What to Do When Someone Talks About a Flux Capacitor in the Daily Scrum it mean "No Progress"
In today's world of hectic schedules, excessive multi-tasking and sharing team members across multiple projects, it is common for a team member to have no progress to report at a daily scrum.
Often, team members will try to hide their lack of progress with confusing updates: "I worked on the OrbitalMonitor class yesterday switching it to use lazy initialization for its flux capacitor all powered through an ARC reactor."
Rather than let that happen, I encourage team members to admit when they got nothing done. I do this by having team members say simply "No progress" whenever that's the case. But discuss it with your team. Maybe they'd prefer a different phrase.
There are a couple advantages here. First, it's more honest to allow people to admit when they got nothing done. Sometimes it's their own fault. (We all have days when we just couldn't concentrate.) Other times, though, it's because things from outside the project demanded our time.
Second, using a common phrase to indicate a lack of progress makes it really easy for a ScrumMaster to notice the problem. When one team member mumbles something about slight progress with the flux capacitor and another about minor progress with the ARC reactor, the ScrumMaster might not notice that both really got nowhere.
But when everyone more openly agrees to say "No progress," it becomes abundantly clear. This allows the ScrumMaster to step in earlier than he or she might otherwise and remove a problem such as an outsider interfering. It also help Scrum Master to plan the activities with no hurdles for upcoming sprints.
Whether your team uses a specific phrase or not, encourage them to be open and clear during the daily scrum whenever they have "no progress" to report. And if they do that, you'll be more likely to succeed with agile
Inspired by blog of Mike Cohn
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