How to do a better daily

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If you have issues taking full advantage of your dailies, whatever your role is (dev, Scrum Master, PO…) you can suggest a plan for the team to appropriate and make it evolve.

Here is an example of what I put in place with teams, hoping that it will help you doing yours.

What is a daily?

The daily Scrum is a Scrum event.

According to the Scrum Guide, the daily is a dedicated time for the development team for planification and inspection. Yes, every day we plan and improve with Scrum! We don’t wait for that.

The daily is not a report to someone who’s not part of the dev team. It’s a moment of collaboration.

A plan, or going wild?

I’m convinced that the daily should be informal, because it would mean that it is completely natural for the team.

Before, going there, you should sometimes help the team to acquire good reflexes.

The Scrum Guide propose three questions to ask:

• What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
• What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
• Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?

The plan

In order to help a team find its way in the daily, or unmotivated to do it, you can propose to start one new thing.

Just one thing. You (the team) can choose accordingly to the team’s context, per example, start with something simple (in addition to the three questions):

• Begin the daily with a questions: Is the sprint objective in danger?
• Then, everyone ask itself the three questions

We will then embellish our plan empirically. By observing the daily, we will know what we are missing and what we need to pay attention to.

Example

In addition to reminders like the time of the daily, because as we want it to be easy to do, we do it at the same location, at the same time every days, we display the plan:

• Observe the burndown
  • What do we learn?
  • Is the sprint objective in danger?
• Walk the board
  • For each “not-done” element, starting with the highest priority:
    • Let’s talk about it
    • Is there any problem? (if yes, let’s discuss after the daily)
    • How to maximize the done?
• Trust in objective completion?
  • ROTI (Return On Time Invested) from 1 to 4 and you note the average
  • Update the Burdown
• End of the daily, let’s discuss and collaborate!

Be careful with complexity

As I wrote, the goal is not to follow the plan. The plan is a tool, something supposed to help you not forget what we want to review during the daily, the seek of our improvement. I suggest to keep this plan relatively simple, to make it become a reflex.

Make it evolve! Try new things, try to change elements order, etc. And please, tell me what do you do to make your dailies efficient.

Edit : Thanks to Cyrusol for pointing out that I forgot to mention that a good daily is done at the same time and place every time.