Most people (reading this blog at least) are familiar with the format of the Daily Scrum, where everybody on The Team comes up with an answer to the following three questions:
- What did I do yesterday?
- What am I planning on doing today?
- What impediments do I see?
But what a lot of people don’t seem to realise is that this is pretty much all there is to Scrum.
Scrum is pretty much just these same three questions repeated over and over and over again.
Don’t believe me?
At the Sprint Review the entire Team answers the question: “What did we accomplish last Sprint?”
And at Sprint Planning the Team again answers the question: “What are we planning on doing in the next Sprint?”
And finally at the Sprint Retrospective we are ask and answer the question “What impediments do we have? (and what are we going to do about them)”1
And of course the very same pattern can and should continue to repeat at the Release Level if you have one.
It’s far too easy to get caught up in the mechanics of Scrum — at which point it starts looking like a laundry list of artefacts to create, time boxes to keep and meetings to attend – but IMO that’s overcomplicating it.
All you have to do is connect with your inner 3 year old and keep asking (and answering) the same three questions over and over and over again.
- Careful readers will notice that the meetings could be considered to be out of order. That’s because the Daily Scrum Questions IMHO are out of order too! It’s far more effective to discuss what has been done and what impediments have been uncovered before figuring out what you’re going to do next. ↩