Daily Scrum - (Wrong) Order of Questions?

Daily scrum meeting is time boxed meeting held on the each day of the sprint. This meeting is short (should not take more than 3 minutes per person), is informative and should help team to organize. Daily scrum is for developers and only developers are allowed to speak during daily scrum. All others are welcomed but they are not allowed to speak.

During daily meeting each developer, one by one, answers to three questions:
1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Are there any impediments?

Simple enough. Short enough. Very important.

The main goals of the daily scrum can be summarized as:
- everybody are informed what is happening
- everybody are aware about possible risks
- team can organize what will implement up to the next daily scrum.


The second question (what will you do today) and the third item of daily scrum summary (team can organize work) leads me to the point that order in which questions are asked is wrong.

If the user stories are small enough, everybody can promise what they will implement up to the next daily scrum. But very often that is not a case. Features are bigger, contain number of tasks, and having more than one developer on a feature in lot of cases can increase overall productivity.

So it seems to me that in the first round, all developers, one by one, should be asked two questions: "Whad did you do yesterday?" and "Are there any impediments?"

When everybody answers these two questions, team all together should discuss and decide who will implement what up to next daily scrum. This way, team selects the best possible way to achieve the final result, sprint goal. Also this way daily scrum gives you even better satisfaction of rule: team can organize work for the next working day.

Up to recently, we have been doing daily scrums by the book. Everybody had to answer three questions asked. But very often, it happened that after daily scrum, when we started with implementation, we changed our promises of what we will implement because we noticed there is much better path to increase productivity.

Because of that we changed order of questions as described above. And now, at the end of daily scrum we decide who will participate on which feature. To me this seems as better approach. After some time, when we have used to this approach, our daily responsibilities are better organized and we have feeling that we are doing it right.

What I would like to mention one more time is that I am aware that if user stories are small enough this approach need not to be necessary, but when user story is bigger and contains number of tasks, organizing developers to work on one feature can increase productivity. Even when user stories are small enough, and they are more or less independent, very often there is indirect dependency between them (e.g. architectural), and when this dependency is noticed by the developers having them work together on these user stories can increase productivity (in the worst case you will need less refactoring)