The daily standup is such an interesting practice. My mother used to implement in the late 90s and early 2000s. That is before the Agile manifesto. It helped her greatly make sure that along side her team things were going smooth and everyone knew what they needed to do.
Such a simple practice to start and do yet it can wrong so easily.
“The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work.” Sprint guide (2020)
And from the manifesto “Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.“
This alone give us a lot of insights on the daily stand up. Inspect progress and provide where everyone in the team can work together.
I see it building empathy among team members once they also start understanding what the others have to do.
You do not have to stick with the 3 famous question (what you did yesterday, what will you do today, and any impediments?), but can be a good start for new teams.
I even in see it helping individuals get their thoughts ready and prepare their days.
Being there for the team to answer question is great. Asking them to update you on progress is not. This stops any ownership of work and self management. In addition, these update should be transparent and can see without asking the team on the boards.
Back to the self organizing and self managing concept. We do not want high dependency on the scrum master or others especially on a frequent event, which is the daily standup. It would also become repetitive and boring. The best case is mixing things up with styles and people. A challenge I like: if someone who doesn’t know the team attends, they should not be able to tell who is the scrum master.
When the team finds no value they will ask to skip it. Now, there are valid reasons to skipping it every now and then. However, keep ignoring the daily standup will cause issues of “you should have” variety. The standup is a space for it to happen. Make sure it is valuable and brief.
Best advice? Start slow, consider constantly how to improve the value of that time, and do experiments
