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Scrum Myths: Daily Scrum Is Not a Status Meeting

January 26, 2017

This post is part of a series on debunking Scrum Myths.  While my business cards say Professional Scrum Trainer, I may change that to Scrum Myth Buster.  This post debunks the myth that the Daily Scrum is a status meeting.  This myth undermines the effectiveness of Scrum in major ways.  I will share four key differences between the Daily Scrum and a status meeting.

What is the Daily Scrum?


According to the Scrum Guide, the purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress towards the Sprint Goal, synchronize activities, and create a plan for the next 24 hours.

  • The Developers run the Daily Scrum.
  • The event is time-boxed to 15 minutes, and it happens every day.

Essentially, the Daily Scrum is a collaborative planning session conducted by the Developers.

What is a status meeting?

There is not one definitive source for the purpose of a status meeting.  However, we can look at how this term is generally used in the workplace.  In a status meeting, individuals provide an update on the progress of their assigned tasks to another person.

  • This other person is usually someone in the role of team lead, project manager, or manager.
  • The focus is on the progress of a set of tasks or milestones, not on valuable business outcomes.
  • Status meetings tend to focus on individual contributions.

On the surface, the two may not seem that different.  However, in practice, there are important differences that drastically impact the effectiveness of Scrum.

4 Key Differences between Daily Scrum and Status Meeting

#1 – Daily Scrum promotes self-management.

The accountabilities in Scrum are important for effective self-management.  The Developers have a shared accountability to instill quality as they create the Done Increment.  This means they determine how they do it.  They own the Sprint Backlog.  By inspecting their progress and adapting the Sprint Backlog together, the Daily Scrum helps the Developers self-manage more effectively.

When a Daily Scrum is treated as a status meeting, the Developers provides a status update to someone else.  They may not feel empowered to make decisions.  This may be exacerbated if the person questions their decisions or tells them what to do.

#2 – Daily Scrum amplifies transparency and enables frequent inspection and adaptation.

Scrum uses empiricism to deal with the complexity and unpredictability of product development.  One of the three pillars of empiricism is transparency.  The Daily Scrum enables transparency by ensuring that the people who are responsible for instilling quality and determining how best to create the Increment and achieve the Sprint Goal all know what is going on.  The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Transparency enables teams to adapt based on the current situation and new learnings.  The people building the Increment have a short Daily Scrum every day.  This cadence and time-box optimizes the inspect and adapt feedback loop without creating waste.

If Developers are reporting a status to someone, they may not be as open about their progress and issues they face.  Furthermore, a status meeting does not emphasize adaptation of the plan.

#3 – Daily Scrum enables focus on achieving an outcome.

The entire point of Scrum is Done.  And the Sprint Goal guides the Developers.  By focusing on achieving a goal and having working software, the purpose of the Sprint is emphasized.  The Developers can assess progress in the context of the entire Sprint.  If new work has been identified that endangers the Sprint Goal, they can discuss and adapt the plan.  If issues are slowing progress, they have the right discussion and adapt the plan.

In a status meeting, individuals give updates on the tasks or items they have each worked on, and there is likely not focus on achieving a valuable business outcome.  A task or a feature that is 80% complete is not very meaningful in software development.  We don’t know what progress has been made.  We don’t know if we will likely have something that delivers business value by the end of the Sprint.

#4 – Daily Scrum promotes collaboration.

The Daily Scrum is a great opportunity to promote collaboration.  All Developers have awareness to progress, what people are working on, and what impediments are slowing progress.  Since everyone is on the same page and focused on their shared accountability, there is ample opportunity for collaboration.

The Daily Scrum is a collaborative planning session.  No single Developer owns the plan. They create it and adapt it together.  Furthermore, the Daily Scrum presents opportunities to help each other with impediments, share knowledge, or work together to get an item done faster.

In my experience with status meetings, there is not a lot of collaboration.  They tend to focus on individual contributions and coordinating work.

In summary, an effective Daily Scrum is essential to achieving the benefits of Scrum.  The Daily Scrum is a quick collaborative planning session.  It is by the Developers, for the Developers.

What techniques have you used to get out of “status mode” and amplify the effectiveness of the Daily Scrum?

 


What did you think about this post?

Comments (18)


Utilisateur
11:11 am January 9, 2019

I would like to answer the question "What techniques have you used to get out of “status mode” and amplify the effectiveness of the Daily Scrum?
I have introduced a token (a simple ball), and invited the members team to pass it to the person they will more likely work with in the current day. This to avoid the members team to report onto the scrum master or technical leader but to exchange with their teammates.
The ball shall not move around a circle but jump from one member to another depending on their work interactions.

The ball is also useful to avoid people to speak at the same time.


Dominika Koasidis
10:48 am April 2, 2019

Good question and interesting idea.


Mulder
08:25 am May 20, 2019

If you rally the team behind a sprint goal, this can be helpful. Even if they are in "status mode", if it becomes an update on how they are tracking towards the sprint goal, rather than individual tasks, you may end up with the collaborative effort you are after.


Samurai Fox
12:04 pm December 30, 2019

IMHO, "Daily Scrum is not status meeting" sounds much like "Candies are not sugar" to me.


Samurai Fox
12:06 pm December 30, 2019

That is like awkward form of Mutex


bleebzabob
03:21 pm June 30, 2020

The article title is misleading. But maybe that was intentional to draw scrum critics to the post only to find that they agree with the content? If so, it's disingenuous.

The title should instead read, "Scrum Myths: Daily Scrum Is a Status Meeting". It would then be implied that you are debunking the idea that scrum is a status meeting. Anyway, I'm not going to read your article because I suspect it was intentional and that irks me.


Sam
01:25 am January 29, 2021

Indeed.


Korhan Eker
11:43 pm March 4, 2021

She clearly states the differences between a daily scrum and status meeting. I believe, managers, stakeholders, and even product owners should be excluded from daily scrums. Or at least, they shouldn't attend each and every daily scrum. Sprint backlog is already there to have a general grasp of where the team is in terms of progress. Otherwise, it unintentionally turns into a status meeting. If it is kept within the development team, then team members can be more open about the difficulties they face, impediments/dependencies they are struggling with etc.


reedkickball
05:44 pm September 15, 2021

We have a "scrum" meeting. It runs more like a Status meeting. Our Scrum leadership keeps trying to make it into something other than a status meeting, and we developers keep resisting. Our 8 developers unanimously voted to change it back to a status meeting after a month of trying a more scrum approach. And now they're forcing it back to a non-status meeting

The reason why we prefer a Status meeting, is you report on your responsibilities, and ask for help, or clarification from others on the team. If you're not there, then someone working with you can report. If you don’t have to report anything (like in a scrum meeting), no one will bother saying anything. When we went from the Status meeting, we went from a 30 second update by each developer that was quick, concise, collaborative and informative to information by functional area where there was a general "Nothing to say" malaise of conscientious. For example, us “3” developers are working on this, we talk to each other routinely during the day, we don’t need to report to the rest of the developers because they’re not involved nor do they have the time to care, because they’re working on their own stuff.

In other words in a Status Meeting, when it's your turn to talk, you talk. When it's ambiguous as to who is to talk, no one talks. Everyone hides behind the silence. Then the required information doesn’t get out, no one feels like they have control, and details get missed and/or dropped. People can hide in a Scrum meeting and get away with doing nothing.

Essentially, if I don’t control my own work and have personal responsibility to report for it, I won't be aware of the expectations, and productivity will slow.

For example, the ideal scrum methodology would be to have just the developers with no product owners in the meeting. The communication that would probably be done every day would be done in about 30 seconds. If no one has to talk, no one will. It would probably devolve into a "Good Morning". "Anyone have anything to share on any of the tasks?", "No?", "Well, have a great day"


mel pullen
05:46 pm November 24, 2021

It is similar to what Jeff Sutherland said they did in scrum, inc. just highlight the single most important blocker the team has.


Opeur
04:02 pm February 13, 2023

I mean.. you're right. but you should take the info because no single truth came from a man that never told a lie.


Janina Yossarian
01:10 pm September 1, 2023

>If no one has to talk, no one will.

you either literally have nothing going on, or toxic devs. People communicate given the chance, because they want to. In both cases, that means the daily standup works, it's your team that is broken. If you need a product meeting each day, but have no need for a dev daily any day, you have much bigger issues than that already. You're not doing scrum anyway, and you're doing poor development.


Hexxys
07:08 pm December 7, 2023
you either literally have nothing going on, or toxic devs. People communicate given the chance, because they want to.

People may choose not to communicate, or find it difficult to communicate, for a variety of reasons that you seem oblivious to. None of which, mind you, are because they're "toxic".


Janina Yossarian
08:09 pm December 8, 2023

Sorry to break it to you, but if people find it difficult to communicate, it's by definition a dysfunctional environment. If people choose not to communicate in a workplace willingly, they are by definition dysfunctional coworkers. Working with people is about communicating with people. You seem to be oblivious to that fact. Just because you don't know, want or know how to communicate, doesn't mean it is or should be the norm. BTW, don't try to play the neurodiversity etc. card, I warn you it may backfire.


Hexxys
09:06 pm April 25, 2024

Missed this gem. I never said it was or should be the norm, only that your reasoning was overly reductive. Your categorization of what does and does not constitute a dysfunctional environment and/or coworker is as myopic as it is off-base. You're also trying to pass your opinion off as a fact, and the fact that you can't seem to tell the difference tells me a lot about you. So to does that fact that you're the kind of guy that upvotes his own comments, lol.

That's all, muted.


MarcusStone
08:01 am November 14, 2024

Your two little posts tell me, that you are a very toxic and narrow-minded person. You don't understand people and team dynamics and your very anxious opinion is declared as fact. If that is your approach, I bet you see a lot of "dysfunctional teams" because you make them dysfunctional and you leave a trail of annoyed developers behind and you are oblivious to how much they hate you.


Janina Yossarian
12:56 am January 31, 2025

It takes a toxic person to go on an internet forum just to claim other people are "toxic". Also, going to personal attacks on a person you know nothing about only shows your character and intelligence, mate. The only one to be hated here is you, for being a lame internet troll :)


Janina Yossarian
12:59 am January 31, 2025

Ugh, should I cry because you muted me, or should I reply to your rant? I never understand why people need to announce to the entire galaxy they ignored/blocked/muted someone, and that "that's all". Again - if you don't understand that an environment in which people don't communicate is dysfunctional, I really think there ain't much to discuss with you anyway, "lol".

BTW Damn, is it 2000 again, so that people are "lol"-ing?