Daily Scrum

Scrum meetings play a vital role in fostering collaboration, communication, and transparency within development teams. These meetings are one of the main pillars engineering and development teams use to remain agile and on track. In addition to sprint planning, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospective meetings, scrum meetings are what engineering and development teams use to foster alignment and remain focused. Without a well-structured scrum meeting agenda, agile development teams may struggle to optimize their time, focus on their goals, and work as a cohesive unit. Well-structured scrum meeting agendas will allow these teams to facilitate effective conversations and teamwork, leading to seamless collaboration, communication, and continuous improvement. 

Key sections of a Scrum Meeting Agenda

If you’re looking for a way to successfully foster alignment amongst your development team, scrum meeting templates are the answer. To enhance meeting productivity and prioritize agile project management, it's important to be mindful of the sections you are including in your scrum meeting templates. We recommend scrum meeting templates that are composed of three main sections including “progress”, “slowed down” and “stopped”. Collectively, these three sections provide teams are their managers with the opportunity to provide crucial updates, and address roadblocks. Let’s dive into each section a little bit further: 

1. Progress

The progress section is the first section of the scrum meeting template. This section provides teammates with the opportunity to review any progress that has occurred since meeting last. For agile development teams this may mean discussing anything that has been moved to the “demo” or “done” stage of the current sprint. This will provide your development team with the opportunity to share their work or demo it to your team if they haven’t previously had the chance to share it in a group setting. As a manager, this will provide you with the opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding of what your team has been working on. 

2. Slowed down

It's normal to hit roadblocks or run into issues during sprints, but if you don’t address them, they may hinder your team from fulfilling crucial launches. During this section of your scrum meeting agenda template, its important that you and your teammates take the time to review any tasks that may not have progressed the way you had intended. Has one of your developers missed a deadline or failed to complete tasks within their sprint? Now is the time to discuss the issue and get to the root of the problem. This is also a great time to encourage your team to ask questions, allowing your teammate to problem solve and overcome challenges together.

3. Stopped

A key component of agile project management is progress. Development teams are constantly striving to make iterations and improvements, leading to stellar final products that meet their brief. Are there tasks that have been outlined in the present sprint that your developers have stopped working on? It’s important to bring them up during this section of the template. Having an open and honest conversation about why progress has halted on certain tasks will make it possible for your team to collaborate on solutions. If progress has halted completely, you may have to rearrange your sprints and move the task in question to a future sprint. 

Best Practices for Planning an Effective Scrum Meeting 

1. Define the meeting agenda and communicate it in advance 

The key to facilitating an effective scrum meeting is creating a comprehensive meeting agenda and circulating it among your team prior to the meeting. A meeting agenda will ensure your conversation is structured, and informative and circulating your meeting agenda in advance will ensure all team members can adequately prepare for the meeting. It will also provide meeting participants with the opportunity to add to the agenda. Fellow’s easy-to-use agenda builder ensures that your meetings start with clarity and everyone feels inspired to contribute.

2. Stick to the meeting agenda

To ensure meeting productivity during your scrum meetings, it's important to stick to the meeting agenda! Sticking to the agenda will ensure you make the most of your meeting, covering only important topics and refraining from derailing the conversation. Following the meeting agenda will also ensure your meeting does not go over time. This is especially important for a busy team of developers that are striving to hit tight deadlines! 

3. Limit the duration of the meeting to prevent it from becoming too long and unproductive

There's nothing worse than attending. Long, drawn out meeting. Scrum meetings are meant to be short and impactful. Sticking to your meeting agenda will ensure your meeting is short and productive. The longer your meeting lasts, the less engaged your team will become. 

4. Encourage all team members to share their updates 

To facilitate a productive meeting, all teammates must participate. The purpose of a scrum meeting is to provide status updates, and proactively problem solve as a unit. If all of your teammates don’t provide an update during scrum meetings, you won't be able to foster transparency, or accountability. These updates are a crucial component of every successful development team. If for some reason one or more teammates cannot attend the scrum meeting, it is recommended that they reach out to a team member to share their update on their behalf. 

5. Keep track of action items and decisions 

A key component of facilitating effective scrum meetings is fostering accountability. Keeping track of action items and decisions that come up during these meetings will help hold your teammates accountable. Because scrum meetings occur frequently, it can be difficult to keep track of all the details. With Fellow, you can gather and organize all your meeting data using tags to track any and all specific information, making it quick and easy to keep track of action items and decisions.

Why this Scrum Meeting Template is better in Fellow

Are you planning a daily scrum meeting and need a meeting agenda template to get started? Try this daily scrum meeting template in Fellow.

With Fellow, getting started with a daily scrum meeting template is as simple as choosing from one of hundreds of pre-built templates complete with recommended talking points, tweaking it with custom headers and talking points unique to your meeting, and bringing it to life during your next daily scrum!

When you choose to leverage a daily scrum meeting agenda template in Fellow, it automatically connects with your calendar and shows up side-by-side in your meeting calls for the ultimate distraction free meeting experience. And if you don’t have the capacity to build out your own talking points, you can leverage Fellow’s AI agenda builder to add talking points to your sections in a matter of minutes.

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Daily Scrum Meetings FAQs

1. Why are daily scrum meetings important? 

Daily scrum meetings provide regular opportunities for team members to communicate and collaborate, ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding project status, goals, and deadlines. Daily scrum meetings also help development teams identify potential bottlenecks before they turn into roadblocks, fostering clarity, alignment, and providing ample opportunity for proactive problem solving. 

2. What is the difference between a daily scrum meeting and daily check-ins? 

Daily scrum meetings refer to daily events within the scrum framework whereas daily check-ins can be used in various contexts. Daily scrum meetings often facilitate conversations regarding sprint progress whereas daily check-ins are often less structured, encouraging teammates to provide updates whether they pertain to the current sprint or not.

3. What is the Role of a Scrum Master in daily scrum meetings? 

The Scrum Master is responsible for facilitating all scrum related events, including daily scrum meetings. This individual is responsible for ensuring meetings are productive, informative, and helpful. They also ensure scrum principles are followed and everyone on the team has the resources they need to fulfill their development duties. 

4. Can daily scrum meetings be conducted virtually or asynchronously? 

In a world that continues to embrace digital-first solutions, virtual or asynchronous daily scrum meetings are becoming more common. The key is to maintain the essence of daily synchronization and communication. Whether you facilitate your daily scrum meeting virtually or in-person is entirely up to you. 

5. What if one or more team members cannot attend a daily scrum meeting? 

It is generally recommended that all team members attend daily scrum meetings. If someone cannot attend, they must inform their team with ample notice and provide the team with their update prior to the meeting. A designated representative can share the absent team members' updates during the meeting. If you cannot attend a scrum meeting, re recommend capturing a quick screen recording of any development progress you wish to share. This will allow you to share your update without being present.