Daily Stand-up questions explained
Daily Scrum Meeting Questions
Learn how Scrum Teams use daily stand-up to stay on track
Agile is about delivering customer value, about closing user stories all the from design to product. As a Scrum Team, you are working together (Scrum Master and Product Owner included) to achieve a sprint goal.
These are the questions I recommend to the Scrum Teams to answer during the Daily Scrum :
- What did you complete yesterday to achieve the sprint goal?
Knowing the work done (finished) is crucial information for the entire scrum team. For this reason, I recommend the Scrum Teams to share the work completed.
If a user story requires multiple days of work, as a Scrum team member, you’ll report in this section of the daily stand-up when you completed the user story.
Why I love this question: It is a mental exercise that forces the scrum team members to minimize the work in progress.
- What did you work on (but didn’t complete) yesterday to achieve the sprint goal?
It is usually the work in progress from a day to another. Here you’ll log the tasks that you started but did not compete. If you, as a Scrum Team works on a user story for multiple days, you can mark it as in progress. But my recommendation will be to split the user story into tasks so you can better assess the progress.
Why I love this question: it changes my mindset into adopting the scrum principle of limiting the work in progress.
- What will you be working on today to achieve the sprint goal?
When I see this question, I usually feel like going into my sprint in Jira and see what the sprint goal was. If in my Scrum Team, we are “late” as per the Sprint Burndown and the user stories completed, it forces us to find new ways of implementing the user stories to achieve the sprint goal.
If I have to say what I work on today, in most of the days, I’ll go away from the sprint goals.
Why I love this question: it keeps my scrum teammates and me on track.
- What does it block you from achieving the sprint goal?
A blocker or impediment is anything that keeps you and your scrum team away from meeting the sprint goal. Here you can include missing hardware, access, unavailability of someone you need. It is the role of the Scrum Master to resolve these impediments as soon as you share it.
Why I love this question: I can get help from the Scrum Master or a teammate when I’m stuck.
- What do you need to “discuss after”?
As a Scrum Team member, I list under this section of the daily scrum the topics I want to address. A good practice that I learned over the years is to list the issues, and the people I need a discussion. In that way, I set a time per topic, and I don’t risk spending more time in the meetings that I want.
Why I love this question: It structures our scrum team discussions and avoids the meetings to run over.
I recommend you to adapt these questions to your Scrum Team context.
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