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I understand all the advantages of Daily Scrum and my team does it when we are working on stories.

But sometimes we just have bugs to fix for days, while we're waiting for new stories, and when this happen we put daily scrum aside. Some of developers says that "There's no need to do a Daily Scrum when we have nothing to discuss".

I don't know if a Daily Scrum when we don't have any new story to develop is necessary. Is there anything interesting we can do on a daily scrum when we just have bugs to fix?

2 Answers 2

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The daily scrum's official purpose is as follow:

  1. Communicating to the rest of the team what you did yesterday
  2. Communicating to the rest of the team what you are going to do today
  3. Communicating to the scrum master any impediments or blocked items

Applying this to your case:

  • Discussion is not a part of the daily scrum, so whether there's anything to discuss is irrelevant
  • "I have done bug 23/24/25 yesterday and I am going to concentrate on CSS bug files today" is a valid and useful scrum status. It tells everyone that one is progressing and what to keep their hands off for today. It also tells people that one hasn't been stuck on the same bug for three days.
  • We need to have a check that there is no trouble brewing, problems happening, impediments etc.

The daily scrum's behind the scenes purpose is:

  • Embodying the agile principle of transparency
  • Minimizing the impact of problems by making sure they are reported as fast as possible
  • Have a very quick feedback cycle of one day for many whole-team issues, which is preferable to having only an iteration-long feedback cycle
  • To give your developers a place to speak or ask questions to everybody else instead of having to go desk-by-desk
  • To have an ahead of time understanding if the team is going to make a sprint or not
  • To let the team re-organize if the current workload distribution is not efficient

...

You can find a very good article by Jeff Sutherland on MSDN:

Individuals and interactions are essential to high-performing teams. Studies of "communication saturation" during one project showed that, when no communication problems exist, teams can perform 50 times better than the industry average. To facilitate communication, agile methodologies rely on frequent inspect-and-adapt cycles. These cycles can range from every few minutes with pair programming, to every few hours with continuous integration, to every day with a daily standup meeting, to every iteration with a review and retrospective.

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  • IMO the third bullet is also to the team, the scrummaster just pays close attention and makes sure something is done.
    – Balog Pal
    Jun 4, 2013 at 14:57
  • @BalogPal It's to everybody, however it's specifically the SM's job to keep track and remove impediments.
    – Sklivvz
    Jun 4, 2013 at 15:14
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The whole SCRUM is summarized in a single picture and like 2 pages of text. It has very few "mandatory" elements. Daily SCRUM is one of them. Guess what? ;-)

I don't get the motivation not doing it. If there is nothing to discuss, everybody will just report that and it is over in 15 seconds. With everybody happy that whole team is on track.

And if someone have something relevant to report?

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  • While the actual meeting costs 15 seconds, the anticipation of the meeting and the loss of flow (and subsequent need to get back into a flow) can cost some developers a half hour or considerably more. Jun 5, 2013 at 0:12
  • only if you execute some anti-SCRUM really, the daily SCRUM must be natural as breathing and take zarro overhead. Ok, I allow a full minute. If you have more, I suggest working on that. Finding a good time-point when work is not done anyway is a good start ;-)
    – Balog Pal
    Jun 5, 2013 at 0:34

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