Daily Scrum and the Three Questions of Doom

Oh yes, the Daily Scrum. That stand-up meeting that happens at the beginning of the day. It is a planning meeting. Not a status update. The Scrum Guide, in a rare moment of being prescriptive, even dictates the questions that should be asked in the meeting:

The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team to synchronize activities and create a plan for the next 24 hours. This is done by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum and forecasting the work that could be done before the next one. The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity. During the meeting, the Development Team members explain:

• What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
• What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
• Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?

So why do I call these the "questions of doom"?

Getting Beyond Mechanical Agile

Are the questions, themselves, the problem? Like a lot of things with Scrum, it is not the mechanics you need to look at. It is the surrounding culture you need to pay close attention to. So, by themselves, no, I do not think the questions are problematic. Let's take a look...

What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?

In a meeting about planning for the immediate future, looking back might seem like an odd thing to do. For me, understanding this question is a good indicator if someone "gets" agility or not. Scrum teams should be autonomous and self-organising, so it is important to talk about what you did because it may very well impact what someone else will do.

What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?

This, of course, is the question at the heart of daily planning. It is important to know this for many reasons:

• Perhaps the work you are planning on doing has dependencies with other on-going tasks;
• Perhaps the Product Owner wants you to focus on another higher-value item first (for any reason);
• Maybe you need to go to your kid's school play in the evening and it is important for the team to realise you will deliver slightly less than usual.

Who knows? I could come up with 1001 reasons with it is important to know this information.

Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?

I actually do not like the word "impediment". I'd prefer it if this question was something more like, "Have I learned anything that might prevent the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?"

• Over commitment in Story Points?
• Overly complex dependencies between tasks?
• Summer holiday you forgot to take into account during Sprint planning?

The potential list is endless.

So What's The Problem?

Whilst I do not like that these questions are somewhat prescribed in the Scrum Guide, you're gonna have to go a long way to tell me that they are not worthy. Of course the meeting itself is also worthy. So what's the problem? Why brand these "Three Questions of Doom"?

In short: ScrumMasters actually ask these questions. They should stop.

Have you been in a Daily Scrum where you felt the Daily Scrum was reporting meeting because the Scrum Master fired these questions at you? If you have been doing Scrum for a while, I bet you have at some point! In case I was not clear the first time, I will say it again: the Daily Scrum is a planning meeting. All too often these are becoming status updates and even worse reporting meetings (important cultural different between updating and reporting). If the team members feel they have to report to the ScrumMaster (or the Product Owner) there is something wrong. You might be successfully delivering a mechanical Scrum but you have some cultural problems that are going to hurt you in the long-run.

By actually pitching these questions at the team members, the ScrumMaster is most-definitely turning the Daily Scrum into a reporting environment.

So How Should We Run The Daily Scrum?

Well, there are plenty articles out there with some good tips. I think, in short, the culture of the meeting needs to be one of "let's come up with a plan for today" not "let's report on progress". The Three Questions of Doom are useful because they illicit the information required to perform daily planning. But they are also problematic if they are used as the structure for the meeting.

So:

• talk as little as possible, but talk about everything that is important;
• shake up the order of the meeting;
• rotate who is facilitating the meeting;
• remember your time-boxing;
• the output should be a shared understanding of the plan for the day and that is all.

By keeping the meeting lively, informative and brief, your teammates will continue to show up. If they start to vote with their feet and skip the meeting you know you have a real cultural problem surrounding one of the most important planning meetings in Scrum! Treating the Daily Scrum as a reporting meeting is one of the common indicators that an organisation has not fully understood and adopted Scrum yet. In such an environment, sadly, it is all too easy for the inexperienced ScrumMaster to fall into the trap of establishing themselves as a manger rather than a facilitator; an important cultural difference in a framework of equals.