A key element in the execution of scrum, is the daily stand-up. It is a short meeting held by the scrum team, typically at the beginning of the day. The purpose of the meeting is to assess the team progress towards the scrum goals and address any challenges to meet those goals. Running daily stand-ups drives transparency among team members and allows them to control the activities in light of progress achieved and any changes that may come during the scrum period. Based on my experience, teams that conducted daily stand-up regularly and effectively had significantly better results in meeting their scrum goals.
For teams that do not regularly conduct a daily stand-up, I will dedicate a post in the near future to share some insights and steps taken to transform the daily stand-up from a dull ceremony team members felt forced to participate in, into a team event that gets people excited and engaged. However, even teams that diligently perform daily stand-ups and appreciate their value will find themselves wondering from time to time “should we really have one today?”. Take for example the Jupiter team, a team of four developers (one of which is the Team Leader) and a Quality Assurance expert. This team regularly holds daily stand-up sessions at 9 am. This morning Larry and Dave found out that Alice, the UI developer, is in training through the end of the week, Mark the Team Leader is out for Staff activity and Bill the QA expert has taken the morning off. Larry thought that there is no point in holding a stand-up with most of the team absent. Dave, on the other hand, said that a stand-up can still help the two of them plan their daily activities better. So, stand-up or not in this situation? What do you think?
I happened to step into the team room, well after the regular stand-up time and found Larry and Dave deeply engaged in code development. After hearing their question, I recommended to hold the team stand-up as usual, even if it included just the two of them (with me as a guest 😊). Stand-ups should be held every morning or, if there is a dire conflict, as soon as possible afterwards. Surely the quality of two team members stand-up is not the same as having the whole team together. However, having a stand-up with lower attendance is better than having none. In the case of Team Jupiter, that morning, the progress of some team members was missing in the tracking application. Larry and Dave made few calls to get the information and updated the systems. After holding the stand-up, they realized that some scrum deliverables are at very high risk. Larry shared this information with the Product Owner, who gave directions to move two deliverables back to the backlog. This alignment placed the team back on track and in alignment with their customers.
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