Scrum Master Daily Checklist
Introduction
Ideally, there should be a Scrum Master for each project in the organization. Whether one is new to the role or old, you need the Scrum Master daily checklist. It is a list that mentions the tasks for the day or the tasks that need top attention and is a priority for the day. It should typically contain the important daily tasks that Scrum Masters just cannot miss out; rather keep their focus on these tasks mentioned as these are critical.
The importance of the SCRUM checklist is that it helps the Scrum Master facilitate the better working of the team. Imagine the checklist to contain all sorts of information about what the Scrum Master needs to address and do for the day.
Scrum Master Daily Checklist
These are the top five items on the Scrum Master checklist.
1. Facilitating the Product Owner:
One of the important tasks of the Scrum Master is to keep facilitating the Product Owner and improve his/her effectiveness. The way Scrum Master contributes towards this is by helping maintain the Product Backlog as well as the Release Plan. These are a few questions that the Scrum Master needs to answer as part of the Scrum Master daily checklist.
- You should educate the Product Owner about technical debt and the reasons to avoid it.
- Can visible charts be created to facilitate the flow of information?
- What kind of help have you offered to the PO to organize the Backlog items in releases or priority?
- Check if the release plan fits well with reality?
- Check if the PO can amend the release plan after the end of the last Sprint Review meeting.
2. Assess the performance of the team
The Scrum Master checklist helps you check the performance of your team, something that is always at risk of getting lost amid all technical tasks.
- Is your team going as per goals?
- Is the team concentrated and focused
- Are you offering immediate feedback directly to your team
- Whether the ability of the team member is as per the task assigned?
- Are the team members able to collaborate fruitfully – do they like each other, and celebrate when they have done good work.
- Do the members hold each other in high esteem and play a role to enable each other to grow?
- Is the team avoiding uncomfortable issues and opportunities?
- What are the formats being tried for Sprint Retrospective meetings?
- Is the team focused on the Sprint Goals and are the Acceptance Criteria of the items in the Product Backlog high or low?
- Check if the task board is reflecting on what the team is doing currently.
- How large is the team and does it have the required mix of skills?
- Is the task board updated?
- Are the artifacts accessible to the team to self-manage tasks?
- Are the artifacts sufficiently protected from impediments?
- Do team members volunteer to do tasks?
3. What about the technical or the engineering aspects?
- Does the system have a Unit framework that facilitates testing conveniently?
- What kind of testing tools do you have – are they automated unit tests or end-to-end system tests?
- Are both these test types been written in the same language as the development code?
- What is the useful gray area between unit and system tests?
- In case of a regression failure, is the continuous integration server facilitated to sound off an alarm?
- Are all the tests rolled up in the continuous integration test server?
- When items from the Product Backlog are being marked ‘done’, are they being tested too?
- What about pair programming – are team members doing it?
4. How is the organization benefitting?
- Is there time being allocated for inter-team communication?
- How are the teams independently working and producing results?
- Are all the Scrum Masters meeting and focus on the impediment list.
- Is the development director aware of the organizational impediments?
- Is your organization aware and working towards the achievement of the career objectives of the team?
5. Team’s involvement
Finally, the Scrum Master needs to make sure that the Scrum Team is having fun in the work. Scrum Master also needs to be sure that the Scrum of Scrum calls happening or not? Plus, he/she needs to prepare the team for the Sprint Review and facilitate the team to take part in the Sprint Retrospective meeting.
Conclusion
These are the important and top lists that every Scrum Master has to follow on a daily basis. The way to use the Scrum Master daily checklist is to use the Task board, impediments, and the Burn Down chart effectively. The Task Board needs to be updated with the tasks listed assigned to someone, there are estimates of stories and tasks, and the time remaining on tasks is updated. The Task Board offers an update on the tasks to all the team members. Impediments are also visible to all team members, the statuses were managed, and organizational impediments are informed to the management. The Burndown chart needs to be updated and action is taken based on the status of the actions as mentioned in the chart.
References
- https://www.scrumdesk.com/wp-content/uploads/SMDailyChecklist.pdf
- https://scrummasterchecklist.org/pdf/ScrumMaster_Checklist_12_unbranded.pdf
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