A Day in the Life of a Scrum Master - 9:30 - The Standup
Our standup takes place by the Scrum Wall each day at 9:30am. Every member of our team attends including our Product Owner and every team member talks about what they were working on yesterday, what they’re doing today and any impediments they may have and updates the relevant post-its on the wall. Any new impediments raised are added to our impediment white board for follow-up.
It’s recommended in Scrum that you timebox your standups to 15 minutes, and in our team of 9 standups generally last around 10 minutes. Our team is fairly well established so I rarely have to actually ask “the three questions” (What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Are there any impediments in your way?). For the most part each team member gives their update in turn without this prompting, although sometimes I do follow up with one of these questions if their update doesn’t address it e.g.
Team Member:I’m finishing off that bug [updates post-it]
Scrum Master:Ok, was that what you were working on yesterday too?
I don’t generally ask each person if they have any impediments even if they don’t specifically say so in their update. A common complaint I’ve heard of “The Three Questions” approach to stand-ups is a general feeling that the questions make the team members feel like they’re being spoken to as if they’re babies or young children. Once a team is the rhythm of answering these questions every day, it seems to me there’s no need to explicitly ask them.
So that’s about it for our morning stand-ups. Team members are able to start the day knowing what everyone else has achieved yesterday and with a plan for what they’ll aim to achieve today. The PO knows exactly how far we are progressing and the Scrum Master has a clear idea of anything that may be impacting on the team’s ability to progress.
