Standups/Daily Scrum Guide – Corporate Hellion

This is part of a short series on scrum ceremonies and I’ve done some short pieces for each one. Here’s the complete list:

Attendees

The daily standups are only useful if you’re able to keep them short, about a max of ten or fifteen minutes. To that end, it’s important that the list of attendees to this ceremony is also kept short to only core team members:

Project Manager/Scrum Master
Developers
QA
Product Owner (optional!)

How-to: Standups

Standups are super easy, but for the sake of completion, here is a guide!

1. Check in with what’s been done so far

AKA: What did I do yesterday?

This is where each team member updates the group on what has recently been completed, or is almost complete. Reviewing what’s been done is important because sometimes, tickets have dependencies on each other.

2. Share what’s coming next

AKA: What am I going to do today?

Each member of the team shares with the group what they’ll be doing today. The benefit to this is that team members are aware of the capacity of their team mates for that day, so they get a better idea of the availability of their team.

3. Address any impediments

AKA: Is there anything blocking me right now?

This is by far the most important aspect of any standup. If it’s a small impediment that can be addressed quickly, go ahead and do it at the standup to get it out of the way. If it’s something bigger that takes more time, or requires communication with an external party, table it and follow up privately with the team member that brought it up after the standup.

Some important stuff to note

Daily standups are supposed to be a fast update for the team and if you bog it down by spending ages on any of these steps, you’ll break the entire process.
It’s important to communicate with your team that they do not need to wait for the next standup to bring up roadblocks. Be patient – this is something that will come with time after building up trust with your team.