Maintaining Efficient Progress Meetings

Progress meetings, in scrum called “Daily scrum”, are the instances in your development cycle where you inspect the team’s progress towards the goal and adapt to accommodate changes in the iteration. At this point (2025!) most of us are familiar with the three questions that Scrum proposes from running these meetings. However, I find that this time-tested method of running the progress meeting comes short of coping with the diversity of the current software development context.

To ensure your progress meetings/daily scrums are effective, it’s crucial to understand the common pitfalls and how to avoid them. I believe in observing and accepting each of the organisations’ context, and adapting the practices while respecting the principles and motivations that gave rise to those practices.

Here are some common issues that I find with progress meetings:

Progress meetings become status meetings, When there is an overreliance on adhering to the three questions, then team members reduce their participation to reporting on their tasks. This approach prevents the team from achieving the event’s true purpose, which is a working meeting where not only progress is reported, but work is levelled, and scope decisions can be taken.

Team members focus solely on their work, A common symptom is that team members focus on their reporting task and overlooking opportunities to assist their colleagues. These meetings are intended to increase collaboration among the team.

The environment is not a “safe” space, and team members do not openly discuss their challenges therefore problems remain unsolved until late stages of the iteration.

The Product Owner attends to ask questions, this is related to the previous one. The main purpose is to inspect the team’s progress towards the goal and adapt to accommodate changes in the iteration. This does not mean preventing the Product owner from attending, but educating the Product Owner on their role in the meeting.

Adapting to changing dynamics in software engineering

The traditional image of a team huddled around a physical board, sharing updates in a conference room, has given way to a more fluid and distributed reality.

Teams and their structures have evolved dramatically. Remote work has transformed once co-located teams into distributed units spanning multiple time zones and geographical boundaries. Synchronous daily meetings are challenging to schedule around multiple time zones.

With Work-from-home, we saw the rise of flexible work patterns. Thus, another layer of complexity has been introduced. Some team members may operate on shifted schedules, while others follow traditional working hours. This diversity in work patterns requires a more adaptable approach to daily scrums, moving away from the rigid “same time, same place” model to more flexible formats that maintain the ceremony’s essential benefits while accommodating various working styles.

Team composition has become increasingly dynamic, with size and structure varying significantly across projects and organizations. Some teams operate with a lean setup of three to four members, while others manage complex projects with larger groups. This variability demands scalable scrum practices that work effectively regardless of team size.

Modern productivity tools have introduced another dimension to team dynamics – the multi-project developer. If find that it’s now common for developers to contribute to multiple projects simultaneously. This shift challenges the traditional single-team scrum model and raises important questions about how to maintain effective daily communication without overwhelming team members who need to context-switch between different projects and their respective ceremonies.

Solutions for Strong and Effective Progress Meetings

To overcome these challenges and improve your Daily Scrums, consider these tips:

• Keep the principles in mind. These meetings are there to inspect and adapt.
• Focus on the interaction’s goal: Keep the meeting centred on what’s needed to achieve the iteration goal. Consider what value is being created. You might not meet all your quantitative goals (i.e. story points), and if so, it is better to convey this earlier.
• Promote collaboration: Create a safe space where everyone feels comfortable participating and openly sharing struggles or impediments. Foster an environment where team members are eager to help one another. 
• Vary the format: Bord of the three questions? Spice it up a bit. Use a ball to pass the word to the following speaker. You are doing it online/hybrid? Then the Wheel of Names will work just fine. Do you want to do this asynchronous? Think about an accountability buddy system.

Are you having issues with your sprint ceremonies? Is your process flow stagnated? Click this link to reach out, and let’s take the first step toward breaking through those barriers together.