Scrum Meetings

In Agile it is important that the various members of the project team, and anyone who has a significant stake in the project, be constantly up to date and aware of whatever issues may be involved with the project. For this reason a daily Scrum meeting is extremely important to keep the project moving smoothly.

A scrum meeting is a daily meeting that is held in the same place every day and will always last 15 minutes. It is held first thing in the morning and can be used to make sure everyone is on the same page for the upcoming days’ work. It is also important to limit who is allowed to speak to certain people. “Scrum affords special status to those who are committed, and many teams enforce a rule in which only those who are committed are allowed to talk during the daily scrum meeting.” (Cohn)

It is necessary that all members of the team attend the meeting including the Scrum Master and the product owner, to show they are both committed team members. This will show that they are involved with the development of the project. Others who are not directly involved in the development of the project can also attend, such as a salesperson, but they are only allowed to listen.

During a Scrum Meeting it is important for each person who is involved in the development of the project to ask and answer these three questions.

1.      What did you do yesterday?

2.      What will you do today?

3.      Are there any impediments in your way?

With these questions answered the team members will have a good understanding of what has been done and what must still be done. “The daily scrum meeting is not a status update meeting in which a boss is collecting information about who is behind schedule. Rather, it is a meeting in which team members make commitments to each other.” (Cohn)

If a programmer announces that he will deal with some bugs in the system or work on the interface, the team will find out the next day if he was successful or not. This causes the team to understand that the commitments they make are to each other and not to some customer or salesman they have never met.

At a scrum meeting it is the Scrum Master Job to deal with any impediments that may have been brought up at the Scrum Meeting. These could range from a developer not having the software they need, or a piece of hardware breaking or a vendor not getting back to someone. In the event where a Scrum Master cannot solve the problem themselves, then it is their responsibility to find out who can and make sure they fix the issue as soon as possible.

There are several ways to run a Scrum Meeting, such as having everyone go down the three questions in turn, or if there product backlog, working through that first and then continuing on to the next one. There is no one way to run a meeting. Feel free to experiment to find which one suits your team best.

Sources:

Cohn, Mike. Mountain Goat Software, www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/scrum/meetings/daily-scrum