How to improve the daily stand up…!
A rugby scrum is about a team of people working together to force a change in an agreed direction, it works because everyone works together. Daily meeting stand ups focus on individuals by asking three questions:
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What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
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What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
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Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?
This focuses the attention on an individual and not the team as a whole to achieve an objective.
Questions left uncovered
Each developer might have spent yesterday being productive, is not blocked and has work to focus on.
However after the meeting it may not be clear if a Sprint Goal is feasible or understood.
Often, several questions remain after the Sprint meeting:
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“What open items remain?”
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“What tasks are near completion, who will finish them (e.g. a code review)?”
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“Why was an item reopened, was there a bug and was it reintroduced?”
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“Are there any tasks dependant on others that may cause an impending impact to others?”
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“What about tasks that have not been worked on yet, will they still be worked on in this Sprint?”
Change focus to items
What matters is for each item on the sprint board to get to Done, to achieve the Sprint Goal. The goal is not to occupy people, but to complete items.
In the Sprint meeting go through all items one by one, let the team respond.
Start from the right hand side. The rightmost items are the closest to the Done state.
Do not loose focus on people
Scrums daily meetings are designed to be quick and allow people to share issues to help them progress items, e.g. Did Xyan complete the green button? If not, what’s holding them up? Have they completed it and moved on to the database indexing?.
The meetings are not designed to be a Sprint Planning or a Review meeting.
The artifacts are always there and everyone can see the burndown, so no developer needs to be told what to work on next.
It is important that the Scrum Master hears from all members in the team during the meeting.
