What to say in a daily standup: scripts for 6 situations
Daily standup scripts in English for a normal day, a blocker, a delay, a day with no visible progress, time off and helping a teammate, with the tenses to watch.
3 min read
A good standup update is three sentences long: what you did, what you will do, and what is in your way. That is easy on a normal day. It gets harder when the day was not normal, and that is when non-native speakers start to over-explain, apologise or go quiet. This article gives you scripts for those days too.
Note that the current Scrum Guide no longer prescribes the classic three questions. It only says the Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for inspecting progress toward the Sprint Goal (The Scrum Guide). Most teams still use yesterday, today and blockers, so the scripts follow that shape.
The tenses that matter
| Part | Tense | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Yesterday | past simple | Yesterday I reviewed the new checkout flow. |
| Today | going to / present continuous | Today I'm going to fix the two bugs from QA. |
| Blockers | present continuous | I'm waiting for the design for the empty state. |
| Overall status | present perfect | I've finished about half of the migration. |
The most common slip for speakers of Slavic languages is the present tense for yesterday: "Yesterday I review the PR." If you fix only one thing, fix that.
1. A normal day
Yesterday I finished the filters on the orders page. Today I'm going to write the tests and open a PR. No blockers.
Keep it this short. Nobody needs the details unless they ask.
2. You are blocked
I'm blocked on the export. I need read access to the production logs. Could someone from the platform team help me after this call?
Say what you need and from whom. "I have a problem with the logs" makes people guess.
3. Something is taking longer than planned
The migration is taking longer than expected, because the old data has a lot of duplicates. I think I need one more day. I'll update the ticket.
One reason, one new estimate. Long apologies make it sound worse than it is.
4. No visible progress
Yesterday I was investigating the memory leak. I haven't found the cause yet, but I've ruled out the cache and the image service. Today I'll try profiling the worker.
The past continuous ("I was investigating") shows effort over time. Listing what you have ruled out shows progress even without a fix.
5. Time off or a shorter day
Quick heads-up: I'm off tomorrow. If you need anything from me, let me know today.
I have an appointment this afternoon, so I'll be offline from two to four.
6. Helping someone else
Ola, I've seen that error before. I can pair with you after lunch if you want.
This sounds like a longer discussion. Shall we take it offline?
"Take it offline" means "let's continue after the standup in a smaller group", not "let's hang up".
When English is the reason you dread standups
Standups are short but daily, which makes them the best place to build fluency: you repeat the same structures every morning until they need no thought. A dry run before the real call helps in the first weeks. Every new FluentSession account has a ready-made "Daily Standup" room where the tutor plays a friendly senior engineer who runs the standup and asks follow-up questions.
If the freeze happens in other meetings too, read Why you understand English but freeze when speaking.