Daily Scrum - the feeling of synchronization

November 9, 2007 by Artem Marchenko

How does a large project get to be one year late? - One day at a time!
(c) Frederick Brooks

Every software development is not like hardware manufacturing or building identical houses.
Every software development  project aims at creating a new artifact - something never previously developed by anybody else. Similarities with other projects can exist, however, a number of unique challenges is always significant. As a result unpredictable problems with many possible solutions arise regularly during the course of software development and many meetings can be held in order to choose or form the most suitable solution.

No problem solving

Daily meetings are special in the sense that problem solving is explicitly prohibited during these meetings. One of the main reasons to hold daily scrums is to let all the team members know what happens where, what is the situation like, if the team still meets its commitments. Essentially the daily meetings aim at building a feeling for the project. With this feeling at hand team members can always see where the help is needed, what is the current common agreement on the quality level and code style, what could usually be sacrificed in case a tradeoff wil be needed

If everybody is already effectively communicating with everybody, there might be no extra benefit in holding the daily meetings. However, the daily meeting guarantee that at least once a day everybody will find out what is the current status, who has what problems and if the iteration target can still be met. Daily synchronization done live, by doers and for doers ensure that most of the problems will be known by those who need to take an action no later, than one day after the problems arose.

What is the situation in your team? How many days does the developer work hard trying to solve a problem, before he feels it is reasonable to ask for help?

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