Daily Scrums

A lot of time can be wasted in meetings that add little value to the overallresults of the project. Daily Scrums eliminate long elaborate meetings in favor of shorter productive ones.  The objective is to provide laser focus to indentify issues quickly and productively.

The Daily Scrum is a simple daily routine meeting, which helps the team self-organize, focus, identify and eliminate impediments to progress. The primary goal is to allow team members to get to the point by telling what they are working on and what they are having issues with. The meeting lasts a maximum of 15 minutes. All team members are required to attend personally, by phone or by proxy.

During this time, team member discuss progress, obstacles and daily plans.

Successful scrum meetings demonstrate the following features:

• Meeting should be 15 minutes or less
• Standing rather than sitting – this helps to keep the meeting short and everyone focused
• All project stakeholders should attend the daily scrum – to eliminate that need to repeat information
• Team members should only focus on: what was done yesterday, what will be done today, what issues may cause problems for progress
• The meeting should be held in the same place and at the same time every day
• Burndown charts and Status boards are updated during the meeting – which visibly records progress being made.

By adhering to the above practices, you can increase the efficiency of your team and improve the quality of your project by avoiding tedious and time-wasting meetings.

Conclusion

Over the past several weeks we have highlighted for you five ways that Agile works to eliminate waste. My hope is that you now have a better understanding about the advantages that Agile offers and its primary focus to eliminate waste and streamline the application development process.  There are many other advantages to using the Agile methodology, of which there are too many to highlight in this segment.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers” by Mary and Tom Poppendieck, is an excellent book that defines how lean manufacturing processes can be applied to software development.