The daily scrum
While taking a leg-stretch AFK at work today I was walking with the senior developer in our new development team for a startup project. I’m appointed scrum master for the project and asked him at what time of day would be best suited for our daily scrum standup meetings, and he’s answer was “Let’s keep it floating and do it when everyone’s not bussy”.
I could not disagree more! – Even tho we are a small team, with a base of 3.5 developers and one UX resource, inside an environment where you almost have to hide while juggling other departments or projects requesting you in meetings and “emergency-just-fix-this-5-minutes-max-thingy’s” .
The daily scrum in my opinion should be set to a fixed time of day to prevent the added “chaos” of every team member wondering if we’re having the meeting, a bit later, skipped or if everyone has got the communicator message with your “can’t make it to daily scrum today, got to go to coffee shop…” note.
To be able to be agile you need to have some form of boundaries, first one being the sprint plan with as fixed sprint dates as possible and a fixed time of day for the daily scrum. without this minimum you will never be able to pull off the project.
What i said to the developers was that if you cannot participate on one of the stand up meetings, send me a short email with what you did yesterday, what you are planning to work on today and if you have any problems or issues you need help solving – And I will relay this to the other team members, and come back to you if anyone need input from you to complete issues.
I’m still quite new to the role of scrum master, but it feels quite unnatural not having the stand-up’s at the same time every day. Anyone tried doing both?
