Comments on: One Word Can Change Your Daily Scrum

By: John

John — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:13:57 +0000

I have nade that suggesion a number of times but the SM and team continually commit to stories that are too large and the tasks are not as well understood as they should be. So the members really can’t say ‘ I completed ….’ We have 5 hours tasks that go on for 3 days, Its very frustrating to see bright people struggle.

By: Richard Lawrence

Richard Lawrence — Tue, 10 May 2011 20:26:03 +0000

@Adam – The items under discussion in the Daily Scrum are typically tasks, not stories. No matter how big a story is, it should be possible to decompose the work into tasks of less than a day each.

The point of changing the questions is to surface issues and impediments early rather than hiding them behind, “I’m still working on X.” I haven’t yet seen this interpreted as the person working too slow. Teams seem to get the point and focus on either finding the issue that prevented the task from being completed or making their tasks smaller.

By: Adam Yuret

Adam Yuret — Tue, 10 May 2011 18:41:12 +0000

Interesting approach.

I love the idea that our stories should be small enough that failing to complete them in single-day work increments should not be a common occurrence. But the one potential hang-up or loophole I see here is the blocking criteria. Do you ever have status reports that are “I failed to complete X and i am blocked by the fact that there is not enough time in the day.”

I can see where such a report would be valuable if it is interpreted as an issue with the story size rather than with the lack of alacrity with which the reporter is working.

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By: Eli Weir

Eli Weir — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:43:46 +0000

Great post, Richard! I have often struggled with getting teams (especially those new to the agile paradigm) to have effective stand-ups. They often direct their “reports” at the PM/Scrum-master/Coach rather discuss with the team in general, and the stand-ups become a rote exercise, just something that gets done as part of the process. I’ll try this tweak and let you know how it goes …

P.S. Looking forward to how things progress in your new venture.

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:25:45 +0000

I see that pattern, too. The more senior you are, the more likely you are to have work outside of one team’s sprint goals, therefore the greater need to justify your lack of direct contribution to DONE. On the team I wrote this post about, I didn’t change the language because of the interns…

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:45:48 +0000

Good tip. I’m going to bring this up with our Scrum master, Schmidt. The application developers are usually pretty on point, but our architect and DBAs often rattle off several items that were worked on but not completed in a given day. And the DBAs always have distractions to report that they feel justifies their lack of work completed for the Sprint goals.