Killing daily meeting (one dev at a time)

I’ve seen it many times. A daily meeting (daily scrum) during which every team members tell what they did, what they plan to do etc. And the result is always the same. People don’t pay attention and you can clearly see it is just a ceremony, a pathetic remnant of an agile cargo cult.

But it is not the fault of daily meeting, it is about the way it is handled. If done right, daily meeting brings a lot of value to the team.

Dev by dev

If your way of doing daily is to go person by person so that each of them tells about all tasks they were involved in, then this will happen:

• people switch off after they turn,
• you will hear the same things twice (cause often few team members worked on the same task and everyone wants to prove they also contributed),
• pieces of information related to one task are often hidden in statements given by few team members,
• you won’t notice some tasks were not discussed at all (if someone doesn’t wants to draw the attention to task X then they will simply not mention it),
• some people will talk quite long (boring!).

Do not do that. It is an anti-pattern.

It is all about tasks

What to do instead? Go task by task. It is as simple as that. And, after all, the progress of tasks is what really matters, right?

Going tasks by task will bring the following benefits:

• no tasks will go unnoticed,
• no repetitions, each task explained exactly once,
• people pay attention as they need to wake up few times during daily (e.g. X worked on task A, but he also reviewed task B),
• the speaking person changes often which helps to keep the meeting energy up.

And the downsides? None.