Best Practices for Your Daily Scrum Meeting

A daily scrum or stand up, is a 15-30 minutes meeting for teams to meet and synchronize activities. It is an opportunity to fine tune daily priorities, understand what is being done by each team member and how they can help each other deliver the sprint goal. The purpose of the meeting is collaboration and not the status update.

Best Practices

• Strictly Timeboxed – Set expectations with your team and make it clear that the meeting will always start and end at its appointed time.

• Start Regardless of Who is There – Start with whoever is present and you will see the latecomers will try harder the next day.

• Have each team member run through the following questions:

  • What did you do yesterday?

  • What is the plan for today?

  • Are there any impediments?

• Use Due Dates – Due dates are a good way to communicate what is planned to be completed.
  Note: If you are running Agile in a large enterprise then this simple task can be a way of eliminating many status meetings with external teams and management.

• Update the Sprint Board– Have the team update their user stories and tasks before the start of the meeting. This is especially important for virtual teams.

• Include All Team Members– Everyone responsible for the sprint delivery should be included in the meeting.

A Final Note

In order to work effectively, a Daily Scrum Meeting should not be viewed as a status update or a progress tracking meeting. You will quickly lose excitement and buy-in if it is approached this way. Rather it should be viewed as a chance to ensure collaboration among team members and resolve impediments as a team. It is important to remember that the definition of a successful sprint is team members committed to delivering sprint contents, working together as one unit and are supporting each other to achieve the sprint goals.