Get the Most Out of Daily Scrum

Scrum is an Agile framework where actions are planned with a timebox and progress is tracked in daily meetings. The daily scrum is a stand-up team meeting where team members explain what they worked on and what’s their agenda for that day. It helps the team to understand the status of all the activity that is going on and get a suggestion to rectify any issue which is delaying the development. Scrum is the most popular Agile methodology because it minimizes the need for documentation, helps team members to stay updated on a daily basis and resolve any issue as a team and not on an individual basis.

Whether it is mobile app testing or software development, scrum is used by most of the teams these days. It also has a periodic feedback system which is a part of the sprint review, sprint retrospective and the involvement of the product manager and stakeholders enables you to try new things with the features before finalizing. Although, it might be a little difficult to maintain the pace in the beginning. Here are some of the aspects to learn lessons from and make improvements in the scrum:

  • Task updates during the sprint: It’s very common in that customers can come up with issues during the sprint when everything is already planned. In this scenario, the developers need to set the priority again and fix the issues that were originally not a part of the plan. This means the deadline is pushed a bit further and the task remains unfinished at the end of the sprint. 
  • Scrum of Scrums: If the team is small then it makes sense to have a single scrum. Although if the team is bigger then it might become a tiresome job as all the members will take time to explain their points. It’s better to divide teams on the basis of their specific task and they have a scrum of their own. Then one person from each of those scrums can gather and have a scrum to discuss the status.   
  • The ideal sprint: Usually the sprint is supposed to be two to three weeks long as it takes that much time to develop a feature and make the necessary changes once complete. Although, the length of a sprint can be reduced if the client is not so sure about a particular feature function. This way the developers can work on the feature for a week and the changes that are expected from the client will be worked upon in the next week. This might lead most of the features in different stages of completion not planned.

This is why it’s better to be as agile as possible. The backlogs should be stored in an automated tool like Jira so that the team members are able to access the backlogs and report the status. Use of Kanban like scheduling system is important to get the work done before the deadline.

  • Tools to the rescue: To maintain theflow and synchronize with each team member is easy if you have a small team. But as the team grows it’s better to use some tools like Google sheets to share the daily updates. Atlassian Confluence will make it a bit more formal and the scrum master can manage it bases on the task in Jira.   

In the software development life cycle, the scrum is the most important part to keep the project on the timeline. Use of tools like Jira, Kanban, Atlassian will bring further improvements and speed up the overall process. It depends on the developers to use the tools religiously and use the time in scrum meetings wisely.

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