The new scrum guide states that only dev team members participate in the daily scrum

The Daily Scrum is a collaborative event for the Development Team. It is a work session focused on turning PBIs into working software, a formal opportunity for the Development Team to inspect and adapt their plan for the next 24 hours on creating the Increment.

I see the Daily Scrum as how the Development Team knows when to react to help each other, where they coordinate tasks to complete the PBIs they’ve forecasted, and when they work together as a team to be successful. It is where they understand how to work together as a self-organizing team to create the anticipated Increment. So, unless the PO or Scrum Master are actually executing work on the Sprint Backlog they do not participate.

I do agree that for transparency sake others can attend a Daily Scrum, as long as they remain silent.

Fredrik, I believe your confusion stems from equating participation and attendance.

The Scrum Guide does not place any limitations on Daily Scrum attendance. A Product Owner may attend a Daily Scrum, provided they do not participate (unless explicitly requested to by the Development Team in regards to an issue or impediment).

The same guideline applies for a Scrum Master, although a Scrum Master may initially need to help facilitate the Daily Scrum for the Development Team until they are able to conduct it themselves.

As stated, the Daily Scrum is specifically designed for the Development Team to collaborate around the current sprint.

> The definition of the development team is the developers and
> the scrum guide states that "The Product Owner and
> Scrum Master roles are not included in this count unless
> they are also executing the work of the Sprint Backlog".
>
> I think this needs to be clarified, surely the product owner
> and the scrum master should participate in this meeting ;)

Why should they participate if they are not members of the Development Team? Can you explain your reasoning?

> If this has changed can you explain why this has changed?

This hasn't changed, it's been in the Scrum Guide for many years.

The point is the difference between "participate" and "attend" to the Daily Scrum.

As many have stated, The Scrum Guide does not bar others from observing the Daily Scrum event. I feel that there are important things to consider when permitting an audience.

The conduct and content of the event may change. The maturity and experience of the Development team and the business roles of others observing may affect the how and what of the discussion.

The Scrum Master MUST enforce the rules, preferably ensuring that it is well understood prior to the event. If the individual in either the Scum Master or Product Owner role cannot remain silent, then be assured others will also not be.

Many so-called Scrum references (Scrum for Dummies, Mountain Goat Software, Scaled Agile Framework, etc) encourage not just observation but participation by those outside the Development Team especially the Scrum Master. Such a practice inhibits the Development Team from being truly self managing and self organizing.

Hi All, In my view sometime user story is not clear to scrum team and they can develop something else which may not required by PO, So better for a Product Owner to attend standup meeting and try to check whether team is going in right direction or not. If there is clarification required for any user story then it can be discuss in standup or offline. So practically in my view Product owner should attend standup at least once at the mid of sprint.

There should be every attempt to verify story understanding between the PO and the Development Team during grooming and Sprint Planning. Still, the Development Team may begin working on a story with an incorrect understanding of the PO's request (it can happen).

We should not advocate a PO attending only one Daily Scrum each sprint, even if it is a "minimum" suggestion (don't promote the idea that one Daily Scrum per sprint is acceptable!).

To mitigate the above situation, along with any other potential sprint issues, the PO should attend every Daily Scrum.

There should be a solid understanding prior to the Sprint Planning event, that's part of the purpose of refinement. Sprint Planning may surface a misunderstanding. As stated, it can happen that the misunderstanding surfaces during the Sprint. So how can that be remedied? Hopefully the backlog items are small enough to ideally be completed in a short amount of time. Utilizing continuous integration techniques, each item should be reviewed by the Product Owner throughout the Sprint. Should a disconnect arise, the Product Owner and Development Team can discuss and determine a course of action: reset the item and begin again, discard the work and create a new item in the Sprint Backlog or Product Backlog, keep the work and create a new item in the Sprint Backlog or Product Backlog, etc. The Daily Scrum is not for the management to get a status update, Product Owners to check on the Development Team, Scrum Masters to validate progress, stakeholders to evaluate the product, etc.

Hi all,
Thanks for the replies and explanations. I have read them through and it seems that the general opinion is that it is mainly the dev team that contributes to moving work forward and that the PO and SM can attend if they keep silent unless requested by the team to be involved.

I do not fully agree with this. The reason is that I do see the necessity for the SM and the PO for being as committed to delivery as the dev team, they are not just involved, and as such they should sit with and participate fully. I see it as a big risk that if the PO doesn't participate daily that the PO becomes disengaged and not committed . If they do not participate daily and you put solely the dev team in the driving seat you might have the situation that after 30 days (or however long your sprint is) that the PO comes back and says that "ohh, great delivery but this is not what I wanted to have". Even if the backlog is groomed and ready we don't want to go into more details than for the team to be able to understand it well enough to to start working on the story. There will always be room for mistakes and clarifications and I think that the daily scrum is one of the most important tools for making sure everyone is on the same page. Also a PO who attends the daily scrum and sees the progress can take much better decisions and is in a much better position to inform management, stakeholders etc. This helps to avoid situations where to dev team is seen as a black hole you feed requirements and nothing else. Daily communication and collaboration builds trust and understanding between team and PO as well.

I guess the main difference here is that I don't see the daily scrum as mainly a forum for the dev team. I would agree that if you have a PO that sits together with the team who is assigned 100% to the project where the team can ask questions directly would not need to attend the daily scrum if all that is discussed in the daily scrum is technical problems but my understanding is that the daily scrum is mainly for transparency and collaboration and not for the dev team only.

I do appreciate what the scrum guide says and can understand it's reasoning for the strict restriction of development team only however currently we allow both the SM and the PO to attend and participate when there is something related to the increment that can be contributed, for example the SM doing code reviews (in which case is part of the development team at that stage) or the PO passing on a clarification on a story being worked on.

I feel it also contributes to the scrum value of openness and in this particular case works well for the team dynamic making all feel part of it.

I'd be interested in any views on that.

Andrew,

While items like PO feedback certainly have value, it is my opinion that creating more "openness" around discussion topics in the Daily Scrum gets away from the intent of the meeting, and diminishes the scrum value of Focus.

The Daily Scrum is intended to provide the Development Team with a daily point-in-time to come together and discuss the current sprint, progress, and issues.

In your example, the SM contributes as a Development Team member, not as a Scrum Master. The PO contributes clarification on sprint work, which is ok if the Development Team raises an issue with a sprint story, but in my mind it is not ok if the PO volunteers that information on their own.

The PO may attend the Daily Scrum, and reply if called upon. Otherwise, they are a fly on the wall.

> I see it as a big risk that if the PO doesn't participate daily
> that the PO becomes disengaged and not committed

Correct, but daily participation by the PO is not the same thing as attending the daily Scrum. There are 23 hours and 45 minutes left in the day, any portion of which can be used for collaboration between the PO and the Development Team.

> ...my understanding is that the daily scrum is mainly for
> transparency and collaboration and not for the dev team only.

Why? Why should the Development Team be denied just 15 minutes out of a busy day, during which no end of collaboration may occur and transparency provided, to reflect and refocus on their own plan to meet the Sprint Goal? Why is that too much to ask?

Posted By Timothy Baffa on 13 Jul 2016 04:00 PM
To mitigate the above situation, along with any other potential sprint issues, the PO should attend every Daily Scrum.

It always good for PO and SM to attend daily scrum.
But when they have other responsibilities, or several teams to work with, they don't always have opportunity to attend all the daily meetings.

Clarifications with the PO could be done out of these 15 minutes meetings. Especially when a whiteboard can help and more than few minutes is needed.

But when they have other responsibilities, or several teams to work with, they don't always have opportunity to attend all the daily meetings.

Clarifications with the PO could be done out of these 15 minutes meetings. Especially when a whiteboard can help and more than few minutes is needed.

Sedera,

I really cannot respond to this issue any better than Ian did in a previous post; therefore, I will paraphrase his response:

"There are 23 hours and 45 minutes left in the day, any portion of which can be used for collaboration between the PO and the Development Team. Why should the Development Team be denied just 15 minutes out of a busy day to reflect and refocus on their own plan to meet the Sprint Goal? Why is that too much to ask?"

Should a manager, customer, CTO, HR representative be allowed to attend a Sprint Retrospective? Isn't it possible that person might have input into how the Scrum Team could improve? Is that a valid method for any of them to solve an issue with the Scrum Team?

How many of you shudder at that thought? Why? Is it the loss of self-organization? Fear of micro-management? The fact that it violates the rules in The Scrum Guide? Is it that the detrimental affect to the value of the event is easily understood?

Why is it that so many fight to uphold the sanctity of the Sprint Retrospective yet are willing (or even demanding) to violate the Daily Scrum event? Is it because Retrospective affects you directly as the Scrum Master or Product Owner? Is there a lack of trust? Or a fear?

Please take some time to honestly and critically think about that inconsistency.

----------

There is value in having the Scrum Master coach a Development Team new to Scrum on methods for conducting the event; preferably this is done outside of the event itself, perhaps via a workshop. There can be value in occasional observation by the Scrum Master to later provide feedback to the Development Team. IMHO there is never a reason, only excuses, for skewing or violating the purpose of the Daily Scrum. If there is a problem, don't dis-empower the Development Team; find a solution that doesn't alter the immutable rules of the framework.

Even having said that, I feel that I am simply justifying having an observer to silence the cries for transparency. Encourage your Development Teams to try different approaches, research online, discuss with other Development Teams, and whatnot for self improvement. Commitment to excellence shouldn't just be about the technical aspects; it should also include the Scrum skills. Inspiring that level of investment goes a long way.

I was really hoping that a discussion would be sparked.

+1 to Tim Vandewalle and Ian's responses above.

In my view, the main reason that PO and SM shouldn't be mandatory attendees nor participants is that the Dev Team is self organizing. Requiring attendance or participation by one of those other two roles or any other person implies that the Dev Team cannot even self organize to hold a 15 or minute less synchronization meeting. That seems pretty ludicrous to me.

It is very common for teams to hold an "After Meeting" or "After Party" just *after* the Daily Scrum has concluded, in which non Dev Team members can participate. I go into this much more in the following article only my web site:

http://www.scrumcrazy.com/Overview+-+Daily+Scrum+Patterns

Also worth nothing that the "Dev Team members participation only" rule has been in place since at least the 2007 Scrum Guide.

Thank you for comments, Mr. Bradley. I've poked around the Scrum Crazy site a bit in the past, but not too much. Perhaps there will be some time for more reading there in the future.

I should have been more clear about the spark. I would really love to hear thoughts about my question:

Why is it that so many fight to uphold the sanctity of the Sprint Retrospective yet are willing (or even demanding) to violate the Daily Scrum event?

Maybe that needs to be a new thread?

Posted By Ian Mitchell on 08 Jul 2016 04:16 PM

Why should they participate if they are not members of the Development Team? Can you explain your reasoning?

And why not?
There is a lot of reasons for the PO attend (listen mode), but I have no one about why not!
And how about SM? How could he/she coaching the team if don't attend the meeting?

See here: http://tomulrichconsulting.com/Scrum_Guide.pdf
Scrum Guide 2009, written by Ken

"The ScrumMaster also enforces the rule that chickens are not allowed to talk or in anyway interfere with the Daily Scrum.", page 10.

Did Ken change his mind?

regards,

Carlos

> And why not?

If non-developers participated in the inspection and adaptation of the Development Team's plan, do you think that would be a good way of working? Do you think it would be representative of sound agile practice?

> Did Ken change his mind?

He dropped the pigs and chickens analogy, and put the focus instead on the matter of participation and accountability.

And why not?
There is a lot of reasons for the PO attend (listen mode), but I have no one about why not!

Because of the observer effect.
Even in "silent mode", the PO "could" disturb the Daily Scrum of the Dev Team.

Because of the observer effect.
Even in "silent mode", the PO "could" disturb the Daily Scrum of the Dev Team.

If the team members, SM and PO work as team player, practice the five scrum values, have transparency, WHY PO could disturb the Daily Scrum?

It's not make sense for me.

If non-developers participated in the inspection and adaptation of the Development Team's plan, do you think that would be a good way of working? Do you think it would be representative of sound agile practice?

The PO could not "participate" (talk to the team for example), but why not could PO attend (silent mode) this meeting? Where is the problem? Where are the 5 values of Scrum?

At second part of sprint planning, the Development Team create theirs plan, and "The Product Owner can help to clarify the selected Product Backlog items and make trade-offs"

> The PO could not "participate" (talk to the team for example),
> but why not could PO attend (silent mode) this meeting? Where is
> the problem?

The Daily Scrum is an opportunity for the Development Team to inspect and adapt its plan for meeting the Sprint Goal. The Scrum Master will enforce the rule that only they participate. Furthermore the team and/or SM would be quite within their rights to veto the PO or anyone else from attending, even if they do not speak, due to the observer effect that Olivier mentions.

The Scrum Values include Focus and Respect. When the Development Team seek focus, this must be respected. The Daily Scrum is an excellent example.

Mr. Martrins, the link you provided is for the 2009 version of The Scrum Guide. As previously noted there have been several changes. Please see http://scrumguides.org/ for the latest.

I believe that a string Development Team with a good supporting cast (Scrum Master and Product Owner) and supporting organization (management) would be less affected by the observer affect. Ultimately that should be the goal. It is often the case that the purpose and value of the Daily Scrum event is not understood. The Development Team may be having good planning conversations while addressing the three questions without an audience; once there is an audience that may change to a pass-the-baton status meeting then the real planning is done later.

Hi,

I believe this is changed in the latest version.

Scrum Master ensures that the Dev team has the meeting, but not emphasizing that only the Dev team should attend the meeting. It is ok for others to attend, but Scrum Master has to ensure that they do not disrupt the meeting.

Thanks!

I guess I need to clarify on what I mentioned.. Anyone can attend the Daily Scrum, but only the DEV team can participate.

"The Daily Scrum is an internal meeting for the Development Team. If others are present, the Scrum Master ensures that they do not disrupt the meeting"

Thanks Filip - I was going to mention the same point. 

Its not about a particular rule - the Scrum Guide is exactly that IMHO - its a "guide". If the scrum master doesn't attend / and/or attends and doesn't participate - s/he may not be able to "protect" his/her team from external issues / or coach them when noticing some "break" in the team spirit or when an individual is being unfairly treated.

Level of participation should also thus be a factor of how new the team is - and which "stage" of team formation they have got through to (should reach "performing" phase so SM can be more hands-off, CANNOT be hands-off if visibly in a prior phase).

The interesting thing about enusring that only the dev team can participate in the Daily Scrum is this:

It is hardly ever appropriate to tell the others to shut up. If people outside the Scrum Team disrupt the meeting it usually means some need of theirs is not being met. Usually that's something like the progress of the Scrum Team not being transparent enough for them (at least on the surface). Now the tricky part of a Scrum Master's job is to find out what it really is those people need and find alternative ways of providing it.

I was taking a practice test on: http://www.techagilist.com/practice-exams/csm-practice-test/csm-practice-exam-real-mode/. Is this incorrect?

Or is it a case that per the CMS Test, the Scrum Master, Product Owner and Development team are required to attend, but in practice, it can be negotiated?

Launa, both Scrum.org and ScrumAlliance use the Scrum Guide as the basis for their certifications exams.  While the Scrum Guide has had its wording changed slightly, the current version of this statement can be found on page 12, and reads:

"The Daily Scrum is an internal meeting for the Development Team. If others are present, the Scrum Master ensures that they do not disrupt the meeting."

To both your questions, I would say no, the discussion in this thread should still hold true with the current CSM and PSM I exams.