Common Misconceptions

Most people consider Daily Scrum is presumed to be a Status Meeting where Scrum Master takes status from the teams. One of the most common reasons for this is because people have used Project Manager as an entity for years and assume that Scrum Master is a renaming of Project Manager role and Daily Scrum to be a new name for “Status Meeting”.

What is Daily Scrum Really?

• Daily Scrum is not a Status Meeting. Daily Scrum is a inspect-adapt forum for the Developers to make a plan for next 24-48 hours by checking if the Sprint Goal is being met or not
• Developers sync up daily so that the plan for next 24-48 hours is effectively done
• Updating the Sprint Backlog should be the main goal of the Daily Scrum. This optimizes the probability of meeting the Sprint Goal
• Daily Scrum is a effective forum for improving communication and collaborations between Developers

Recommendation about Scrum Master’s Role in Daily Scrum

• Scrum Master may facilitate the Daily Scrum to ensure it gets over in 15 minutes and people do not make it a detailed discussion forum. However, Scrum Master is not considered the compulsory participant of Daily Scrum.
• Scrum Master’s role is to make the team independent and help them becoming self-managed team. Therefore, Scrum Master should teach the Developers to run the Daily Scrum effectively by doing a quick sync up and updating the Sprint Backlog
• Once the team becomes self-managed and know how to get the Daily Scrum completed within 15 minutes, Scrum Master should change his/her stance to an observer stance. That means the team has to talk to each other without Scrum Master’s intervention
• Scrum Master should teach the Developers to keep the status transparent through various tools and techniques such as Burn Up Charts, Burn Down Charts, Scrum Boards. This avoids a lot of wasteful status discussions in the Daily Scrum
• Once the Scrum Master feels that the Developers are managing on their own, the Scrum Master should purposely skip a couple of Daily Scrum and find out if the Developers still keeps doing the Daily Scrum on their own. If the Developers also skip the Daily Scrum, just because the Scrum Master was not there, then Scrum Master should treat this as an opportunity to coach the team again
• If Scrum Master notices that Product Owner is conducting reviews of Product during the Daily Scrum, then, Scrum Master should coach the PO not to do it and create another forum where the review of the product could be done
• Similarly, if Scrum Master notices that the line managers are wasting the time of Developers by taking status, then Scrum Master must intervene and prevent the line managers from doing this
• Sometimes, one of the Developers wastes a lot of time of others during the Daily Scrum trying to dominate the forum by showing off on his/her skills. Scrum Master’s job to facilitate and ensure that everyone gets equal chance during Daily Scrum. There are many facilitation techniques which could be used. For example, tossing the ball every 60 seconds to the next person to speak, introducing friendly penalties (buying a drink for everyone, doing 10 push-ups) for exceeding the time allocated to speak etc.

Conclusion

Thus, Scrum Master is not a mandatory participant of Daily Scrum. “Not Mandatory” does not mean that Scrum Master is always Absent in Daily Scrum. Scrum Master’s role is to make the team independent so that they can manage the Daily Scrum to inspect and adapt and optimize the probability of meeting the Sprint Goal. Once the team becomes independent, it is better for the Scrum Master to take a step back and take observer position.

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Common Misconceptions and negative implications

Most teams implement Sprint Planning as three parts – Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. The Product Owner comes in part 1 and 2, helps with setup of the Sprint Goal (WHY) selection of functionality (WHAT) and then the Developers sits and thinks over the technical (HOW) during the Part 2 of the sprint planning. The implication of this is that PO then does not get involved in the detailing and the road-blocks that team faces and technical feasibility problems that result during the Part 3 becomes a back-and-forth discussion between PO and Developers. This obviously results in a loss of productivity.

Recommendations

• The whole Sprint Planning process is an iterative, incremental and collaborative process and therefore there are three Topics and not three Parts to the meeting.
• First topic – WHY – is the business objective
• Second topic – WHAT – is the selection of the Product Backlog Items which may help achieve the goal. So, it is forecasting what items should be part of this Sprint. The scrum team should self manage and pickup items that they think they will be able to deliver in the Sprint.
• Third Topic – HOW – is the discussion of details and feasibility of the items and the help required from Scrum Master or Product Owner to get this done.
• So, you can consider the WHAT and HOW are iterative in nature where the HOW revolves around the WHAT and joint discussions are necessary. There are possible considerations that may happen to the WHAT because of the HOW. Technicalities do influence to a large extent on WHAT can be done and what cannot.
• The Sprint Planning Event can end with a decision on THE WHY – Sprint Goal, a forecast of WHAT needs to be done and the HOW for at-least a few things to be done over the next few days. However, the Sprint Planning PROCESS does not end with Sprint Planning EVENT. The Product Owner and Developers keep doing the discussion on the two topics – WHAT and HOW throughout the Sprint. Many-a-times, the teams do these detailed discussions on the HOW for the WHATs after daily scrums on the plan for next 24-48 hours.

So, my recommendation is not to call the Sprint Planning as Part1, Part2 and Part3 but iterative, incremental and collaborative process of Topic1, Topic2 and Topic3 which starts with Sprint Planning and continues throughout the Sprint.

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Common Misconceptions and Negative implications

Most teams conduct Daily scrum as a status meeting. When this happens, following negative implications result

• Developers start thinking that this is Scrum Master’s forum
• Developers don’t take accountability
• Developers lose interest and start saying “there is nothing to status report every day”

Recommendations:

• Primary intention of Daily Scrum is to Inspect and Adapt. This is supposed to be a forum where the Developers finds out if things are going in the right direction. If they are not, then it is time to discuss the same and adapt as soon as possible. If required, the scope needs to be adjusted, decisions need to be taken so that the Developers comes back on track.
• It is good to keep the “Sprint Goal” at the centre when the Daily Scrum discussions are on. This is not about day-to-day tasks. This event is about knowing if we will be meeting the “Sprint Goal” or the business objective.
• Daily Scrum should be an opportunity for the Scrum Master to help the team become self managed.
• The three questions (while they are not compulsory in Scrum) actually are mis-understood by most teams. The three questions are not about “What did you do?”, “What are you going to do?”, “What are your impediments?”. The tree questions are about Sprint Goal and not about what tasks you are doing . So the correct 3 questions are

1. What did I do yesterday that helped the Developers meet the Sprint Goal?
2. What will I do today to help the Developers meet the Sprint Goal?
3. Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Developers from meeting the Sprint Goal?

• Daily Scrum is also an important opportunity for collaboration for the Developers. Scrum Master is actually a facilitator in this forum. Scrum Master’s job is to make sure
  • The Daily Scrum happens
  • Negative things which happen regularly are prevented
  • To make sure that it finishes off on time within 15 minutes and teams are free to go back to work.
• The only mandatory participants of Daily Scrum therefore are the Developers members and not Scrum Master and Product Owner. PO if at all joins,  his presence is limited to clarifying scope. 

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