Stand-Up Meeting Questions That Are Not a Status Report

The best standup meeting questions are about the work, not the person: what is closest to done and what would finish it today, what is stuck and who can unstick it, what has been in progress too long, and is our goal still reachable. Asked in that order, they produce a plan and a list of offers of help instead of a round of individual updates. Keep the set short, ask it of the board rather than of each person in turn, and change it when the answers become automatic.

For the meeting itself, who attends and when to skip it, see daily standup. This piece is the question bank.

Why the three questions become a status report

The familiar set is yesterday, today, obstacles. Jason Yip’s patterns for daily stand-up meetings↗ (opens in a new tab), published on Martin Fowler’s site, lists it as a pattern and then spends much of the article on what goes wrong with it: people reporting to the leader, treating the meeting as simply individual reporting, and tuning out until it is nearly their turn. The questions are phrased about me, so each answer is a small speech about my day, addressed to whoever looks most senior.

The 2020 Scrum Guide↗ (opens in a new tab) no longer prescribes any questions. It says the Developers can use any structure and techniques, as long as the Daily Scrum focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day of work. So the test for any question below is simple: does its answer change what someone does today?

Five question sets to rotate

Pick one set and use it for two or three weeks, then switch. A new set breaks the autopilot that sets in when everyone knows their lines.

1. Walk the board

Ask these of each card, starting at the column nearest done and working left. Yip describes walking the board from the end of the process to the start, and from highest to lowest priority.

• What would it take to finish this today?
• Who is waiting on whom here?
• Has this moved since yesterday? If not, why not?
• Is anyone working on something that is not on the board?

2. The goal

• Are we still on track for the goal we agreed? What would have to be true for us to miss it?
• Has anything we learned since yesterday changed the plan?
• Is there something we should drop so the rest fits?

3. Help

• Who needs help today, and with what?
• Who has capacity to review, pair or test this morning?
• What are you waiting for that someone here could give you in five minutes?

4. Aging work

Work item age, the time since an item started, is one of the four flow metrics in the Kanban Guide↗ (opens in a new tab), and it is the one you can act on during the meeting.

• Which item has been in progress longest? Is it blocked, too big, or abandoned?
• Should it be split, swarmed or stopped?
• What is older than our usual cycle time, and what is the plan for it?

5. Risk and surprises

• What surprised you yesterday?
• What are you least confident about in today’s plan?
• Is there anything we are all assuming someone else is handling?

Questions for an async standup

Written stand-ups need different questions from spoken ones. Nobody can ask a follow-up in the moment, so each answer has to be specific enough to act on, and it should point at the work by reference so a reader can open it.

1. What did you finish? (task refs, and whether it is ready to test)
2. What are you moving today, and what would finish it?
3. What are you waiting on, and from whom? (name them)
4. Anything older than a week in your hands? Why?
5. Anything that puts this week's goal at risk?

• Keep it to five questions or fewer. Long forms get skimmed and then skipped.
• Name people in the waiting question. “Waiting on review” is ignored; “waiting on Sam’s review of FET-018” gets done.
• Read the answers at a set time and reply in the thread, so the questions produce actions rather than a log.
• Meet live whenever two answers mention the same item, or any answer says the goal is at risk.

Questions for AI assistants on the team

When coding assistants do part of the work, they are not at the stand-up, but their tasks are. Ask the person who runs each assistant, or read the assistant’s own end-of-session note on the task:

• What did the assistant finish, and has a person checked it?
• What did it start and not finish, and why did it stop?
• Did it change anything outside the task it was given?
• Is anything it produced waiting for review, and who is reviewing it today?

Verifying AI-generated work covers the checking itself. The stand-up’s job is only to make sure an assistant’s work does not sit unreviewed.

Questions to stop asking

• “What did you do yesterday?” It invites a play-by-play of the day. Ask what finished instead.
• “Any blockers?” asked once to the whole room. The answer is almost always silence. Ask it of each card that has not moved.
• “Are you on track?” Everyone says yes. Ask what would have to happen for the item to miss.
• “How many hours did you spend on it?” It measures effort, not progress, and makes people defend their time.
• Any question only one person in the room can use. Take it offline, as Yip puts it, and pick it up afterward with only the people involved.

The Agile Alliance’s entry on the daily meeting↗ (opens in a new tab) warns about the “no problem” meeting, where no one ever raises an obstacle even though the team is clearly not performing at its best. Most of the questions above exist to make that harder: it is easy to say “no blockers”, much harder to say nothing when asked why a card has not moved in four days.

The question to end on

Yip ends his article with a single measure of whether a stand-up worked: does everyone know what is going on? It makes a good closing question too. Before people leave, ask whether anyone is unsure what they are doing next or who they are helping. If someone is, the meeting has one more minute of work to do. If nobody is, it is over, even if it took five minutes instead of fifteen.

Answering the questions from a fenbs board

fenbs has no stand-up screen and no sprints, but several of these questions have answers on the board before anyone speaks. It has four lanes, To Do, Next Up, In Progress and Completed, which is what walking the board needs.

• What finished? History records every move with who made it, a person or an AI assistant, and how long ago.
• Has anyone checked it? The “Completed, not tested” filter lists tasks that finished but have no test result yet.
• What needs the team’s attention? Flag a task for everyone on a team board, and say why in a comment.
• What did an assistant do? An assistant connected over MCP can leave its end-of-session note on the task with fenbs_comment.
• An async update to paste? Copy as Markdown, below the board, copies the lanes as text.

What fenbs will not tell you: who owns a task, because there is no settable assignee, or when it is due, because there are no due dates. Those answers still come from people.