Do We Only Have to Ask the 3 Questions at Stand Up?

One of the basics that most of us learned in scrum is the stand-up ritual where we ask the three questions every morning. What did we do yesterday? What’s your plan today? Are there any blockers?

I personally think that the 3 questions great basic questions as a default. However, we shouldn’t be stuck with them. As the team grows we should add more information on top of them. Depending on the work that the team does, sometimes it’s better to talk through the tickets as well. This works best when the team is standing in front of their kanban board (or if it’s a remote team then have the kanban board open). By talking through the individual tickets in-flight, it keeps the whole team informed on what’s being worked on and prompt them to discuss further if needed after the stand-up.

The other useful things to do is to discuss the tickets that were released to production the day before. Again this will ensure that team members know what is actually new in production at the moment. This way, they should be aware of what monitoring to look out for, what kind of alerting they should be aware of and what kind of production support level they should be prepared with. This will also help reduce the risk of only one team member knowing how to support the product in production.

One thing to keep in mind that even if we add the above topics to the stand up is to still keep it at maximum 15 mins. Although we add more discussion points, these are mostly for cues for further discussions after stand up.

So for all the scum / agile practitioners out there, don’t get stuck in the standard format of questioning. Vary the discussion points at stand-up depending on the team maturity and the way the team works.