The All Too Missed reason for Scrum Standups

There is a non-stop parade of blogs and other instructional material on stand-ups.  What makes them effective?  And what are they REALLY for anyway?

Why do we have stand-ups?

The real reason for the Scrum Stand-up is to re-plan for the next business day what we need to do to achieve our sprint goals.  We come together to find out how far we got since the last stand-up (but not a status update!), what we learned from doing those activities, and what our direction and plan should be until the next stand-up.

What I did, what I’m going to do…

The three guidelines of the stand-up (what I did yesterday, what I will do today, any impediments) are in place to help us get to the right information as to what to re-plan.  What I did yesterday is only important to the rest of the team so as to illustrate what is completed and no longer an issue for us to meet our sprint goals, and to provide anything learned from those activities to get closer to or better at attaining those goals.  That's why it's not important that I only got one thing done yesterday because I had a ton of meetings (that will come in the impediments part); from a "How did I help move the team toward its goals" perspective, this is unimportant.  The fact that I was able to get a new test harness in place or confirmed the accuracy of a business rule we are building will really help the team in its re-planning efforts.  Sharing progress simply so that the other team members know what I accomplished (status update) is wasteful of the full groups time, since the team should be able to see actual progress from sprint boards and the like.  "What I plan to do today" is stated to share with the team what I think my role is in meeting the teams goals (till the next standup) should be.  However, as we re-plan, the team may elect to change my intended direction based on other impediments or changed direction.

Remember this diagram from Scrum training?  The "24 Hours" loop is the point at which we assess what we have completed, and what we should do next to keep moving towards the sprint goal.  This is the opportunity to apply the knowledge gained from the “what I got done” part to help the “what I will do” part.

The Impediment Factor

So now let’s talk about impediments.  Why should everyone else on the scrum team care that I have 3 meetings taking up my time, or am struggling with rebuilding that test harness?  They care because we are all pushing towards the same goals, and need everybody effectively pushing in the same direction to attain those goals.  Perhaps someone else that has bandwidth can take one of those meetings so that I can focus on the test harness.  Perhaps someone else has more experience and can help me with it, but then needs to offload what they had planned to another team member.  Maybe that test harness is no longer high priority and should be returned to the backlog?  Sharing impediments in a standup is a way of saying “I have these issues, what should we as a team do about them?”  The re-planning comes in to help us shuffle priorities for each team member, and possibly even for the sprint goals.

Why do we re-plan every day?

From the Scrum Guide from Scrum.org

Scrum is founded on empirical process control theory, or empiricism. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known. Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk.

We just spent 24 hours working towards a goal, the knowledge we gained during that time should help us re-plan, right?  This is the learning part of the do/learn/plan cycle that we go through each day in our effort to inspect and adapt.  We don’t wait until the sprint demos or the retrospective to adjust our direction; we do this on a daily basis.  Addressing impediments, re-planning based on what we learned, and adjusting the tasks involved in reaching that goal are all part of this re-planning process.

It’s the evolution of the ceremony

Scrum, as per the Scrum Guide, is

·         Lightweight

·         Simple to understand

·         Difficult to master

Advancing the Standup along its intended course of improvement from just answering the three questions to an evolved re-planning session is part of that “Simple to understand, Difficult to master” evolution.