Are you bored with your current stand-up? “Yesterday, I finished working on widget x, today I’ll start on widget y. I have no impediments.” Yawn! However functional it might be, using the same format can get boring.
So I was very interested when I heard someone at the last London Agile Discussion Group suggest a different way of doing the daily stand-up (aka Daily Scrum). It was in reference to a Kanban board, but I see no reason why it could work for a traditional Scrum set-up.
Quite simply, you start with your final column and work backwards (for most of us this means starting on the right hand-side and working back to the left) asking “How can we progress this item?” or “How can we move this story to the next column”. For me it means starting in ‘Done’ and looking at the exit criteria to see if it can be removed. Then we look at ‘Test complete’ and work out how we can move it to ‘Done’, and so on.
The first few days have already highlighted some benefits of doing this. On day one we identified a ticket that was in the wrong column (we can only assume that it fell off and a helpful passer-by picked it up and put it back on the board – albeit in the wrong column). Our flow is our focus now as we are now focusing on what we need to do to progress stories. Because we’re identifying work remaining on each ticket, everyone is clearer what is left to do before it needs their input (whether that’s for code reviewing, testing, UAT). If you have one of those teams that people feel they need to justify their daily existence, this could be a great way to get them out of that habit – although they’re not justifying their previous day’s work, it’ll still be evident if they’re struggling because they won’t be able to explain what is left to do.
It’s still early days, but I’d say this change has had one of the biggest effects since we moved to a Kanban approach. Give it a go and let me know what you think.