A key component of the Scrum framework is the daily stand up meeting, the Scrum. The Scrum meeting is held at the same time and in the same place everyday and more than likely near to where the team works and where their task board is located. Each of the team members answer three questions in the scrum:

• What have you been working on since we last met?
• What are you going to work on?
• Do you have any impediments?

The scrum allows the team to understand what each member is doing and is essential to the team work involved in delivering a sprint. I also have one team that have added a fourth question to the list and that is “What is your confidence rating (1-10) of delivering the sprint goal?” This helps the team and Scrummaster identify some possibly hidden issues across the team.

As such it is usual for the team to decide on a late penalty for any team member who either does not attend the Scrum or turns up late. It’s essential that the team decides on this penalty and what, If any “excuses” are acceptable for being late. One of my teams went through this process recently and as the team came to the agreement that any later comers would provide donuts the following day as “punishment” one of the team members spoke out and said “I’m not doing that! What if I get stuck with a production support issue? That’s not my fault I am late”. The team then debated what was and wasn’t acceptable as a late excuse. After which they all agreed that the late penalty was to be donuts (again). A 100% agreement was reached across the team.

The important point to remember is that the team must come up with the penalty and the EVERYONE in the team agrees up front to abide by the team rules and pay and penalties for being late. Outsiders should not enforce penalties or conditions on the team as the team no longer own the commitment, a core principle in everything Scrum related.

To that end I was interested to hear what penalties had been implemented out in field, just for a bit of fun. I put the question to the Yahoo Scrum group and received a number of responses which I have combined with ones I have witnessed personally:

Various late penalties

• Sing a song of the teams choice (Slient night, My way, new kids on the block)
• Donuts
• Wearing pink fluffy rabbit ears (with flashing lights) on your head for 20 mins
• Wearing a “I was late” placard for a period of time
• Pay a 2,00 bucks penalty. Put it in a sealed box, and after a few months open the box, the Scrummaster then doubles the amount, and we spend it together. If it’s empty, then the Scrummaster will congratulate the team, put 100 bucks on the table and celebrate. The team decides how to spend the money: ice cream, pizzas, concert tickets, beer, a new coffe machine, etc…
• Fill up our team refrigerator with boxes of ice creams.
• We hold our Scrum in an abandoned office. At the designated starting time, we locked the door. The penalty of missing the daily updates and feeling left out of the team was so high, that people stopped coming late.
• Merciless public humiliation with much pointing and laughing. ;)
• Our developers are very anti-social compared to the rest of the company, so when they are ate we force them to walk around and find out how user experience is from our users. It has only happened once, and he has never been late since.

A big thanks to all that responded on the original thread in the yahoo Scrum group.