Daily Scrum
The Daily Scrum is a Scrum event that is held each day during the Sprint. Its purpose is for the team to inspect its progress towards the Sprint Goal and make changes to the planned work or to the sprint backlog as necessary.
The Scrum Guide provides more details on the purpose and execution of the Daily Scrum. The execution of the Daily Scrum is strictly time limited in order to maintain focus on the purpose of the meeting. The meeting is for the team and not for the benefit of any other stakeholder.
Experience shows there are two main patterns for sequencing the Daily Scrum. Walking the team - each team member gives their information in turn. This pattern gives equal voice to all members of the team but can result in a stilted session where it is hard for the team to interact and discuss plans in a spontaneous manner. A common form of information presentation is three steps:
What I got DONE yesterday (rather than what I DID yesterday)
What I plan to contribute to today
What is stopping me succeeding
Such a pattern emphasises the necessary brevity to get through all the data in 15 minutes. It tends to discourage team discussion particularly around the continued viability of the Sprint Goal and changes that need to be made.
We have observed that if the three step presentation is used, restricting step 1 to “What I got DONE yesterday” promotes a much more focused discussion. A frequent response will be “nothing” - the team should recognise that this response is perfectly valid. If the team member completed a backlog item, all they need do is name it. The team must have sufficient trust to know that the team member will have fulfilled the team’s definition of done.
Walking the board - each active backlog item is discussed from highest priority to lowest priority. Team members contribute to the discussion of the item or items they are working on. This pattern emphasises the importance of the work, but potentially discourages less vocal members of the team from making a full contribution. It can lead to long technical discussions of the backlog items rather than focused discussion of progress and blockers.
We have observed that explicitly asking the team to express their confidence in achieving the sprint goal is a useful way of giving focus to the potential need to change plans.