Daily Scrum

The daily scrum is a critical, daily inspect-and-adapt activity to help the team achieve faster, more flexible flow toward the solution. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the daily scrum is a 15-minute, timeboxed activity that takes place once every 24 hours. The daily scrum serves as an inspection, synchronization, and daily adaptive planning activity that helps a self-organizing team do its job better.

The goal of the daily scrum is for people who are focused on meeting the sprint goal to get together and share the big picture of what is happening so that they can collectively understand how much to work on, which items to start working on, and how to best organize the work among the team members. The daily scrum also helps avoid waiting. If there is an issue that is blocking flow, the team would never have to wait more than a day to discuss it. Imagine if the team members got together only once a week—they would deny themselves the benefits of fast feedback (see Chapter 3). Overall the daily scrum is essential for flow management.