My understanding is that a Daily Scrum meeting should be very quick, hosted in a friendly way and that it requires all the team members present. Because it is objective is to have everyone up to date with what everybody else is doing.
I like Scrum Daily Meetings that are held like that.
In my latest project our Daily Scrums are more like a Status Update meeting. Although the position is that we are holding Scrums and practicing proper Agile.
We are a distributed team, in 2 different countries, and the people that is in the same Country are not in the same office. As consequence we have virtual Scrums.
The problem is that our meetings always start on time, many people calls before the actual start time, so they actually start at the very first second of the meeting. Without any tolerance for small delays.
For example the last time we were on the phone and the person coordinating the meeting checked if everyone was on, and we said one of our team members was not on yet but he was calling. And I was told to start sharing without waiting for my team member.
Also everyone has a lot of meetings, and sometimes they are back to back with the Scrum meeting, so it is understandable if they arrive during the first or second minute of the meeting.
Is that the normal for teams practicing Daily Scrums? It is the first time that happens to me.
I can not find any bibliography directly about it. Although the presence of all team members is stressed, it is stressed also that the meetings should always start at the same time. But I imagine there can be a small delay tolerance.
I even read on a blog someone suggesting that the Scrum Master can place penalties if someone arrives "5 seconds" late. I thought the Scrums were supposed to be friendly, and having a penalty like that seems counter productive.
What is the recommended approach in a situation like this?
Best Answer
Like with any agile practice, scrum teams can decide this for themselves. If it bothers you, you should bring it up in your retrospective and try to come to a solution that everyone is happy with. Perhaps other team members feel the same way, but think that's "just how scrum is done."
That being said, in my scrum meetings I start on the second unless three or more people are missing. For a meeting that everyone is required to attend every day, I feel it is disrespectful of everyone's time to do otherwise. When I'm the one that shows up late, my team starts without me. If we have time at the end, we go back to the tasks of people who came late.
I have been less strict about punctuality in the past, and what happened is people who showed up on time got tired of their time being wasted, so they started trying to guess when the meeting would actually start, and show up then instead, which had a snowball effect.
For a daily meeting, it's not the end of the world if someone occasionally misses part of it. Hopefully it isn't the only communication you're doing throughout the day.