What Is a Daily Scrum, Why Is It So Boring, and Why Is No One Listening?

You can often tell that something is wrong with the agile way of working by looking at how a team runs its Daily Scrum. It should definitely not be boring.

Good morning.

When a team works in an agile way, there’s usually a “Daily.” Sometimes it’s called a “Daily Stand-up” or simply a “Stand-up.” In Scrum, it’s a fixed part of the framework and is called the “Daily Scrum.” So far, so good.

However, I often encounter teams where I find the Daily useless. That could be my own problem and wouldn’t justify a blog post on its own. But the fact that many team members tell me they find their Daily boring and that no one listens to them—that’s interesting.

How did it come to this?

I usually start by asking why the team holds the Daily. And what for. I get answers to the why question more often than to the what for. The “why” can easily be answered with all kinds of cargo-cult reasoning, for example:

It’s part of Scrum. That’s just how it’s done. It’s been that way since I started here. That’s how we begin our workday.

The what for question is trickier for some teams. They simply don’t know. At best, I get answers like, “so we can coordinate,” or “to synchronize,” or “to create transparency.”

On the surface, those sound like good answers. But when you also hear statements like “it’s boring when others talk” and “no one listens to me,” something is clearly off. Or, to put it more positively: the meeting could have potential.

When I work with a team in such a situation, I might suggest the following:

• Before saying anything in the Daily, state who should be interested in what you’re about to say.

• After someone speaks, everyone raises their hand if they heard something useful. (Below I’ll phrase that slightly differently—note the nuance.)

The result might be that the Daily becomes rather quiet. That silence says a lot. The same goes if no one raises their hand very often. Sometimes, that’s because team members aren’t really collaborating—they’re each working on their own tickets. Typically, that also means there’s no shared Sprint Goal that everyone is working toward.

The Scrum Guide says:

“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.”

Oops—A Sprint Goal? We don’t even have one.

And we’re allowed to change the Sprint Backlog? Why that? We committed to those tickets! Are we supposed to abandon them?

Yes—because agile work is not about slavishly completing tickets. (By the way, that’s why this blog is called Escape the Feature Factory.) It’s about achieving goals that create value. That’s why I always encourage the teams I work with to commit to goals, not to tickets.

If halfway through I realize that I can still achieve the goal without completing some tickets—why should I do them? And why should I implement a ticket at all if it doesn’t serve any goal?

The aspect of goal-setting is crucial and will definitely come up again in this blog.

For the Daily, I recommend the following to all developers who want to escape the Feature Factory:

Ask yourself: Who is my contribution for?

And: raise your hand as immediate feedback whenever someone says something that helps you—and the team—get closer to the Sprint Goal.

Until next time.

This article was originally published on heise.de in the german version.