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Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

blog.valuemotive.com

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Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#2
> Usually the better the project is going, the less you need the daily.

That quote sums it up pretty nicely. To bad of a naming for this type of meeting. Hard to negotiate to do a "daily" less then daily.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#3
This kind of daily meetings make me feel like I'm standing trial for my crimes. Especially if I've had a bad/down/unproductive day, which happens.

Maybe it's better when you take away the power relations. And reduce the frequency during non-critical periods.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#4
post #2

> Usually the better the project is going, the less you need the daily. That quote sums it up pretty nicely. To bad of a naming for this type of meeting. Hard to negotiate to do a "daily" less then daily.

Agreed - whether it should be done daily or not is a decision based on a wide number of inputs.

When it's work best anecdotally, is when we hold regular retrospectives ON our agile ways of working. EG: Is the standup working for us? What should we stop/start/continue in our standups?

When this 'retro of agile' (rather than just project/product retros) take place regularly you quickly come across a format and cadence that works for the team.

Tools are just tools, they should work for us, not the other way around.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#5
> Another variation would be to do the daily on Slack which can even be asynchronous.

That is exactly what I do. Every morning answer 3 things in Slack. It is also good way to say "Good morning, now I start to work on X, yesterday I did Z and I need some help on Y.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#6
I think they are worth it for remote teams. Most of the work comms can be easily done in slack, but there’s definitely a benefit of making people talk to each other and express emotions at least once a day.

Normal offices accomplish that with water cooler talk and informal chatter, but you miss on that with remote teams. There might be a better way to solve the “loosing of esprit de corps” thing but dailies are the easiest thing I’ve seen do that.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#7
Daily stand-ups have two formats, one is Round Robin that has origins in Scrum, other is Walk the Board that is more Kanban. I highly recommend you switching from "did yesterday/do today" to "walking the board" as it is less about checking what each employee delivered in a day but rather what the team can do to move tickets through the board. It is also more inclusive allowing quiet/introverted/non-native English speaking members of the team to participate in the meeting rather than rehearse their updates in their heads ignoring others.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#8

> Another variation would be to do the daily on Slack which can even be asynchronous. That is exactly what I do. Every morning answer 3 things in Slack. It is also good way to say "Good morning, now I start to work on X, yesterday I did Z and I need some help on Y.

The point of a stand up is to get everyone face to face to enable quick interactions and collaboration, and to do so in a very lightweight way.

Doing it as you suggest is simply doing daily update reports and negates the point of a daily scrum.

I feel often Agile principles are taken as buzzwords without really trying to understand the point. Now, whether the point works for you and your team is another question.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#9

> Another variation would be to do the daily on Slack which can even be asynchronous. That is exactly what I do. Every morning answer 3 things in Slack. It is also good way to say "Good morning, now I start to work on X, yesterday I did Z and I need some help on Y.

The thing with dailies is not that you share your updates, its more that you’re forced to listen to everyone else’s.

Granted you can always snooze a bit and pretend, but that kind of bad faith is usually indicative of other deeper problems with the team.

Also this can become a drag if you’re “held accountable” rather than “helped in need” but smart leaders would recognize that and attempt to fix the problem in the team, and a daily like that can be a tool for them to diagnose problems like this.

Re: Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

#10
I see the value in daily communication and the general topics (yesterday, today, blockers) of the dailies, but at the same time the daily standups show how the in general much of the modern work and communication has moved to asynchronous methods but the text book example still requires the events to happen in a synchronous way (eg. standup at 9 am) which obviously causes issues.

Then you move forward to move say the dailies in Slack, at which point they just get posted whenever people see fit, which sort of works unless the problems themselves need to be solved synchronously, as it is with many cases and they easily just end up being status reports instead of actual planning.

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