The Twice-a-Week Scrum

The daily scrum is a daily event. That statement sounds obvious—it’s the daily scrum after all—but many Scrum teams want to hold it every other day or even less frequently.

Some team members might complain that not a lot changes day-to-day and that they’d rather have their 15 minutes back. Others may feel so much pressure to deliver as many features as possible that they’ll claim they’re too busy to attend yet another meeting.

When the team reacts this way, you can bet that there’s pressure coming from somewhere. Maybe the pressure is self-inflicted. If the team overcommitted or put too much work on their sprint backlog, cutting meetings might sound appealing. Or maybe the pressure is coming from looming deadlines, or from stakeholders or management. Or perhaps other Scrum anti-patterns are to blame, and they’re causing the development team to not get any value from the daily scrum.

Above all, remember that the daily scrum is for the development team members. This is their event, and they need it. Over the course of a two-week sprint, things can and do change rapidly. If the development team doesn’t stop and inspect their progress frequently, they run the risk of missing opportunities to adapt their work in time to achieve the sprint goal. The daily scrum is an inflection point. It’s a dynamic replanning session where the team takes into account progress, changes, impediments, and new insights from the entire team, and decides what to do next.

One possible solution to a development team not wanting to have a daily scrum every day is to facilitate a discussion about commitment. Start by reiterating the purpose of the daily scrum. Remind team members that part of their commitment is following the Scrum framework. Then ask team members for their input about what could happen if they don’t meet daily to get aligned on their work. This is a great opportunity to explore what the team is experiencing, and see if they can find ways to solve the root problems.

If the team decides that that daily scrum isn’t valuable, ask them what would need to change to make it valuable. Use these ideas to come up with experiments that the team can carry out to try to improve their daily scrum facilitation and practices.