In the dynamic world of Agile Scrum, daily scrum meetings stand as pillars of collaboration, transparency, and alignment within development teams. These brief yet impactful gatherings, held consistently each day, serve as catalysts for synchronizing activities, evaluating progress, identifying obstacles, and planning tasks.

The team comes together on each working day at about the same time to discuss the status of the project. The synonyms for the Daily Scrum meeting include “Daily Stand up”, “Daily Scrum”, and “Scrum Meeting” among others. The meeting is an informal gathering of all the team members coming together in a circle. The very objective of this meeting is to ensure better coordination among the team members working towards the end goal. The Scrum meeting should not be confused with a Status meeting, a meeting to provide status updates to management or other stakeholders.  Every team member’s active participation is appreciated along with a high degree of candidness.

The milestone of having this meeting is to get daily feedback on the progress of the project. The meeting is moderated by the Scrum Master. The sprint backlog is updated during the meeting. The challenge faced by the team members should be noted and resolved by the Scrum Master.  The technical discussion usually happens after the Scrum meeting and is attended by relevant technical members.

Last-minute hiccups at the end of the sprint can be avoided if there is a crystal clear update about the project during the daily standup. It is recommended that the product owner attends the daily standup. The daily stand-up should happen even in the absence of the product owner or Scrum Master.

The meeting is timeboxed to a maximum time of 15 minutes and happens before the task board. Care must be taken to ensure each team member has sufficient time to answer the 3 questions which could last about 2-3 minutes. The time box duration of this meeting is 15 minutes per day. This helps in getting the team clarification as to how much work is left and how to, as a team, handle those user stories/tasks.

The 3 Questions which seek an answer during the daily standup include

1) What did I do yesterday? What have I achieved?
2) What will I do today? The task for the day
3) What impediments to my progress? Challenges faced by me

The significance of this meeting is that it brings all the members of the team on a common platform. It instills discipline in the team. All the details pertaining to requirements and releases are obtained from the product owner. The daily standup helps in identifying and plugging the gaps in the team's commitment and understanding of requirements.