What is the Daily Scrum?

Inspect progress towards the Sprint goal to synchronize activities and create a plan for the next 24 hours. It’s by the development team, for the development team. It’s timebox to 15 minutes and it happens every day.

What is a status meeting?

it’s an opportunity where different team members come together and give an update on their progress for the tasks they’ve been working on to somebody else typically who is maintaining a plan, a lot of times that may be a project manager, maybe a team lead.

Different between Daily Scrum event and Status Meeting

Self-Organization

The daily scrum helps promote self-organization and that is what is the heart of agility, it was at the heart of scrum. So, the development team has this shared accountability to create a done increment and that means because they’re countable, they determined how to do it. They own the Sprint Backlog and by having this event every day, where they inspect their progress and adapt that sprint backlog together, this event is helping the development team self-organized and fulfill their accountability.

If we treat the daily scrum as a status meeting, then we end up with the development team often kind of giving an update on what they’ve worked on themselves to somebody else and it feels like that accountability isn’t there that empowerment to make decisions and to own how they do the work can fall to the wayside a little bit.

Maximize Transparency

The Daily Scrum also helps maximize our transparency which is what helps enable frequent inspection and adaptation. So in Scrum, we’re using empiricism. We’re using an empirical approach to deal with the complexity and unpredictability that we have in Software Development.

And 1 of those 3 pillars of empiricism is transparency so if the development team members who are responsible for creating this working increment if they’re there and they all know what’s going on whether it’s good information, whether it’s bad information you know, and everything in between. It is at least transparent so they can adapt based on this new information, the current state, and the empirical evidence that we have those new learnings that they have gained in the past 24 hours of working towards the sprinkle.

If the development team members are treating this as a status meeting and they’re reporting status to somebody else, especially somebody outside the development team, then we may not get the full story about the progress and we may lose transparency there. The other thing is we’re not emphasizing the adaptation part of this inspect and adapt cycle.

Achieving valuable outcomes:

Let’s talk about the daily scrum focusing on achieving valuable outcomes. The entire point of scrum is done and the Sprint goal is what’s helping guide the development team in terms of what is the purpose of doing this sprint.

So, if they’re assessing the progress in the context of the spread they’re identifying potentially new work that endangers a sprinkle they can discuss they can adapt the plan. If they have issues that are slowing down their progress or preventing them from moving forward to meet that sprint goal, they’re going to have that discussion and they’re going to adapt the plan.

By switching the focus from a traditional status meeting being about what tasks are being done, we’re focusing on our progress towards a goal, our progress towards a valuable outcome for our business.

Collaboration

Daily Scrum also promotes collaboration. So, all the development team members are going to be there and they’re going to have awareness situational awareness about their progress, about what people on the team are working on, and what impediments are slowing progress. So, if everybody is on the same page and they’re focused on their shared accountabilities, this is bringing that opportunity for more collaboration and this is why I often call the daily scrum is a collaborative planning session. No one person owns the plan, the development team owns the plan. They create it and they adapt it together. So instead of focusing on the individual contributions in a status meeting, we’re focusing on the collaborative whole.

These questions need to be answerable after each Daily Scrum:

• Are we really achieving the purpose?
• Is this a collaborative planning session?
• Are we inspecting and adapting and focusing on valuable outcomes?