A Scrum Team has quietly acquired two standing meetings: a Tuesday and Thursday coordination call, and a Friday impediments call with the Scrum Master. The Daily Scrum still happens and takes twelve minutes, but nobody raises anything in it. How should the Scrum Master read this?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 1. Understanding and applying the Scrum framework medium
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The options
Correct As a signal that the Daily Scrum is not producing what it exists to produce, since Daily Scrums eliminate the need for other meetings
Correct. Scrum says Daily Scrums improve communications, identify impediments and promote quick decision-making, and consequently eliminate the need for other meetings — so two standing meetings have grown around an event whose purpose already covers both of their agendas. The fix is to make the Daily Scrum do its job, not to schedule the work it is failing to do.
Not correct As normal and healthy — extra coordination meetings are what a team adds as its work grows more complex
Wrong, and it is the comfortable reading. Events exist in Scrum to create regularity and to minimise the need for meetings not defined in Scrum, so meetings accumulating around them is a symptom worth investigating rather than growth.
Not correct As acceptable provided the Scrum Master chairs both extra meetings so that impediments still reach them
Wrong. Routing impediments through a chaired weekly call makes the team dependent on an intermediary for something the Daily Scrum surfaces in a day. Causing the removal of impediments does not require owning the channel they travel down.
Not correct As a breach of the framework — Scrum defines five events and a Scrum Team may hold no meetings beyond them
Wrong, and it is the overcorrection. The Daily Scrum is not the only time Developers may adjust their plan; they often meet through the day for more detailed discussions. What is questionable here is a standing substitute, not people talking.
Why
Scrum does not ban meetings, it makes most of them unnecessary — events create regularity so that coordination has a known home. So when standing meetings appear around the Daily Scrum, treat them as diagnosis rather than deviation, and ask what the event is failing to produce. A Daily Scrum that ends without an actionable plan for the next day of work has left a gap, and something will always grow into it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Daily Scrum
- What it says
- Daily Scrums improve communications, identify impediments, promote quick decision-making, and consequently eliminate the need for other meetings.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 1 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
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