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(Bild:
Stefan Mintert
)
Stefan Mintert works with his customers to improve the corporate culture in software development. He currently sees the greatest potential in leadership; regardless of a hierarchy level. He gave himself the task of leveraging this potential after a career path with a few changes of course. Originally coming from a computer science background with several years of consulting experience, he initially founded his own software development company. He discovered that leadership has to be learned and good role models are rare. It became apparent that the greatest need for support from his customers in software development was not in producing code, but in leadership. So it was clear to him where his company Kutura was headed: improve leadership so that the people who develop the products can develop and grow themselves. Stefan has been writing for Heise as a long-time freelancer for iX since 1994.
When a team works agile, there is usually a “Daily”. Sometimes it is also called “Daily Stand-up” or just “Stand-up”. In the case of Scrum it is part of the fixed inventory and there it is called “Daily Scrum”. So far so good.
Now I often come across teams in which I find the daily useless. This could be my own problem and doesn’t warrant a blog post. But the fact that many team members tell me that they find their daily routine boring and that no one listens to them is interesting.
How could it come to this?
I then usually ask the question why the team does the daily. And why? On the “Why?” I get answers more often than “What for?” The question of why can be wonderfully answered with all sorts of cargo cult reasons. For example:
It’s part of Scrum. That’s just how you do it. That was the case when I started here. This is how our working day begins.
The question of why is trickier for some teams. They just don’t know. At best, I get answers like “so that we can coordinate” or “for synchronization” or “to create transparency”.
On the surface, these are good answers. In connection with statements like “what other people say is boring” and “no one listens to me” something is wrong here. Or to put it positively: the meeting may have potential.
When I’m dealing with a situation like this with a team, I suggest the following, for example:
Before someone says something in the Daily, he or she says who should be interested in what was said. After speaking, everyone raises their hand if they heard something helpful; I’ll put it a little differently below (note the difference).
The result can be that a daily is pretty quiet. In this case, the silence says a lot. The same applies if often no one raises their hand. Sometimes it’s because the team members don’t really work together, but instead everyone works on their “own” tickets. A sprint goal that we could work towards together is typically also missing.
Im Scrum-Guide heißt es “The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work.”
Oops, a sprint goal? We don’t have that at all. And we are allowed to change the sprint backlog? Why that? We have committed to the tickets! Should we give that up?
Yes, because the agile way of working is not about slavishly processing tickets. By the way: That’s why this blog is called Escape the Feature Factory. It’s about achieving goals that have value. That’s why I always encourage the teams I work with to commit to goals, not tickets.
If I realize halfway through that I can achieve a goal even if I don’t use some tickets, then why should I do it? And why would I only implement a single ticket if it doesn’t serve any purpose?
The aspect of goal setting is important and we will definitely come across it a few more times in this blog. In the case of the Daily, I recommend the above test to all developers who want to escape the feature factory: Who is my post aimed at? And: Raise your hand as immediate feedback for contributions that will help me and the team get a little closer to the sprint goal.
Bye. Stefan
(rme)
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