The “3 standup questions” are terrible and need to die

How did we end up in this place? Thousands – maybe millions? – of developers sit in standup meetings daily and answer the same 3 questions (“What did you do yesterday?”, “What are you going to do today?”, “Any blockers?”).

Managers around the world blindly adopt the same standup meeting format, without critical thought to its usefulness. It is the meeting agenda version of “you won’t get fired for buying IBM”.

Imagine you’re part of a soccer team, and your side advances towards the opponent’s goal. Each player is shouting, communicating with immediacy, collaborating on how to score…and suddenly the manager walks on to the pitch and says, “OK, gather around! Where did you kick the ball yesterday? Where are you planning on kicking it today? Any blockers?”

We already know that a soccer team is constantly communicating verbally and visually, and each member is aware of the overall plan. And while it’s a somewhat reductive comparison, it’s worth pondering on exactly why it’s ridiculous to think that a soccer team would even need a special ceremony to force collaboration and team awareness.

Why are the 3 questions so damaging?

Let’s look at each of the usual standup questions, and examine them through a lens focused on outcomes, user feedback, and delivery:

“What did you work on yesterday?”

• Past-focused
• The team already has a lot on their minds with what’s coming next
• Focuses on activity, not outcomes
• Is disconnected from user feedback
• Should be answerable by just looking at the work board, not by interrupting someone’s day

An engineer can answer the above question satisfactorily without moving the ball towards the goal at all. Hearing the answer, “I worked on some stuff” does not make users happy, it does not help the team learn about their users, and it certainly doesn’t make the business any money.

“What will you work on today?”

• Activity-focused, not outcome-oriented
• Doesn’t reveal any information about when that work will be completed
• Reinforces the idea that software is an individual, isolated pursuit

“Any blockers?”

• Has at least some value, since blockers to flow are crucial to resolve, but…
• …blockers should be resolved immediately, not wait for up to 24 hours for the next standup meeting to occur!

All of these standup questions reinforce anti-agile behaviors. They encourage a gross “follow the worker, not the work” model and miss the opportunity to build a continuous delivery and learning mindset. They reek of bad top-down management and progressively cause slow, big-batching activity.

Collaboration design should be intentional

I’m not going to propose a replacement set of standup questions here, because I am not part of your team and don’t know how you operate. Instead, I would encourage your team to be intentional about its daily collaboration approach. Some helpful areas to probe in that might include:

• Where should your team build awareness of what each other is working on? And how much awareness do they need of each other’s work?
• Do you really need to meet daily to just look at a story board that everyone can already see? Could that time be spent in more valuable ways?
• Which channels are most valuable for collaboration? You probably already communicate in a messaging tool like Slack, and in code review discussions on GitHub. Are those enough? if not, why not?
• Are you learning as much as you need to about your users each day?
• Is using a standardized daily question format helpful or wasteful?
• Are your standup meetings the only daily connective tissue that your remote team members have with each other? If so, is your standup the best method for communicating remotely?
• Should you consider other more intense collaboration models like mobbing?

The 3 questions have run their course, and have far outlasted their stay in software by slowly regressing many teams into mediocrity. Now that the latest official Scrum guide has already removed the 3 questions, our industry should consider eliminating them too.

(Photo by Dan Edwards on Unsplash)