Daily Scrum: Complete Beginner’s Guide

Daily Scrums are held by 87% of agile teams, making them the most popular of all Scrum events. Let’s review how you can make this popular Scrum event more productive, effective, and beneficial to your whole team.

The Daily Scrum is a time-boxed, 15-minute meeting that is one of the five official Scrum events.

Scrum teams hold the Daily Scrum every day of a Sprint at the same time and in the same place, to reduce complexity. The Daily Scrum is also known as the “daily standup,” “daily huddle,”, “standup”, or simply “the daily”.

The term “standup” comes from the idea that when everyone is standing, it encourages the team to keep the meeting short.

The Daily Scrum is used to inspect progress towards achieving the Sprint Goal and reduce the need for other ad-hoc gatherings that damage the focus of developers.

The goal of the meeting is to create clarity on the day’s work, adjust plans, and engage in some quick problem-solving.

Jeff Sutherland, inventor of the Scrum framework, compares the Daily Scrum to a sports team huddling before a match:

The focus of the Daily Scrum should be on looking ahead at how to tackle the day and unblock one another, rather than giving status updates on what team members completed yesterday.

The Daily Scrum is run by the developers of the Scrum team for the developers of the Scrum team. However, according to the Scrum Guide, “If the Product Owner or Scrum Master are actively working on items in the Sprint Backlog, they participate as Developers.”

Developers can hold the daily standup meeting by themselves, but a Scrum Master or other Agile Coach may facilitate it, especially when the team is new to Scrum. The Scrum Master may also coach the developers on how to make the Daily Scrum productive and how to keep it within the 15-minute time box.

The Scrum Master may facilitate the Daily Scrum for teams that are new to running it. But generally the Scrum Master does not directly participate in the standup unless he or she is working as a developer in the sprint.

Product Owners should also not participate directly in the standup unless they have worked as a developer.

However, the Product Owner and other stakeholders are also allowed to attend as spectators if they are not participating in the sprint as Developers. They may want to do this to get a sense of how progress towards the Sprint Goal is going.

The Scrum Guide gives little guidance on the format of this popular meeting beyond its length, location, and who should attend.

Scrum does not specify a Daily Scrum agenda and says:

For remote or distributed teams who do not work in the same office, this may involve using an online tool.

💡 Need ideas to spice up your Daily Scrum’s format? Hop over to 14 Daily Standup Formats to Try With Your Team.

The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event held every working day of the Sprint at the same time and place.

This consistency reduces complexity makes the Daily Scrum the heartbeat of the Sprint. It also makes it easier for team members to plan their deep work around it.

Distributed teams can hold the meeting on Zoom or Microsoft Teams, and many opt to turn the event into an async practice using a dedicated online standup tool. Each team member then posts a daily update about their plans, progress, and blockers for the day.

Previous versions of the Scrum Guide prior to 2020 recommended three questions to ask during the daily standup. These questions are no longer prescribed by the guide, but many teams still use them to structure the meeting.

The three Daily Scrum questions are:

Teams typically go around a real or virtual circle, with members answering the three questions above one person at a time.

Three questions are a lot to answer. So if you’re using these guiding questions try this rule:

If you find yourself speaking for more than about 90 seconds, try to resolve the issue outside the meeting with your Scrum Master or team-mates.

💡 Here are 57 Daily Standup Questions for More Engaging Updates.

Without proper guardrails, Daily Scrums can transform from energizing team huddles into standing ordeals.

When that happens, developers come to hate the daily ritual because it’s a distraction instead of a productivity booster.

Here are 6 tips to make and keep your Daily Scrums great.

Because it happens daily, the Daily Scrum should be short and abide by Scrum’s mandated timebox. Most developers who hate the meeting – and there are many – will tell you it goes on for too long, too often.

When you do find development teams who like the Daily Scrum, it’s because they keep them short and helpful.

Time boxing can be relatively easy for smaller teams – just make sure you have a timer. Larger groups might find the 15-minute time limit harder to maintain. So, instead of just timing the meeting, time box individual updates too and keep them within one or two minutes.

⏱️ Scrum Masters or Facilitators : Don’t be afraid to use a physical stopwatch with your teams if they’re prone to running over the scheduled 15 minutes.

If standing and time boxing don’t keep things moving, here are more ways to stop the meeting from going into overtime. Depending on your viewpoint, some of these ideas border on the obnoxious – carefully assess whether they’re a fit for your team and culture.

“Managers” should never interfere in the Daily Scrum or request status updates in that forum because then the meeting ceases to benefit the development team.

The Daily Scrum should be attended by developers to serve developers in their quest to meet the Sprint Goal.

To keep this from happening, some teams don’t allow the Scrum Master, Product Owner, or project manager to be the meeting facilitator.

Scrum trainer Mirko Perkusich sums it up:

Developers can also use their Sprint Retrospectives to debug the Daily Scrum if it’s somehow not helping them to improve their work.

Since the Scrum Guide gives no template or other prescriptions on how to run this event, you can take an agile approach and iterate on the Daily Scrum itself.

The three questions from the old Scrum Guide make for a good starting point. But they’re not required, so you can adjust them as you please. For example:

One of the most common complaints about the Daily Scrum is that it forces developers to break their focus during the day. It takes time to regain complete focus after a distraction. Instead of lasting 15 minutes, a poorly timed Daily Scrum can easily distract developers for twice as long.

Remember, since the meeting serves developers, it should be developers who choose how they prefer to run the meeting.

To prevent themselves waiting around for the Daily Scrum or struggling to focus after it, developers can consider trying these things:

💡 Learn more about the benefits and pitfalls of async standups in Virtual vs Async Standups: Which is Right For Your Team?

To maintain focus on achieving the Sprint Goal, make your Daily Scrum about the work progress instead of individual updates.

Talk through sprint backlog items on the task board in order of importance or completion status, and let people comment on those items. This approach means one person might speak several times during a meeting instead of just once.

Scrum founder Jeff Sutherland said that the meeting should create teams that:

Daily Scrums can energize your team and form the glue between the other Scrum events – sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. When done right, they become the equivalent of a sports team huddling before a match. Members walk out of the meeting motivated with a clear sense of what they need to do.

💡 Check out our Daily standup hub for an overview of all our resources on daily standups.

Most people who speak about a daily standup refer to the Daily Scrum and vice versa. In some cases, a standup meeting is just a get-together where people stand instead of sit, even when it’s not a Scrum event or other agile meeting.

As mentioned earlier, it is sometimes called the Daily Huddle, the daily or simply a standup. Its purpose is to keep the team focused on progressing toward the Sprint Goal (often referred to as the product increment).

The Daily Scrum’s facilitator is often the team’s Scrum Master. However, the meeting doesn’t require a facilitator. The meeting is held by developers for developers. So as a Scrum team becomes more mature and truly self-managing, the developers should be able to organize and facilitate this meeting among themselves.

The Daily Scrum is a short event without much official structure. Since the Scrum Guide remove the three guiding questions in 2020, there is even less structure.

You can use the checklist below to ensure a smooth and effective daily meeting:

Iterating on your Daily Scrum process may involve introducing new questions, new tools, or even trying an asynchronous standup process.