Does Your Team Need a Daily Scrum Every Day?

Back in 1975, Fred Brooks managed the IBM OS/360 project. This was one of the first software projects to be notoriously late. In fact, it was a year late.

Brooks was asked, I suspect with shock and incredulity, "How does a project get to be a year late?"

Brooks replied famously, "One day at a time."

I believe that daily scrums help our projects from having similar fates. By meeting daily, issues are raised sooner than they would be any other way. And that helps prevent the day-at-a-time slips that led to Brooks’ project being a year late.

But, do we really need to meet every day?

Yes, most teams do. I do believe there are two exceptions to a daily meeting.

But one of them is not "a team that talks a lot, anyway." I hear this argument a lot. The team doesn’t need a daily scrum because everyone sits near one another and talks frequently.

That’s not the same. Even on such a team, the daily scrum may be the only time each day when everyone participates in the discussion. Most other conversations include just a subset of the team.

Besides, when a team does talk frequently outside the daily scrum, the daily scrum will be extremely short. And, so, hardly worth complaining about.

So, what are the two cases when I don’t think a team needs a daily scrum?

First, on Fridays when the team is highly distributed. Consider a team in which a few remote members are expected to call into a daily scrum at, say, 8 p.m. their time, which is presumably early morning for the rest of the team.

Participating in a nightly call might be OK from Monday through Thursday. But no one wants to give up their Friday night as well.

Second, on days when a team does a sprint planning meeting, many teams will find a daily scrum unnecessary.

Sprint planning usually ends with some discussion that mimics a daily scrum—what tasks from the sprint backlog will each person work on initially? That makes a separate daily scrum redundant.

Daily scrums are important and when done well can help a team immensely. But there are a couple of cases when skipping the daily scrum can help your team succeed with agile.