Stand-up Meetings Should Not Be Status Meetings

No Blockers

3 min readAug 10, 2022

I’ve been wondering, is there any difference between saying no blockers and saying no block?

If you’re saying anything different at your stand-up it’s all going a bit wrong. Let us explore why.

I’ve been in software projects where the stand-up goes on for that little bit too long.

The easy-fix issues are

Too many people in the team
People talking about irrelevant issues (to most of the team) that need to be taken offline

These should be tackled at source, and most people have no real argument with this.

But there is a more difficult issue at play here.

The hard-to-fix issue

Many stand-up meetings have turned into status report meetings.

It’s a subtle distinction, but one that needs to be tackled in many workplaces that are not as agile as they would like to think they are.

I’ve seen 3 questions asked in many places where I’ve worked.