Daily Scrum

How do you begin your day at work? In Scrum, the team holds a 'Daily Scrum' meeting for each and every day of a sprint. The Daily Scrum meeting is strictly held with a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development team.

The Daily Scrum is also known as the Daily Scrum Stand-up meeting because of the common practices made for everyone are usually followed by standing during the entire duration of the meeting.

Importance of Daily Scrum 

The Daily Scrum meetings are typically done at the same location and at the same time every day of the Sprint. This meeting focuses on the optimization of the team collaboration and performance by inspecting the previous day’s work and forecasting on the upcoming sprint’s work.

The Scrum Master acts as a facilitator and the Development team organizes this Daily Scrum meeting. The Daily Scrum meeting is conducted by the Development Team with the associated team members, product owner, and Scrum master who acts as a facilitator in the team. The Scrum Master ensures that the Development team is responsible for organizing the Daily Scrum to track the progress of their work.

Duration:

The Daily Scrum is an essential process, as its adapt-and-inspect activity helps the team to achieve a faster and more flexible flow towards the goal. The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute-timeboxed activity that takes place once every 24 hours. This scrum daily meeting serves for the synchronization, adaptive planning, and inspection activity that helps a self-organizing team to do a better job.

The main intention behind a Daily stand-up:

The daily Scrum stand-up is meant to regularize and streamline the activities of the scrum team on a daily basis and identify all possible impediments. There are a few salient features of daily standup-

• The team should come together to inspect the progress towards the Sprint goal.
• Team members should have coordination among themselves to reach the target.
• Visibility of what’s going on, good or bad
• Increases the development team’s key skills.
• To inspect how progress is being tracked towards achieving the team goals in the Sprint Backlog.
• Create alignment and highlight the problems that are needed to be resolved.
• If there is an issue that is blocking the process, the team members wouldn’t wait for more than a day.
• Increases team performance and promotes quick decisions.

By considering all the above aspects, everyone understands what is happening, how they are gaining ground towards the sprint goal, any changes they need to make for the next sprint, and the issues that need to be addressed.

They stand next to their dashboards in the form of a circle and answer the below questions:

• What have I done yesterday that helped the Development team gain success?
• What will I work on today to meet the Sprint goal?
• What obstacles did I face till now?

The daily scrum is a crucial process for helping the development team members to manage their work with a fast, flexible flow within a sprint. The daily stand-up is not a problem-solving activity. But comparatively, in many teams, they decide to talk about problems after the daily scrum and do the discussions with a small group of interested people. It is not a traditional approach, particularly the kind historically called by the project managers. In reality, it can help them to get updates on the project’s status. However, it can be helpful in communicating the progress of sprint backlog items among the team members.

The Daily Scrum is internally held for the Development Team. If others are present in the Scrum meeting, the Scrum Master makes sure that they do not interrupt the meeting. In this meeting, only the development team members should talk about their work while others should act as observers.

For organizations or teams of any size, the Daily standup meeting should be done within 15 minutes. The team members, product owner, and Scrum master often meet together to have a detailed discussion, replanning user stories or to adopt any process to work. The Scrum Master who acts as a facilitator,  notes down all the impediments and try to get them solved. He coaches the team members to keep the Daily Scrum short (just 15 minutes) and makes sure that each person speaks briefly on his/her work. The daily scrum is the best way to increase team collaboration and performance.

Definition of “Done”

In Scrum, the sprint results are referred to as a potentially shippable product increment. It means that whatever the Scrum team members accept to do is really completed or not according to its agreement of the definition of “Done”. This definition of “Done” defines the level of confidence that the work completed is of high quality with a potentially working product.

If the definition of “Done” for an increment is included as a part of a convention, guideline or standard of the organization development, then all Scrum Teams should follow it mandatorily.

This definition provides the instructions for the Development Team members in deciding how many Product Backlog items are to be selected within the Sprint Planning section. The purpose of every Sprint is to deliver the Increments of working software product functionality that sticks to the Scrum Team’s present definition of "Done".

The Development Team is responsible for delivering an Increment of product functionality for every Sprint. This Increment should be in a working stage, so the Product Owner may immediately release it. Each and every product Increment is an addition to all the previous Increments and thoroughly tested. It makes sure that all Increments are working together.

As Scrum Teams mature, it is expected that their definitions of "Done" will extend to more stringent criteria for better quality. If new definitions were used, then it may uncover our total work to be done in the previously "Done" increments. We should have at least any one system or product to obtain the definition of "Done" that specifies the standard for any work to be done on it.