Minutes of meetings of Daily SCRUM

Question

As a Scrum team, we understand that daily scrum is for us to update each other with

1. what we did y'day and 2. what we will work on today. 

Beside this, we each update each other with any impediments or any dependancy due to which there is blocker in doing the work.

We are about 8-9 developers and since we are working with other cross-functional teams, almost each one of has some kind of impediments or dependancy that we mention in daily scrum. Since no one document these impediments, our Scrum master needs to remember all these impediments for each developer(some of us has more than 2-3 impediments).

This has started to bother us as a Scrum team, because, the Scrum Master is missing the impediments mentioned during the daily scrum.

I searched on this site and found this post but it talks about Scrum of Scrum kind of meeting and not a daily scrum.

Shall we start "documenting" these impediments/minutes of daily scrum now as we missed quite a few of the impediments during last 2-weeks?

Answer 1

First of all, with 8-9 developers, each having 1-3 impediments, it seems like the team is not really working together towards the same goal, but working very efficiently towards several goals. (and thereby losing real productivity).

Second, the Daily scrum is the last responsible moment to raise an impediment, but nothing prevents the team from quickly writing the impediment on a post-it and putting up on a wall somewhere. Or talking to the Scrum master the day before or before the daily scrum.

Third, the Scrum Master may be accountable for removing impediments, but the team is responsible to remove the impediments within their power. Depending on the type of impediment it may just as well be an additional Task, and extra Test or a much needed discussion with a Product owner or Stakeholder. For most of these, when the Scrum Master acts as a go-between, he just adds overhead and additional process, the team should "do the work" instead of treat it as something "blocking them".

My suggestion would be:

• Reduce the work in progress and have people work together on the same Product Backlog item.
• Start stopping and stop starting. Whenever an impediment blocks progress, don't pick up something else to be able to remain busy. Start working towards removing the impediment immediately.
• Distinguish clearly between "unexpected work" and "impediments". The first just results on new tasks on the Sprint backlog and the team must self-organize to complete that work.
• Use post-its, a whiteboard or some other medium to quickly track the real impediments. I tend to put up a big red sheet of paper somewhere and use neon-yellow post-its on it. That way the problems are very visible also to people from outside of the team.
• Use the daily scrum to plan the upcoming day. Plan who will help remove these impediments and plan how you are going to achieve the sprint goal. Then use the time after the daily scrum to do that work. If needed sit with the Scrum master and Product owner to see how the impediments can be removed.
• Stop "managing" impediments and start "removing" them. Removing involves changes to processes, broader responsibilities, adding other skills to the team, changing the way of working or the tools, maybe automating things as well. Use the Retrospective to go deep on the types of impediments you have and work together with the whole Scrum team to become more independent as a team. Learn to solve your own impediments and learn to prevent them from happening. Learn to work together tightly to resolve them without the need of the Scrum Master. Use the Scrum Master for impediments that are really out-of-reach for the development team, so he/she can use his/her time on those items that provide the biggest improvements to the team, but are not possible for the team to resolve (these are generally organizational issues, lack of autonomy, licensing or enterprise architecture type issues).