We recently received a letter from Mike Cohn which reads:
Back in 1975, Fred Brooks managed the IBM OS/360 project. This was one of the first software projects to be notoriously late. In fact, it was a year late.
Brooks was asked, I suspect with shock and incredulity, “How does a project get to be a year late?”
Brooks replied famously, “One day at a time.”
I believe that daily scrums help our projects from having similar fates. By meeting daily, issues are raised sooner than they would be any other way. And that helps prevent the day-at-a-time slips that led to Brooks’ project being a year late.
But, do we really need to meet every day?
Yes, most teams do. I do believe there are two exceptions to a daily meeting:
- The first applies only to teams that are widely distributed across time zones–say when 8:00 am for some team members is 8:00 pm for others. You might not want to hold daily scrums on Friday if it means some team members will have to attend on a Friday night.
- The second time you may not need a daily scrum is on sprint planning day. Sprint planning usually ends with some discussion that mimics a daily scrum—what tasks from the sprint backlog will each person work on initially? That might make a separate daily scrum redundant.
Many teams believe there’s a third instance where they don’t need daily scrums: when they “talk a lot, anyway.”
Talking frequently isn’t the same thing as a daily scrum. First of all, the daily scrum may be the only time each day when everyone participates in the discussion. Most other conversations include just a subset of the team.
And secondly, when a team does talk frequently outside the daily scrum, the daily scrum will be extremely short. And so it’s hardly worth complaining about.
Daily scrums are an important inspect-and-adapt activity. Aside from a couple of times when skipping the daily scrum makes sense, holding a daily scrum every working day will help you succeed with agile,
