Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read
The most important reason why people (development team and managers all alike) hate the Daily Scrum: It is a litmus test for your adoption of Scrum and very often it will show you that you are not really doing Scrum, but Cargo Cult Scrum. The other Scrum meetings happen only once every sprint, therefore the pain to be reminded that you are doing it wrong is neglectable. But being called out on your mistakes (and that you are not really doing anything about them) hurts a lot.
A collection of things uncovered during the Daily Scrum:
- You are doing waterfall disguised as Scrum. Therefore, any “progress” on an item just means it passes “a gate”. You will not deliver any working increment this sprint but have to look at the same item in the upcoming weeks again and again. And this becomes tiring, killing all motivation to do it better. By the time you really delivered something to production, the story has grown so old that nobody is still interested — and you have to juggle with dozens of new and half-old things anyway.
- The team is not allowed to self-organize. Managers fear letting go and capture the Daily Scrum to keep a tight grip on everybody. No time for the needs of the development team to do its work, we have a product to deliver! People do not feel safe to openly talk what is bothering them. The whole meeting becomes just a theater play.
- The members of the team are not really working together. Instead, everyone gets (or picks) a personal item to work on. Then it does not make any sense to share the progress (no cooperation possible or desired) and the negative habit of getting into too much detail can even be a sign of bragging in front of the others (competition, “look what complicated things _I_ am doing”, “you know so little”).
- The really important insights are not gathered or shared with the whole team. This can be the result of an unhealthy hierarchy, some team members won’t let go of their “power by knowledge”. If there are a lot of other meetings and talks beside the Scrum ones where not everybody is involved, this can be a good indicator.
- There is no follow-up on findings shared during the Daily Scrum. If “you have to help yourself or endure the situation” is the standard “solution” to any problem you run into, guess how meaningful the formal meeting is?
