Problem solving during the daily Scrum
Is your project ‘doing’ agile? Well, if your daily stand up meetings are wasting the full teams’ time on problem solving activities, your not following the principles of an agile project.
It is very easy to fall into this practice, to extend your daily stand up meeting beyond the basics – here’s what I’ve done and here’s what I’m going to do, and here’s what’s impeding me – into a much lengthier problem solving session. Actually, it’s so easy to do, why shouldn’t you take just a few minutes of time to resolve a quick issue, then move on to the next person?
Well, why you shouldn’t do this is that this is the type of impediment a traditional development methodology runs into all the time. Scrum lays out a pretty simple, nuts and bolts set of standards for how to handle situations such as these. So I’d encourage you not to change agile in order to resolve these issues when they arise. The intent of agile is to change you and your organization, not the other way around.
So how would you deal with the inevitable problem solving questions and brainstorming when it arises in a daily stand up? Table the discussion until a future time. An effective strategy is to hold a quick meeting after the Scrum, and all of those interested and impacted can attend. And the rest of the team can continue on their way.
