Daily stand-ups and the 15 minute challenge

The daily stand-up or daily Scrum is an essential feature of Scrum. It requires that everyone be present in person, or call in. It is a time boxed event which means it has a time limit and cannot exceed 15 minutes!

There are three essential questions every team member answers in the stand-up – what you did yesterday, what you plan to do today, and if you have any barriers or obstacles. The meeting takes place at the same time and same place every day to make it easy and ‘automatic’. Some teams do this at the beginning of the day, so that they have a roadmap ready for the rest of the day. Some teams prefer the evening when they have a good idea of what they achieved that day, and want to have an action plan ready for the next day. The time could also be determined by time limitations team members may have such as some people being in different time zones.

The Scrum Master acts as a facilitator here and makes sure that everyone sticks to the format. Any potential lengthy discussions are deferred for later. These kind of design discussions are generally held immediately after the Scrum. The SM also documents any new barriers on the board and has his/her work cut out. The Scrum Master may give his/her own update too explaining how s/he worked on particular barriers or concerns the team had.

One practice I have seen followed is that team members move the task cards during the stand-up. This is supposed to give a person a sense of accountability as they move a card from the ‘not started’ to the ‘in progress’ section. Similarly team members feel a sense of achievement when they move a card from ‘in process’ to ‘done’. Many coaches encourage this physical act instead of making updates in some online tool.

Distributed teams can prove to be a challenge for the daily Scrum. If there are only 2-3 persons in a closer time zone, they generally call in. If there is a large team (5+) in a far-off time zone such as another continent, they can have their own Scrum locally, and email updates to the Product Owner and the rest of the team.

The daily stand-up ensures that the team ‘inspects and adapts’ on a regular basis. Everyone is aware of the general updates and what is happening on the team, and how their progress or lack of it may be affecting others or causing impediments in others’ work. E.g delay in coding a certain feature may be blocking the testing story.

The information gained in the daily stand-up exposes potential and current issues and empowers the team to adapt themselves to complete the Sprint goal.