I've been servicing as the observer and coacher for my Scrum team for quite a long time, who has developed and been developing great products for years, though there're some dynamics occurred to the team, I would say it is a great team.

The way that the team runs the Scrum is just like most of other Scrum teams are doing, they get together to plan the Sprint at the begining of the Sprint, do the blog grooming at some time middle of the Sprint, demo/review the increament products close to the end of the Sprint, and look back at the Sprint in the retrospective meeting..oh, yes, they also perform the daily standup meeting to share the status updates

. Everything looks pretty fine, until one day I observed a very interesting phenomenon about the daily Scrum.

Usually I will attend the daily standup, but I was occupied by something else at that day, so I did not have the time to attend the meeting. However, when I finished the thing at hand, the team had completed the daily standup meeting, and it was just within 5 minutes. There're totally more than 16 team members in the team, and finish the meeting in 5 minutes which is extremely shorter than expected. It is very surprising and counterintuitive, because with the team size, the meeting time would expected to be close to 30 minutes, given the daily Scrum should be continue to 15 minutes for a team size of 5 to 7 people. This observation makes me looking back at all the daily standup meetings that had been performed before, after retrospective

by myself, I find an very interesting issue existing there, that is the daily standup would typically be longer than 20 minutes when I join, and would be shorter than 10 minutes when I do not join. The reason, as far as I can recall, is I always ask a few of questions to each one of the group. At the time when I was not there, few questions were asked. But is that on the surface? what would be the underlying reasons if another why is asked?

I then interviewed couple of team members in order to validate hypothesis in my mind. In general, all the persons I interviewed do have the same senses like me, i.e. all of the people interviewed also observed the same interesting aspect of the daily standup meeting. Answers sorted out after interviewing are:

1. People are reporting the status to me

This would probably be true or not true. What is true is I am the manager, and the team members do report to me. What is not true is I understand the mechanism of the Scrum, and has been transitioned my role into an observer, a coacher and a problem resolver. I'm attending the meeting for providing help for the team, not intend to interference their work. Also, we've the Scrum master who has been working well within the Scrum framework. Therefore, I'm intend to hide myself from the team, for the daily standup, except asking questions.

2. Each inviduals are focus on the tasks of their own

It probably is true. Most of the team members have their user stores and tasks to be completed, and they should not be demeaned because of their dedication. However, the bad side is if everybody only focus on the stuff of their own, probably they will lose the big direction, the goal where the team should reach in teach of the Sprint.

3. Some one may not familiar with the Scrum development

Yes this is true. There're some team members who're green hands, and not be trained in Agile and Scrum development. They may not familiar with the Scrum framework and not understand why we need to have the daily standup, even they may not know what should be spoken and to who in the meeting. However, when I asked what would be the purpose of the daily Scrum, to the persons who experienced in Scrum, I did not get a satisfied answer.

4. The team size is too big for an effective daily standup meeting

It is true that the team size is two times bigger than an appropriate sized team, i.e. 5 to 7 people. However, the challange I have here is not the daily standup runs too long because of more team members, it is too short. Never to mention the effectiveness, because there would be no effectiveness if no sufficient communication.

I've seen lots of articles on the Scrum, and also learned many ways to limited the daily standup meeting into 15 minutes. Some of them even suggested to stop the meeting if time is close to end. All is fine. But this issue that I observed is new to me, and makes me worried, on one hand, the short daily standup would cause many potential problems. On the other hand I can see the opportunity to make a change and .....Yes, you got it, continuously improvement is waving its' hands...

Will continue the discussion in next article......