, you would also participate in the Daily Scrum as a Developer.

Try to make the Daily Scrum an open meeting where anyone interested in hearing what is happening can participate as an observer. If the Developers decide to invite observers, ensure that observers do not participate actively in the meeting, or even less, ask the Developers to justify their progress and explain their problems.