Daily Scrum Anti Patterns – Tools and Techniques

Daily Scrum Anti Patterns are habits that are frequently exhibited but overall ineffective counterproductive in practice or maybe even harmful. Scrum stakeholder anti-patterns result from a training and coaching void accompanied by not changing individual career objectives. “Scrum is like your mother-in-law. It’s constantly pointing out your shortcomings.” — Ken Schwaber

Daily Scrum Anti Patterns – Scrum Master

• Don’t act as a manager of the team, and don’t use the Daily Scrum to distribute work and make decisions on behalf of the Developers.
• The Developers do not support or commit to working with Scrum and need the Scrum Master to ‘make sure it happens. In this case, the deeper motivation to work with Scrum needs to be addressed.
• The Developers may be depending on the Scrum Master to facilitate communication within them. This impedes the ability of the Developers to learn how to self-organize;
• Don’t use the Daily Scrum to feel meaningful about your role. Being a servant leader, the success of a Scrum Master often manifests in indirect ways (improvement over time, good atmosphere, learning). For some Scrum Masters, the Daily Scrum provides an opportunity to take the stage and have a visible contribution – even though it does not benefit the Developers.

Daily Scrum Anti Patterns

Over-crowded

A large number of active participants other than Developers (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Managers i.e. Chickens) spoke during the meeting.

• Sometimes this meeting is re-purposed to discuss new requirements, refine user stories, or have a sort of planning meeting.
• A few team members are commenting on every issue while other team members are talking about other topics.

Fix: To fix these anti-patterns scrum master needs to coach the external members on the concept of daily scrum and protect the scrum team from external influence. If others are present, the Scrum Master ensures that they do not disrupt the meeting. Hence Scrum Master should instruct the team to not act in an outsider authority role in the Daily Scrum. Say “thank you for your feedback”! Don’t be afraid of your customer and be polite in your communications.

Status Meeting

The team treats Daily scrum as a status meeting and focuses on the Scrum Master and tends to report rather than inform and collaborate with the rest of the team.

Fix: To fix these anti-patterns scrum masters should coach the team on moving beyond status reporting, and focus on valuable information sharing and team-building activities. Deploy techniques like five why if necessary.

Violate Time-box

Daily Scrum meeting doesn’t start on time and violates the time-box. Hence it indicates distrust on the management side.

Fix: To fix these anti-patterns interview the team members on when a reasonable or ideal start time is, the scrum master should coach the team on the importance of Daily scrum and time-box. If needed provide notification when a team member crosses the allotted time or moves in the opposite direction. Play pass the ball or round-robin game. One person starts, and the talk order proceeds in some spatial pattern (clockwise, counter-clockwise, left to Right, etc). The purpose of the stand-up is to make people uncomfortable by standing so the meeting is short (no more than 15 minutes).

Problem-solving session

Daily scrum discussions are triggered to solve problems, instead of parking those so they can be addressed after the stand-up.

Fix: To fix these anti-patterns deploy a hand sign or other signals to indicate someone’s preference for deferring a particular impediment resolution.

Too much unnecessary information

Team members provide much unnecessary information and do not stick to the purpose of the daily scrum.

Fix: To fix these anti-patterns remind everyone that they can pass during standups. Don’t force people to talk if they have nothing to say.

No routine and doesn’t occur daily

The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity. But when the stand-up does not happen at the same time and in the same place every day, it leads to a lack of direction and an increase in complexity.

Fix: To fix these anti-patterns coach the developers on the positive aspect of daily scrum and time-box. Bring the impact (positive or negative) to a retrospective so that team can access the effectiveness.

Lack of preparedness or no-show for the stand-up

Unrefined product backlog during sprint planning trying to figure out the details in the Daily Scrum. A few Team members are always late or no-shows. The team member is clueless about impediments and these are never identified. Due to this team doesn’t follow up on issues/impediment resolution.

Fix: To fix these anti-patterns have one on one with the team members and try to find out the reason behind their behavior.

Sprint goal

The team doesn’t adjust the plan to meet sprint goals. This is often the case for not understanding the underlying philosophy behind a processor and not implementing it correctly.

Fix: Constant coaching on the importance of sprint goals is needed.

Beginning bell

The team updates the ticket number without any details and value to others. They consider it as the start of the day or the next shift. This is often the case for not understanding the underlying philosophy behind a process or not implementing it correctly.

Fix: If you find yourself in this situation for a practice that other development teams seem to get a lot of value out of, you should examine how you’re doing the practice more closely. Retrospect on whether your current methods are worth continuing or not.

Pull instead of Push

The product owner and/or scrum master assigns tasks directly to team members.

Fix: To fix this Scrum Master has to break the traditional waterfall thought process in the team.

Non-corporation within Team

People either don’t trust each other or are too busy with their work. So no cooperation among them and team members were struggling to resolve their impediments. E.g. working in Silos.

Fix: To fix this start the Pair program to share knowledge. If team members are overloaded try to set the WIP limit.

Not recording Tasks:

Another anti-pattern is talking about tasks that are not recorded either on the board or in the task management software. All work should be logged.

Fix: There are many techniques a scrum master can adapt to remove the above anti-patterns. Please Click Here to know more about these techniques and their effectiveness in the removal of anti-patterns.

Orientation lost

The Daily Scrum serves one purpose as it answers a simple question: Are we still on track to meet the Sprint Goal? Or do we need to adapt the plan or the Sprint Backlog or both? Often, the Development Team cannot answer that question immediately.

Fix: Visualizing the progress towards the Sprint Goal is a useful exercise. Removing the Development Team task of maintaining a mandatory burndown chart from the Scrum Guide a few years ago does not imply that a burndown chart is obsolete.

No use of work-item age

A Development team member experiences difficulties in accomplishing an issue over several consecutive days and nobody is offering help.

Fix: Often, this result is a sign that people either may not trust each other or do not care for each other. Alternatively, the workload of the Development Team has reached an unproductive level as they no longer can support each other.

Note: Of course, the Scrum Guide does not mention the ‘work item age.’ However, it has proven to be a useful practice.

Additional Work (Pitching developers)

The Product Owner or even other stakeholders (bypassing the Product Owner) attempt to introduce new work to the current Sprint during the Daily Scrum. (This behavior may be acceptable for high-priority bugs, although the Development Team should be aware of those before the Daily Scrum. Otherwise, the composition of the Sprint Backlog is the sole responsibility of the Development Team). In some instances, the stakeholders try to speed up delivery by relabeling their tasks are ‘serious bugs.’  This is also an anti-pattern.

Fix: To fix these anti-patterns coach PO & Stakeholder team on the positive aspect of the scrum. Bring the impact (positive or negative) to a retrospective so that team can access the effectiveness.

Scrum Guide – Click Here Daily Scrum – Click Here