I'm not skipping my work, but I have dependencies on other teams' work which block my own. What should I say in daily stand up meetings, if I cannot do any work?
I agree that telling I am waiting for dependancy should work. But that cannot go on for weeks, right? I am being paid on daily basis, and I should be saying some useful work for every day.
And If I cannot do any work, What should I say in status meetings?
If your status is "Cannot do any work until X is done by Team Y", then that's the minimum you should say in your status meeting.
But, if I were running the meeting, I'd also want to hear quick thoughts on:
Nothing to say? You have the MOST IMPORTANT thing there is to say in a daily meeting:
something (that someone else can fix) is keeping me from doing what I am supposed to be doing
You need to say this loudly and clearly at every opportunity until the block goes away or someone tells you the task is no longer yours. You may also want to say
until I can work on x I have been doing y
But if you don't volunteer that, I sure will ask you. The reason most teams hold daily meetings is that blocks like this are quite common. They used to go on for weeks and the blockers often had no idea they were blocking others. So telling someone your issue is really the whole point of the meeting. The whole "yesterday I narrowed in on the layout bugs and today I think I should have them solved" report is fairly boring. The excitement and value comes when problems in the project can be entirely averted by vital information at the right time. So take a big breath and sing out.
If your current status is "waiting for Joe to finish what he's working on", then Joe (and everyone else on the team) should know about it. It's your manager's / scrum master's responsibility to either help Joe finish a bit faster, or find you something else to do while you wait.
That's what stand up meetings are all about, keeping the team informed of every member's current status.
One of the major points in stand up meetings is to identify blockers, they should be brought up and hopefully resolved. That's also why they generally take place at the start of the day.
It is imperative that you say that you are blocked due to a dependency on another team, I would even do that the moment it happens and not wait for the stand-up meeting.
In our scrum we have an impediment column, which means a certain sub-task is blocked due to an external issue (another team, environment, etc.). This is also important because if you (and your scrum) have many or long impediments it might be a sign that the planning was incomplete and you started working on tasks before everything was ready.
Inform the team of your status, and use available time for professional development. What you can say at the standup, in such circumstances, is 'Still waiting for x: in the meantime studied up in HTML5/CSS3/Canvas-Object as implemented in Chrome'. If some of your coder pals get upset at your training window, they might dump some work on you to keep you busy.
I've heard stories of government contracts where people were supposed to design, code, test, and document the system in parallel. Needless to say, much effort is wasted and the project doesn't get done any sooner or any cheaper.
Often the people 'blocked' are in Unit Testing, Integration Testing, Technical Writing, or similar roles that only become active toward the end of the development cycle.
In such circumstances one can use the opportunity for professional development, whatever that means in your discipline. For technical writing one suspects this is focused on online-help development tools, screen capture and cropping tools, 'infographics', etc. If you're a coder in some capacity then it may not matter whether you're focus is on QA - probably any coding area is worthwhile.
