Skip to main content

Daily Scrum on Sprint Planning and Sprint Review/Retrospective days?

Last post 08:32 pm November 27, 2018 by Benjamin Garrido Barreiro
15 replies
07:45 pm April 18, 2017

According to The Scrum Guide, "The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each day . . . to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and to inspect how progress is trending toward completing the work in the Sprint Backlog."

What about the day of Sprint Planning?  We don't really have a Sprint Goal or Backlog until the end of the day.  Do we just not have Daily Scrum on this day with Sprint Planning essentially taking its place?

Similarly, at the end of the Sprint, we have Sprint Review and Retrospective.  The Sprint Goal should have already been met and the Sprint Backlog empty.  Does the Sprint Review essentially take the place of the Daily Scrum on this day or do we still have a Daily Scrum?

 


09:34 pm April 18, 2017

Based on my experience, the review, retrospective and planning happen on the same day, at the very beginning of the sprint, and there is no daily scrum that day.


04:40 am April 19, 2017

Don't the teams do any work for planning sessions, reviews, and retrospectives? Is there no preparation those days to make sure these events go smoothly? If not, why not?


11:20 am April 19, 2017

I don't think anyone would argue that work is not being done, but I see two conflicting objectives.  On one hand, the Daily Scrum is at the same time and place every day to reduce complexity and presumably for consistency.  On the other hand the Daily Scrum's purpose is to help the team organize and plan to meet the Sprint Goal, but there really isn't a Sprint Goal to work on from the beginning of Review until after Planning.

At the very least, the Review, Retrospective, and Planning could affect whether the Daily Scrum is at the beginning or the end of the day.  Morning seems popular because everyone hasn't gotten caught up in other activities or obligations.  An end-of-day Daily Scrum, however, might be better because it would then always be after the Sprint Planning meeting when the Sprint Goal has been determined.


08:17 pm November 24, 2018

Don't the teams do any work for planning sessions, reviews, and retrospectives? Is there no preparation those days to make sure these events go smoothly? If not, why not?

Ian according to the guide the Daily Meeting is used to "inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal" but if you are in the last day of Sprint maybe you had achieve your goal yet.

In the other hand we could imagine that we are at Friday, last day of a 3 weeks Sprint and we have scheduling the Sprint Review meeting at 8.00 am (take us 2 hours for example) and Sprint Retrospective at 10.30 am (take us 1 hour) and our Daily meeting is held at 9.00 am everyday.

Should we change all our schedule to mantaince the Daily meeting? Is It really necessary and useful the meeting at this day?


08:58 pm November 24, 2018

Should we change all our schedule to mantaince the Daily meeting?

Only the team can decide that, but I wouldn't recommend having the Daily Scrum overlap with the Sprint Review.

Is It really necessary and useful the meeting at this day?

If the Sprint Goal has been satisfied, a Daily Scrum may not be necessary. If there is any work remaining on the Sprint Backlog (such as tasks for preparing for the Review or Retrospective), it may still be useful. For example, it may be useful to plan or otherwise confirm who on the team will provide a suitable demonstration of work, in order to evidence that the Sprint Goal has indeed been met.

 


04:09 pm November 26, 2018

+2 for @Ian (+1 for each of his responses).  

I want to point out something from the Scrum Guide. It does not explicitly state the order of the events but it does implicitly do so.  In the section describing the Sprint Retrospective, the very first sentence of the second paragraph gives the order.

The Sprint Retrospective occurs after the Sprint Review and prior to the next Sprint Planning.

Notice it does not say anything about them being on the same day and it doesn't say anything about the Daily Scrum(DS).  So, does the Daily Scrum happen on the same day as Sprint Planning?   I think that is up to your team's to decide. If you have a morning DS, it could occur before the Sprint Review to discuss any outstanding tasks or possibly the work that will be presented and the person(s) that will lead the presentations.  It also gives a chance to have a final discussion with the PO about who will be attending the Review and any known concerns that will be discussed. 

Ok, now for my personal preference. I like to have the Sprint Review and Retrospective on the same day in the late afternoon, right before everyone leaves for the day.  That gives us a clean end of the Sprint and time to decompress before entering Planning. We do have our Daily Scrum that morning to discuss the Review as I suggested above. 

We do Sprint Planning first thing in the morning the very next day.  We create the forecast for the Sprint as prescribed.  The last thing we do before leaving is have our DS where the team communicates together to arrive at what they will be working on for the rest of the day. Yeah, we may be breaking the rule of "same time, same place" but we are still holding to the practice of having the DS every day of the sprint. We still have 2 week sprints, it is just that ours completes at the end of the last day and starts at the beginning of the first day.


10:12 pm November 26, 2018

Only the team can decide that, but I wouldn't recommend having the Daily Scrum overlap with the Sprint Review.

Ian it is ok, both knowing that my expression has semantic mistakes everybody knows that the team is who decide it. 

If there is any work remaining on the Sprint BacklogIf there is any work remaining on the Sprint Backlog

If you have any work remaining just before the Review and just after you have the Retrospective you don't have this work DONE then you have to pass this work to Product Backlog for the Planning.


10:44 pm November 26, 2018

@Benjamin

If you have any work remaining just before the Review and just after you have the Retrospective 

I believe your order is incorrect.  See my post above where I described the Scrum Guides ordering of the events.  By having Review after Retrospective you are missing an opportunity to gather information that could potentially be a topic in Retrospective. 

@Ian's comment is still valid.  If you still have work left, there is still some benefit to having the Daily Scrum.  What conditions could lead to having work left isn't as important as the fact that it would still be beneficial.  Here is an example. I've seen tasks left for doing some file clean up or completing documentation on a deploy process.  Neither of them prevented the delivery of the value that would be discussed in the Sprint Review but it did stop the completion of the story per the Definition of Done. So they still needed to be discussed to ensure that someone was working to complete the tasks. 


07:07 am November 27, 2018

Only the team can decide that, but I wouldn't recommend having the Daily Scrum overlap with the Sprint Review.

Ian it is ok, both knowing that my expression has semantic mistakes everybody knows that the team is who decide it. 

If there is any work remaining on the Sprint BacklogIf there is any work remaining on the Sprint Backlog

If you have any work remaining just before the Review and just after you have the Retrospective you don't have this work DONE then you have to pass this work to Product Backlog to take account in the Planning.


07:09 am November 27, 2018

Sorry for duplicate comments but captcha validation is not working well.


03:05 pm November 27, 2018

@Daniel 

I have not explained myself clearly, I am clear about the order of Scrum events (Planning, Review, Retrospective). Based on this what I mention is that if before entering the Review you have work pending (or in progress), this work will most likely go to the Product Backlog to have in account in the Planning so ... Could you have Daily this day? Is really useful?


03:53 pm November 27, 2018

My experience is that it is useful.  There have been times that the tasks were completed after the dev team discussed and came up with a better solution. There have also been times where it was discovered that the remaining tasks were actually much more than a simple "task" and required the creation of full blown stories. I have even had 2 instances where the remaining tasks were completed by developers while they sat in the events.  

But even after all I have said so far, I will say that "useful" is subjective just like anything in Agile.  The only people that can really determine the usefulness of having the Daily Scrum on the same days as the rest of your events are the people for which the Daily Scrum occurs.  That is the Development Team.  So if you want to know if the Daily Scrum should occur on the day of your events, ask your Development Team.  They own the event and it is entirely for their benefit.  Let them decide. 


06:26 pm November 27, 2018

@Daniel suposse that you are a junior Scrum Master working with a junior Scrum Team and your team needs guidelines to take decisions. Well, suposse that you are on Friday, last day of a 3 weeks Sprint and we have scheduling the Sprint Review meeting at 8.00 am (take us 2 hours for example) and Sprint Retrospective at 10.30 am (take us 1 hour, after Review) and our Daily meeting is held at 10.00 am everyday. 

The Team is confussed because they have 3 items pending (or wip) in your Sprint Backlog but they know that they can´t end the work between the Retrospective and next Planning (our journey is from 8.00 am to 14.30 pm) and the remaining work was reordered by Product Owner in Review. 

We are not talking about if development team is responsible to take decissions about this topic, we are talking about they ask help to us to know the best way to solve this situation.


07:54 pm November 27, 2018

@Benjamin,  I understand the question at hand.  But as a Junior Scrum Master, Senior Scrum Master, Expert Scrum Master, Agile Coach or any other title you would like to use, I still say that this is a Development Team decision on whether to have the Daily Scrum on the day of the other events. It is my job to help the team learn and appreciate Scrum, I would coach them to make the decision themselves and explain to them why that is the right thing to do especially in your scenario of having a Junior Scrum Team.

We are here to help coach others to understand and appreciate Scrum.  Telling them what to do is opposite of that. I would even go as far as to ask the entire Scrum Team how they would like to handle the situation. And if they wanted to reschedule the events, then I'd help facilitate that.  

...we are talking about they ask help to us to know the best way to solve this situation.

As Scrum Master we know better than anyone else that there is no "best way to solve this situation."  So the team should make a decision on how they would like to go forward. The Scrum Master helps them to understand why it should be a team decision and why no one person can decide. Then at the next Retrospective it can be inspected and adapt if necessary. 

Going back to the original post, @Jamie do you still have questions or have you been able to form your own opinion based on the feedback you have gotten here. I don't want the debate between @Benjamin and I to interfere with your original need.


08:32 pm November 27, 2018

Thanks @Daniel

Maybe this debate between us can improve the vision about the topic of the question, it´s an extension and it is tightly related.


By posting on our forums you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.

Please note that the first and last name from your Scrum.org member profile will be displayed next to any topic or comment you post on the forums. For privacy concerns, we cannot allow you to post email addresses. All user-submitted content on our Forums may be subject to deletion if it is found to be in violation of our Terms of Use. Scrum.org does not endorse user-submitted content or the content of links to any third-party websites.

Terms of Use

Scrum.org may, at its discretion, remove any post that it deems unsuitable for these forums. Unsuitable post content includes, but is not limited to, Scrum.org Professional-level assessment questions and answers, profanity, insults, racism or sexually explicit content. Using our forum as a platform for the marketing and solicitation of products or services is also prohibited. Forum members who post content deemed unsuitable by Scrum.org may have their access revoked at any time, without warning. Scrum.org may, but is not obliged to, monitor submissions.