2020 Scrum Guide — Lean Daily Scrum Alternatives
By: Maria Chec
Tags: Serious Scrum, Daily Scrum, Scrum Guide, Lean, Scrum

2020 Scrum Guide

2020 Scrum Guide — Lean Daily Scrum Alternatives

The new Scrum Guide landed in November and now what? I decided to make a series of short videos and posts about the key changes and what they mean for us the Scrum practitioners in our daily work.

Talking about daily work, I decided to start with the Daily Scrum. It’s one of my favorite subjects. I can’t help it, I deal with it daily. And I consider it the key event for the team collaboration towards their goal. I want to take a look at it today from a different angle. A Lean angle.

Be Scrum, Be Lean

My video about the Lean Alternatives to Daily Scrum as per 2020 Scrum Guide

Let’s start with the updated Scrum Theory:

“Scrum is founded on empiricism and lean thinking. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is observed. Lean thinking reduces waste and focuses on the essentials.” Scrum Guide 2020

Let’s apply the theory to the Daily Scrum. Empiricism means to inspect and adapt our meeting based on how it goes. And Lean thinking helps us eliminate waste from the meeting. We should divert our attention from anything that doesn’t aid us in creating a collaborative plan for the day. This allows us to “focus on the essentials” — keep an eye on the Sprint Goal at all times. In the end, “less is more”.

Lean Daily Scrum

No more three questions

Removing the three questions is lean. It created confusion because even though they were optional already in 2017, many teams followed them erroneously. They were not asking themselves the last part of the question “What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?”. The part of the Sprint Goal was usually omitted. And it was the most important part! Why? Because the Sprint Goal shifts the focus from a status report to the outcome.

What’s with the goal?

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Focusing on the goal and the intended outcome can help bring the team together as it fosters collaboration. The team starts planning and replanning their tasks. They try to help one other and pair to progress and finish something tangible — my favorite “What can we finish today?”

Focusing on the Sprint Goal will lead to outcomes instead of completing a list of tasks. Imagine that at the end of the Sprint you achieve 85% of the Sprint Backlog items yet you miss the Sprint Goal. Which means there is no actual impact for your end-users. Is that a successful Sprint?

And what if you complete 65% of the Spring Backlog Items but you do achieve the Sprint Goal? Which scenario is better? Think about it!

And last but not least, focusing on the goal helps to be more “lean” and reduce waste: remove things that don’t bring value like whatever else you did the previous day that had nothing to do with the Sprint Goal. I explored some of the anti-patterns to the Daily Scrum in my video here.

A good outcome of the Daily is an actionable plan for the day towards the Sprint Goal. The fact that developers can choose any technique to achieve it, creates focus, and improves self-management.

What do we do on the Daily Scrum from now on?

There are different alternatives. And you are free to invent your own technique keeping in mind the boundaries.

I will explain three techniques that can inspire you if you want to go beyond the three questions.

1. Walk the board

My Video about Walk the Board technique

I talk extensively about it in my video. This approach focuses on the work you have in progress. And how to collaborate as a team to finish some of it during the next 24h. For that, you use your board with all the Sprint Backlog items reflected on it.

You can tweak it in a way so that it responds best to your needs. For example, you can create a swimlane that reflects all the items that amount to the Sprint Goal. This way you give them more care and attention. If the Sprint Goal is clear for the Scrum Team, the developers shouldn’t work on anything but it anyway. But we know how it goes…

2. Swarming

This is a technique highly appreciated by Jeff Sutherland and he mentions it whenever he speaks about the Daily Scrum. You can watch his video about it here.

He suggests 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?”

It goes in the lines of the Kanban philosophy and the Walk the Board technique but is more radical. Its aim is to generate a pattern called “swarming”. It means that multiple team members work on one user story. A kind of mob programming.

He explains that the most common problem for the team not meeting the Sprint Goal is the individual separation of work. That results in having a lot of items in progress and little done. Then suddenly, by the last day of the Sprint, many of them appear in the testing column but there is not enough capacity for the team to finish them.

Swarming is a way to get the collaboration of the team going, so they systematically bring items to Done throughout the Sprint and not just by the end of it.

Measure efficiency

What I like about his approach is that he brings metrics to support his idea. He mentions a book on quality software by Jerry Weinberg. There’s an analysis of what percent of the time is available for people to do actual work if working on multiple projects. Given they’re working on one project, they have 100% of the time on one project. With each extra project, they lose 20% of that time. That loss is caused by context switching. You need to stop and think about the other thing and get into it again. You might need to switch tools, log in to different systems, etc.

It is a good exercise to visualize how much time we waste (think Lean).

Process efficiency

Let’s also see the efficiency of our process. If most of the stories chosen for the sprint get done only by the end of it, it means our lead time is 10 days. If a given story is small enough to be done in 1 day given there is no waiting or context switching involved yet it takes 10 days in the process. It means our process efficiency is 10%. To calculate efficiency we divide theoretical time by the actual time and convert it into a percentage.

If we start closing stories during the Sprint, we improve the efficiency of our process. In the end, continuous delivery means we can release updates to our end-users throughout the Sprint and not only after it’s finished. It should be our ultimate goal.

3. Liberating structures

Recently, I read The Liberators article “Improving the Daily Scrum with Liberating Structures”. And they give a lot of ideas on how to use them to make the meeting more dynamic. Liberating Structures are a selection of 33 formats or ideas for facilitating meetings and conversations. They are simple and easy to follow. In the context of lean one idea caught my attention most. It is called TRIZ and is great for identifying what gets in the way for us to achieve our desired outcome as a team.

Do three rounds, each one in different pairs.