Are your daily standups getting dull and boring?  Do you tend to get off track?  Does everyone truly know the status of the stories in the sprint once the standup is done?  If any of these are true, maybe it’s time to try refactoring your daily standup a bit.

What’s the point?

Before we look at changing the daily standup, let’s revisit why we even have a daily standup.  The Scrum Guide says that the daily standup (they call it the daily scrum) is an…

…event for the Development Team to synchronize activities and create a plan for the next 24 hours.

It then goes on to list the standard questions that everyone is used to.  However, I think the most important part of the definition comes last in the section.

Every day, the Development Team should understand how it intends to work together as a self-organizing team to accomplish the Sprint Goal and create the anticipated Increment by the end of the Sprint.

So every day, everyone on the team should understand the status of the sprint and what needs to be done to accomplish the sprint goal.  This is a very goal and story focused statement.  However, in most teams, I find that using the standard questions creates a very individual focused standup.  “I worked on X yesterday, I’m working on Y today, and I don’t have any blockers.”  It’s easy to fall into routine and not even really talk about what stories those tasks are supporting, or worse, maybe they aren’t supporting a story at all, maybe it’s external work distracting from the sprint, but in that format it can be hard to tell.

Focus on the Stories

Since the purpose of the daily standup is to understand the status of the stories and progress towards the sprint goal, why not make our questions about those?  Instead of going around the team, person to person, and asking…

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. Do I see any impediments?

why not go down the sprint backlog story by story and ask…

1. What was done yesterday to get this story to done?
2. What will be done today to get this story to done?
3. Do I see any impediments that will prevent us from getting this story done?

I’ve done this with several teams in the past and it has always provided great results.   The teams have become much more focused and everyone has had a better idea of the actual progress towards meeting the sprint goal.  It can be especially helpful at limiting work in progress as well.  If you start at the top priority story that isn’t done yet and ask what can be done to get the story done today…it naturally implies that people should be focusing their attention on those stories first and not starting subsequent stories until the higher priority stories are complete.

Common Concerns?

Probably the most common concern people bring up when I suggest this technique is “what if someone gets left out?”  They have a concern that since we are going through the stories, and not each individual, there might be someone that doesn’t get to give his or her update.  Everyone on the team is supposed to be focused on the sprint and not working on things outside of the sprint, right?  If that’s true, than how would someone not be providing an update.  They must have been working on getting one of the stories to done, or maybe they were working on resolving some sort of impediment, but that would come up through the questions about the stories as well.

So the only possible way that someone would not have anything to contribute would be if they are working on things outside of the sprint which they aren’t supposed to be working on.  If that’s the case, what’s wrong with not hearing from them?  Anyone raising kids knows that you reward and give attention to good behavior, and you ignore bad behavior.  By not talking about this work at the standup, we are ignoring that bad behavior.  Everyone wants to contribute to their team and help reach our goals.  The individual will notice they didn’t get to provide any input which means they aren’t contributing to reaching the sprint goal.  They should naturally start adjusting behavior to avoid that in the future.  Obviously, a good Scrum Master will also pick up on this and follow up with that person and help coach him or her through this.  A quick 1-on-1 conversation after the standup would generally get the job done.  “Hey Joe, I noticed you didn’t have anything to say during the standup.  Is there something in your way that I can help out with?”  If the individual doesn’t mind always been left out and doesn’t feel the need to be contributing to the sprint goals, well that’s good to know as well and should probably be discussed with that person’s manager and/or HR.  At least now they aren’t also distracting the entire team during the standup talking about things the rest of the team shouldn’t be worrying about.

Conclusion

Using this modified approach to the daily standup has really helped provide focus to several teams I have worked with.  I first started using this modification back in 2010 as part of our changes to keep the team from working late nights at the end of the sprint to get stories done that I talked about in my blog post Getting to Done.  If you are struggling with some of the questions at the start of this post, I would suggest you try it.  I have also seen several other people write about this change recently, so if you are interested I would suggest also reading this article on the Scrum Alliance website.