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I am a QA analyst and currently working on two projects on my company, lets call them project A and project B. Yesterday and today I did not work in project A because my leader (not a member of any of those projects) told me to focus in project B.

Now I dont know if I should go to the daily stand-up of project A, I have nothing to say so I think they would take that as me being lazy. On the other hand I think I should go and remain updated on the progress

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    The key word there is "daily". Always go and if you have nothing to say, don't. "No blockers" is a common thing herd.
    – Chris E
    Mar 30, 2017 at 15:38
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    Of course! The information that you haven't done a day's work on Project A is important in itself. Your tasks may need to be reassigned. Mar 30, 2017 at 16:34

4 Answers 4

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Yes, and you should disclose that you have been directed to focus on your other project so that the team can be aware that you are not currently making any progress on your assigned tasks. Unless directed otherwise, or you are unable to attend do to a conflict, you should always attend stand-ups even if you currently have no tasks.

The daily stand-ups are not a status report to see what you have done, they are there to make sure that the project is moving along, and that any interruptions in the schedule are dealt with as quickly as possible. Your leader may want you to prioritize project B, but Project A may be a higher priority to the business. The team may need to reassign your tasks while you work on project B or have the project champions discuss the priority and give direction to your leader about the business priorities. Or they may just look at your tasks and be fine with the delay in the completion of them.

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    yes, by your description, your assignment to Project B is clearly a blocker / impediment for Project A - this, by definition, should be reported in a daily agile scrum
    – NKCampbell
    Mar 30, 2017 at 15:34
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    This answer hits the key. The scrum isn't just butt-covering "I did this." There could be outcomes, adjustments or work that others did that affect what you will do. Even if you did nothing since the last scrum, what you need to do before the next one could change. That's the whole point of the scrum approach - more agile and flexible and able to make adjustments on the fly. Mar 30, 2017 at 16:11
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    The stand-ups are also for facilitating collaboration between team members. You may not have done anything on the project, but another team member may be running into a problem you can help them solve. You can be valuable to the project even if you didn't work on it yesterday.
    – Seth R
    Mar 30, 2017 at 16:26
  • You are also supposed to say what you are going to work on today and the rest of the team would find it useful to know whether you are going to make progress on their tasks today or are going to be working for another team again. If you are assigned to another team for more than a few days I would stop going to the standups for the team you are not working for after letting them know. There's only so many "I didn't do any work for you yesterday, and I'm not going to do any today, no blockers" that it is worthwhile hearing.
    – Eric Nolan
    Nov 2, 2022 at 10:35
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Provided you are only temporarily focusing on Project B, yes. You may not have updates for the team members but they will have updates for you. There may be an issue which you are able to help with which will have a negligible impact on your performance on the other project but save others a lot of time.

If you're in any doubt, ask your manager which meetings you are expected to attend.


If your company were following Scrum to the letter - and few seem to - individual employees would rarely be bounced between teams and projects. You would be moved as a team.

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A daily standup has three purposes.

  1. Communicate what you did yesterday
  2. Communicate what you will do today
  3. Share knowledge you may have that helps with progress.

The fact that you did not work on the project yesterday, and will not work on it tomorrow, is helpful information to the team, and they need to know it to track the progress of the sprint. Therefore it is important that you turn up to report those facts. Also what knowledge you have may help the team to overcome obstacles, and sharing it might be useful.

If you know that you are not going to work on the project for a number of days, and you have told the team this, then there is minimal usefulness in being at the standup. If you are unsure day-to-day whether you will be working on their project, or if your knowledge might help the team, you should show up.

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  • '+1. I'd add that daily standups are a two-way street. You're giving information (which hopefully is of use to your team) about your project... but you're also receiving information from others. (If it is being used simply to report status, one at a time, with no benefit to others, then it's a waste of time.)
    – Ghotir
    Mar 31, 2017 at 14:01
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The idea of stand-ups is to keep everyone on the project up-to-date about what everyone else is doing, including you being updated on the other members of the group, so I would say you should go. When its your turn to contribute just say "I had to focus on Project B yesterday", they know you are split between projects and should understand.

Personally, I'm not sure daily stand-ups have much value, tasks don't usually move that fast, but that's an argument for another day. To a manager who puts a lot of stock into these get-togethers, it might look worse if you don't show up than if you come and be honest.

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