Feral Sunar // Allianz Türkiye - Agile Coach
We know how much potential a good daily has. But are we sure that we are applying it correctly? In this article, based on five common mistakes in dailies, we are going to analyze how a good daily should be.
The 15-minute daily team meeting to raise awareness and make things visible while moving towards the sprint goal and making adjustments to the backlog seems to be easy to implement by daily. However, as the sprints progress, it is also an undeniable fact that teams develop behaviors that unintentionally create inefficiency here.
It is a valuable practical daily that even our teams who are familiar with agile working and even those who have not yet started agile working however have seen, liked and started practicing from agile teams who have started running sprints. As Gökhan said in his article ”Everything Starts with a Good Daily", when the daily ritual is done correctly, its accelerating effect on becoming a team is very great. Moreover, its contribution to the agile working process is also very high compared to its short duration of 15 minutes.
So are the teams applying this short but great contributing ritual correctly?
Most of the time yes, but sometimes no 😊
Come to the 5 most common ones encountered in the daily ritual, which are often lead to useless, often incorrectly developed solutions, erroneous results, in other words, we come across among the “anti-patterns”, let's look at them together:
- Belonging: Late participation in the daily ritual, irregular participation, or not participating in the daily at all
- To make planning: Discussing new needs in the daily, discussing user stories (refinement), or trying to reschedule the sprint
- Problem Solving: Trying to solve the problems mentioned in the Daily right there instead of discussing them later
- Monolog: To explain things with long monologues regardless of the Daily's 15-minute time limit (timebox)
- Not Mentioning the Obstacles: Not reporting obstacles in the Daily, not requesting help or support from the team
And some concrete data. For this article, I talked about these 5 anti-patterns with the 6 agile teams I work with and asked the teams which of them they encountered with the survey I shared immediately afterwards.
Here are the results:
Agile working teams, even if they apply scrum, can sometimes find it difficult to achieve the desired development. Although there are many different reasons depending on the situation, applying rituals in a mechanical way without understanding the underlying principles can be considered among the most common reasons.
No matter how the teams do at first with the effect of the training they receive while running the first sprints, it is inevitable that they will develop some applications that lead to inefficiency as the days go by. It is at this point that agile coaches guide and keep teams on track without hesitation in raising awareness and determining corrective actions.
Are there any anti-patterns that you have seen? Don't forget to share with us…
P.S. You can contact us by clicking here to share your experiences and ask questions about the agile working method.
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