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The Importance of Mentioning Impediments in a Scrum Daily Stand-up Meeting

April 20, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Communications Management, Performance Reporting, SCRUM

The Importance of Mentioning Impediments in a Scrum Daily Stand-up Meeting
By Olve Maudal

It is about 10 years since the first time I participated in a project using daily stand-up meeting. I was immediately fascinated. Since then I have always encouraged development teams to do daily stand-up meetings and to get rid of the traditional weekly status meeting.

Modern software development is about taking advantage of the fact that most often you have a group of very intelligent and capable individuals working together as a team. Given accurate information developers will know what is the right thing to do for the project to succeed. Given enough freedom (this is often forgotten) the developers will also be able to do the right thing. The daily stand-up meeting is an effective mechanism for making sure that everybody on the team have enough information to do the right thing.

There are a lot of formats for running the daily stand-up meeting. But common for most of them is that everybody on the team should answer three questions in this particular order:

  1. Did?
  2. Will Do?
  3. Impediments?

Sometimes I observe stand-up meetings where the third question is skipped. Nobody in the team mentions anything about problems, hindrance, obstacles or anything that impedes their work. It is very unlikely that this is true. In a software project there is always something that can be improved to speed up the team.

Actually, of the three questions, the third question is by far the most important in a daily stand-up meeting. The “Did?” and “Will do?” question is also important, but the information is often also available in the software repository and the task bord. Apart from the daily stand-up meeting, there is often no formal mechanism for making sure that everybody knows about what slows down the team.

Therefore, I propose that we should order the questions according to their importance. Allow me to suggest that in the daily stand-up meeting the team members should answer the following questions:

  1. Any impediments in your way?
  2. What are you working on today?
  3. What have you finished since yesterday?

Olve Maudal is a software engineer based in Oslo. He has worked for several Norwegian high profile companies such as Schlumberger, BBS, and Tandberg. He blogs regularly on http://olvemaudal.wordpress.com/ about Agile Project Management, software architecture, and coding.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 and is filed under Communications Management, Performance Reporting, SCRUM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 person has left a comment

DID? - DO? - NEED? - That’s great. Thx.

Anon wrote on January 25, 2010 - 12:56 am | Visit Link

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