The Daily Scrum Book

Introduction

The Daily Scrum is a core element of good project and product management. As part of the five events in the Scrum framework, it serves an important purpose for any team wanting to become more productive. If you apply the Daily Scrum correctly, it fosters collaboration and learning, improves planning and agility and helps to continuously improve your processes.

But I’ve seen too many teams misunderstand this meeting and implement it badly. It’s often small mistakes with easy fixes, but you have to know what to look for. Inexperienced teams won’t notice or care about these small mistakes until it is too late. Over time these small issues lead to big problems that can totally derail a Daily Scrum. As a consequence, these teams often become frustrated with their Daily after a while, don’t get any value out of it and in the end abandon the Daily altogether (or keep doing it as a Zombie event).

This book goes beyond a simple description of what the Daily Scrum is. I will talk about experiences from the real world, how to implement the event in practice and what problems the real world will throw at you. By pointing out common misunderstandings & pitfalls, I want to give you hands-on advice to fix the Daily Scrum and reap all the benefits from this important meeting.

The status quo

In my many years as an agile coach I have seen the following kind of bad “Daily Scrums” far too often:
First the Scrum Master announces the beginning of the Daily Scrum and everybody gathers around the Scrum wall. Next the Scrum Master asks the first team member: “What did you do yesterday?”. The team member dutifully reports the tasks they completed yesterday. The Scrum Master continues asking the other two common questions “What will you do today?” and “Where do you have problems or need help?”. After the first team member finishes, the Scrum Master asks the next team member the same three questions. Everyone answers the Scrum Master’s questions until the Daily Scrum ends with the Scrum Master closing with the words “Thank you! Let’s get to work now!”.
Does this sound vaguely familiar?

Let me make this clear: this scenario is bad ? ! A Daily Scrum done like this does not serve any purpose in project management — it is a pure waste of time! If your Daily Scrums look like this, then the team will pretty soon view the meeting as a burden and shortly after they will want to skip it or turn it into a “weekly”. And a team loathing the Daily Scrum or a team doing “weeklies” instead of dailies is a huge alarm sign.
To understand, why this is so bad, let’s first look at what the original purpose of the Daily Scrum is. Then I will present tips how to apply the theory of the Daily Scrum in practice. The biggest part of this book will list several common alarm signals that let you spot a bad Daily Scrum early on, combined with fixes how to improve your Daily Scrums and reap all the benefits from this meeting.

Outline

In this book I want to give you hands-on advice about the Daily Scrum, so that you can make a difference in your company. This is a not a theory book! The knowledge I’m about to hand to you comes from 20 years in the trenches with big corporations and small companies, with Silicon Valley software startups and European financial institutions, with teams opposing agility and with people embracing an agile culture. The biggest part of this book will be practical knowledge for the real world.

Section 1 will talk about the basics: what is the Daily Scrum and why do we need it? It will build on the official Scrum guide to give you a solid understanding. While you can breeze through most of it, if you’re already familiar with Scrum, you should pay special attention to the chapter on the purpose of the Daily Scrum.

Section 2 will talk about how to put the acquired knowledge into practice. You will see examples of how other teams do their Daily Scrums. And we will talk about how you can do it in your team or company.

Section 3 finally goes into the real world pitfalls. It is a collection of tricky situations I have experienced during my years of coaching – and it presents you with solutions to the most common problems. If you already practice Scrum, this section will be a helpful day to day guide!

The epilogue finally will look at the future of the Daily Scrum and about its cousins in other frameworks and methodologies.

After working through this book you will have a strong understanding of this seemingly small Scrum event and you will have a bag full of tricks to fix the real world challenges connected to doing Daily Scrums. Keep coming back to this book to iron out the kinks in your Dailies and make them ever more efficient and enjoyable. I wish you a lot of fun with this book and all the success in the world with your projects and products!