Scrum meeting January 21, 2007 05:08 over 5 years ago
The Scrum Meeting is the heartbeat of any Scrum or Agile project. Each workday at the same time and place, hold a meeting with the team members standing in a circle at which time the same special questions are answered by each member.
- What have you done since the last Scrum?
- What will you do until the next scrum?
- What is getting in the way of meeting the iteration goals?
- Have you learned or decided anything new of relevance to team members? (technology or requirements)
The last question provides an efficient forum for a continuously improving and learning group vital to agile development, and is often an interesting way to end the reports, increasing their perceived value.
- On average 15 to 20 minutes for 7 to 10 members.
- Non team members are outside the circle. (Chickens)
- The scrum master ensures the rules are followed and prepares the location for an efficient meeting.
- Chickens and pigs rule enforced: Non team members don’t talk or ask questions. An exception is management feedback on survival points or explanation of the business relevance of the team’s work. The scrum needs to be a vehicle for communicating the product vision and organization goals.
- No other discussion is allowed beyond the three or five questions. The scrum master has authority to refocus the discussion. If other issues need discussion secondary meeting immediately after the scrum meeting occur, usually with subsets of the team. fx during the scrum meting i may say an members report, we need to talk about that, lets meet after the scrum.
Values of scrum meeting
Value: since there is a self directing and organizing team with no manager directing workers or solving problems during iteration, the scrum meting creates the daily mechanism to quickly inform the team about the state of the project and people. Then people can take action. External people can observe the daily scrums to get an accurate timely and information rich measure of progress and issues. It supports openness and allows resolution of dependencies and conflicts in real time, to maximize throughput.
Value: When a person reports on what they are doing for the next day they are expressing a kind of social promise to the team. The increases responsibility and follow through.
Value: Scrum is based on the insight that software development is creative and unpredictable new product development and therefore empirical rather than defined methods are needed. The scrum meeting provides the frequent measuring and adaptive response mechanism that empirical methods require.
Value: Project risks include not accounting for all tasks, poor estimates and not quickly resolving blocks. The scrum meeting provides a daily forum to update tasks and surface and remove impediments.
Value: It is important to have people and teams that are continuously improving and learning. The scrum meeting supports this especially with the additions of question. Unspoken information and knowledge becomes spoken and shared.
Value: shared language, values, and practices help a development team. This is created and reinforced in the daily scrum.
By Frank Vilhelmsen - 2 tags: agile scrum - Add comment