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I know that Scrum rules in daily standups say that team should only talk about what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, and anything blocking them. Nothing else. But the problem is, sometimes developers spend their day doing work irrelevant to their tasks, and then talk about it in the standup. It's what they did yesterday!

In my experience, I found that it's more effective to talk about tasks on the board, to keep the standup focused, and to keep everyone's focus on their tasks, to review their estimations & track their records daily.

Is it valid to limit the discussion to the tasks on the board?

Thomas Owens
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Shadin
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2 Answers2

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As per the Scrum Guide content on daily standups, the three questions for discussion are:

  • What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
  • What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
  • Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?

All of the questions focus around the Sprint Goal, not the tasks that are on the board. Again, per the Scrum Guide, the Sprint Goal is created in Sprint Planning and it defines "an objective that will be met within the Sprint through the implementation of the Product Backlog, and it provides guidance to the Development Team on why it is building the Increment".

Everything that your development team does should, ideally, be helping the team progress toward the Sprint Goal. These may be unplanned activities that aren't on the board that had to be done, or they could be things at a lower level that may have been considered and estimated, but at a lower level than an item on the board.

I would say let your team talk about everything that they did yesterday. If they are talking about things that don't help the team reach the Sprint Goal, then someone should bring this up, especially if there were other things that they could have done that did move the team closer to completing the Sprint Goal.

One exception may be if an individual is supporting multiple Scrum teams. In the meeting, they probably shouldn't talk about everything they did yesterday, but what they did in support of the team that is currently having the standup.

The Sprint Retrospective is a great time to talk about this issue with the team. There are plenty of questions to consider:

  • Is the team underworked on items related to the Sprint Goal?
  • Is there too much unplanned work?
  • Where is the unplanned work coming from and who is authorizing it?
  • Why are people working on things not on the board?
  • Should we be showing more details on the board to tie the things you do to items on the board more easily?
Thomas Owens
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No, you should talk about what you did yesterday.

If its not on the board you need to do one of the following:

  • put it on the board,
  • stop doing it
  • or change teams.

The most common one, say for unplanned emergency work, is to write up a card and stick it on the board. This ensures that at the end of the sprint you can measure velocity and explain why sprint goals were not achieved.

A team member working on stuff which is not in the sprint is in my view one of the primary reasons for agile adoptions failing. Most commonly this is a developer diverted to fix live issues on another project.

Another annoying thing in sprints is "PM talking about meetings for other projects". In my view the PM is not part of the scrum team, they fill the 'Product Owner' Scrum role and thus there to answer questions, not report progress.

Ewan
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