Walk the Board during Daily Scrum
What do you Need to Know?
What is the Purpose of the Daily Standup?
Let's start by trying to understand the “WHY” behind the three questions that every scrum master and the team seems to focus on which again if you notice are no longer mentioned in the Scrum Guide.
Before we can start, let's define the standup meeting. According to The 2020 Scrum Guide,
The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work.
The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team. To reduce complexity, it is held at the same time and place every working day of the Sprint. If the Product Owner or Scrum Master are actively working on items in the Sprint Backlog, they participate as Developers.
The Developers can select whatever structure and techniques they want, as long as their Daily Scrum focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day of work. This creates focus and improves self-management.
Daily Scrums improve communications, identify impediments, promote quick decision-making, and consequently eliminate the need for other meetings.
The Daily Scrum is not the only time Developers are allowed to adjust their plan. They often meet throughout the day for more detailed discussions about adapting or re-planning the rest of Sprint’s work.
If you’re a member of a scrum team or part of an agile transformation am sure you know the three daily standup questions are:
What did you do yesterday?
What will you do today?
Is anything blocking your progress?
The Daily Scrum is a key inspect and adapt event that provides the team a formal opportunity to plan and adjust the work for the next 24 hours in order to best achieve the Sprint Goal. Answering the '3 questions is one way that some teams may choose to achieve the outcomes of this event, however, it's not the only format that can be used.
You have to remember the reasoning behind Daily Scrum which is not to answer those three questions as a status update. As a team, we need to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog to maximize the chances of meeting the committed Sprint Goal or in situations, we feel we might not meet our goal raise concerns early before the end of the Sprint timebox. There are many different ways to achieve these objectives and they don't all require the team to answer any questions.
Walking the Board on Daily Scrum
To me, the Daily Scrum along with a Sprint Goal is fundamental Scrum practice. The Daily happens every single day of the Sprint. So we better make it worth our while.
In one team, we start the Daily with two questions before moving on to the rest of the items “In Progress”:
What can we finish today?
How are we going towards meeting the Sprint Goal?
In another team, we created swimlanes on the board according to the priority of the items and their time of resolution (Service Level Expectation: SLE).
Swimlanes here are horizontal lines on the Scrum Board separating different kinds of work items. The top swimlane was called “Expedite” and showed up only if we had a “fire” blocking issue on production that required immediate attention and less than 24h resolution.
The second one grouped all the items the Sprint Goal comprised. Depending on the product and company set up those items will amount to a different percentage of the Sprint Backlog. And that’s OK. From my experience, the important thing is to have a north star — a Sprint Goal — that we want to accomplish as a team as it will guide the Development Team in priority definition. And achieving it will make them feel good about themselves. The dopamine effect I mentioned in the Sprint Planning video.
The third swimlane displayed all the rest of the items planned for the Sprint and as such the team did their best to deliver them.
This way the team can visually distinguish which items belong to which category and understand their priority.
How does “Walk the Board” work?
It helps us shift the focus from the people to the work we want to be done. Start your Daily by reviewing work in progress on your Scrum Board. Work in progress (WIP) is any work that has been started and hasn’t been done. Start from what is the closest to getting done and walk the board towards what’s just been started. Go from right to left. This way you focus on finishing something every day. You can even ask the question at the beginning:
“What can we finish today?”
And let the team self-organize to get it done. Once the team has a plan to deliver something today, move on, and address the rest of the items in progress. Check what’s going on in each of them. If they are being worked on or stay forgotten in one of the states. In case there are any blocked issues, try to unblock them.
Actively manage work items in progress
The activity of walking the board helps us shift the attention from the people to the work we want to deliver. “Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams” talks about active management of work in progress. And when you think about it from a business value point of view it makes a lot of sense.
An important concept in investing is the net present value. It means that money now is more valuable than money later on. Why? Because you can use the money to make more money! Thus, finishing something today provides more value for the end-users than finishing something tomorrow or at the end of the Sprint. And what do the Scrum Teams do for a living? Provide value to the customer and the company, right?
So how can we ensure we provide value sooner than later? Guess what, there is a Kanban principle for that too:
“Stop starting start finishing.”
Let’s start finishing user stories during the Sprint and not wait until the end of it, so the PO can close them during the Sprint Review. When you finish something, close it. And before starting anything new, first, check with the team if you can help to finish something else.
The 2020 version of the Scrum Guide dropped the classic “three questions” of the Daily Scrum. Yet many teams stick with the practice, even when it doesn’t produce the collaboration that is the hallmark of a valuable Daily Scrum. When a Scrum Team I worked with said that their Daily Scrum was lackluster and unproductive, I challenged them to design a better one. The new pattern we created shifted the focus from individual action to team collaboration toward the Sprint Goal.
Start with the Sprint Goal
Developers can select whatever structure and techniques they want, as long as their Daily Scrum focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day of work.
The team took note of what the Scrum Guide had to say about the purpose of the Daily Scrum. They decided to begin each meeting by reading the Sprint Goal aloud. Then they asked, “How likely are we to achieve the Sprint Goal?” A “fist of five” vote measured the team’s confidence. If the result showed low confidence, they talked about what was holding them back. That discussion often brought hidden impediments to the surface.
Review “In Progress” PBIs
After reviewing the Sprint Goal, Developers examined the Sprint Backlog. For each Product Backlog Item that was in progress, they would ask, “What would it take to finish this PBI? Who can work on those tasks?” They repeated the practice with each item until they ran out of things in progress or the time box expired. At first, they would run out of time. They realized that they were allowing too high a WIP, and they learned to throttle back. They taught themselves to collaborate on getting PBIs to do, rather than work in silos.
Review PBIs not started
Once they began to control WIP, the team usually had time left after examining PBIs in progress. If it made sense to start something new, they would select something from the Sprint Backlog that hadn't been started yet. They would ask the same questions about what needed to be done and who could do it. But if the team didn’t have the capacity, they’d leave the remaining items alone. A large collection of unstarted PBIs often triggered a discussion about adjusting the Sprint Backlog’s scope.
Results
When my team changed the way they ran their Daily Scrum, they rediscovered its value. They learned to limit WIP and collaborate to finish work items before starting new ones. Their quality increased, and their throughput rose.
If the traditional “three questions” Daily Scrum doesn’t provide value for your team, try something new. Create a collaborative discussion focused on making each day a valuable step toward the Sprint Goal.
Smarter questions for the Daily Scrum
Scrum isn’t prescriptive about the way Developers run their Daily Scrum. Importantly, going ‘around the room’ and ‘standing up isn’t required.
Some useful questions to raise at the Daily Scrum include:
Asking different questions at the Daily meeting:
“Why isn’t the top story on the Scrum Board done? And how many people on the team can make it Done by the end of the day?”
Questions about metrics
How are we tracking toward the Sprint Goal? Are we where we thought we’d be?
What do our burndown metrics say about our progress?
What do our cycle time metrics say about whether we’ll complete the work by the end of the Sprint?
Questions about scope
Do we need to change some of the work we have in the Sprint so we achieve the Sprint Goal?
Do we need to change some of the tasks we decided need doing?
Do some of the backlog items we chose need to be put aside because we now know they don’t help us achieve the Sprint Goal?
Do we need to negotiate the scope with the Product Owner to help us achieve the Sprint Goal?
Questions about Done
What work is in progress that we can work on today and get Done?
Questions about learning
Did anyone learn anything yesterday that means our work for today needs to change?
Questions about collaboration
Does anyone need their work peer-reviewed yet?
Does anyone need help today?
What pairing activities will we do today?
Whose turn is it to pair with the new team member?
Questions about transparency
Have we updated the board to show our actual progress?
Is the Sprint Backlog up to date?
Is the status of work up to date?
