Daily Stand-up Anti-Patterns
Although the principles and techniques of Scrum are fairly easy to understand, it is very difficult to learn their everyday implementation. Daily scrum meeting is one of the ceremonies among many teams.
Usually, it won’t take longer than 15 minutes for a successful Scrum team to inspect its progress towards the Sprint goal. Given this short time, it is important to note that anti-patterns always riddle the Daily Scrum so much. The anti-patterns also span a wide variety, ranging from actions motivated by dysfunctional Scrum teams to clear organizational-level failures.
The goal of a daily stand-up meeting is to stay updated with the latest progress of any member of the team working on the current sprint backlog. In the other words, the daily stand-up meeting is a recurring approach to a specific collection of issues that arise when a group of individuals try to work together as a team. But this brief description doesn’t tell you the specifics of the ceremony that separate a successful stand-up from a waste of time.
On the other hand, in any business, some ideas turn out to be great. In the beginning, some ideas seem like brilliant ideas, but they don’t work out so well in retrospect. Those are antipatterns. A pattern is a repeatable concept that addresses a common issue and others should follow it. An anti-pattern seems like a solution to a dilemma, but it turns out badly and others should avoid it. in other words, Scrum anti-patterns are behaviours that are regularly demonstrated, but usually unsuccessful or perhaps even harmful.
In this article, I wanted to share some of the daily stand-up anti-patterns that I’ve witnessed in my career as a Scrum Master and Development Team member.
No help: For several consecutive days, a development team member encounters difficulty in carrying out a problem and nobody offers help. Based on my experience, this outcome is a sign that the development team cannot trust each other or care about each other either. Alternatively, the development team’s workload has reached an unproductive amount since they can no longer support each other.
The Scrum Master serves as the ceremonial master: Introducing the next speaker, playing off someone who goes overtime and determining what is necessary and what is not important for the team. The scrum master has to be a facilitator, and often that suggests that some of this must be carried on by him/her. But it is an indication that the scrum master does not trust or think the team can organize itself around the priorities as it becomes the scrum police for the team.
The updates are not connected to the work of others: Daily scrum meetings with cross-functional teams can be boring. For example, in a seven-person stand-up, an IP security person may have to sit through an update from a front-end developer and a digital marketing person. These cross-functional stand-ups for teams are more prevalent than some people would believe. Broken daily scrum, unless the team talks and seeks a new solution, will persist for months on end.
Focusing too much on yesterday: Daily scrum respondents also spend too much time sharing the specifics of what they did yesterday. When it’s happening, a scrum master should catch this and warn the entire team.
Problem-solving: Ideally, the 3 regular scrum questions are briefly answered by each team member. Daily scrum meetings, however, frequently turn into elaborate discussions/discussions on some topics. Someone brings up the new bug right as you think you can get to the end of daily scrum without it derailing, and it sparks a conversation that stretches the meeting by a few minutes.
Hopefully, this article has given some more insight into the ceremony details of the successful daily scrum and also typical anti-pattern.
