I published a post about the three questions in your Daily Scrum that aren’t working back in September of this year. Two months later, I am excited to announce that the Scrum Guide has been updated, clarifying that the three questions method is not the only way to conduct the Daily Scrum!
The updated 2017 Scrum Guide recommends that the Development Team make the final decision on how the Daily Scrum is structured and conducted as long as the meeting measures progress toward the Sprint Goal. The three questions are even clearly marked as suggestions by calling them “examples” of what might be used during the Daily Scrum.
In my experience working with organizations new to Scrum, people easily turn the Daily Scrum into a ritual or mechanical activity where teams just go through the motions. When this occurs, the Daily Scrum turns into a meeting of status reports. Anyone who has been to one of our Scrum classes knows that the Daily Scrum could be conducted in many ways. Responsive Advisors students learn that the intent of the Daily Scrum is to measure progress toward the Sprint Goal and how they run it is up to the Development Team. The Scrum Guide now makes this official.
Why am I so excited about a small change to a 19-page document freely available to anyone with an internet connection? Because so much of my time has been spent helping teams fix this one Scrum event to improve transparency. The problem is rooted in the misunderstanding of the purpose of the Daily Scrum, which is not a status report. The Daily Scrum allows teams to adapt and inspect every day, and how that gets accomplished is up to the team.
I am not suggesting I take all the credit for this change. Many Scrum.org trainers have asked for this improvement in the Scrum Guide to clarify the intent of the Daily Scrum. The new Scrum Guide highlights how empiricism, values, and focus on learning can help solve complex problems in any context. While originally designed for software development, Scrum has evolved over time allowing organizations in various contexts to benefit from Scrum. I often tell my clients that agility is not isolated to software development but the entire business. I look forward to seeing the impact of these changes on Professional Scrum teams in the future.
