A regular meeting held every day; easy to misunderstand and overlook its purpose.
Scrum Guide:
“The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team. The Daily Scrum is held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Development Team plans work for the next 24 hours. This optimizes team collaboration and performance by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum and forecasting upcoming Sprint work. The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity.
The Development Team uses the Daily Scrum to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and to inspect how progress is trending toward completing the work in the Sprint Backlog.
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Here is an example of what might be used:
- 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?”
People tend to think that the daily scrum is only about answering three questions:
- What did you do yesterday?
- What will you do?
- Any impediments?
The meeting could easily turn into a reporting session. What is the main purpose of Scrum? To inspect and adapt as soon as possible. The team should inspect their progress towards the sprint goal and adapt accordingly. An easy way of doing this is to give a quick update on each story in the Sprint backlog.
It is also essential to keep the event strictly time-boxed and don’t let anyone to get into too much detail. If anything important pops up which can’t be discussed or solved in few minutes on the meeting it should be taken offline and discussed later. The discussion preferably happens after the stand-up to avoid context switching and only with the involvement of the relevant parties to keep it focused and efficient.
To sum up avoid long talks and stay focused on the goal; eyes on the prize.