Are we doing things that needs to be done?

Those from you, who use Scrum in their work knows daily stand-up meetings and three famous questions to ask and answer:

• What did I accomplish yesterday?
• What will I do today?
• What obstacles are impeding my progress?

But there is one small problem with those questions, really tiny one - there is not a single word about progress in sprint.
Of course, you will tell people in your team what have you done yesterday, what you will do today, what problems you had, but even if you were extremely busy it doesn't mean that you are doing something which have impact on sprint.
It can happen, than even with huge amount of work you aren't closer sprint goal than day ago.

That's why I prefere little bit modified questions:

• What I've done yesterday, what brings us closer to achieve sprint goal?
• What will I do today to achieve it?
• What obstacles are impeding my progress?

Ok, but what if I did nothing related with sprint? Or I won't do nothing today?

Well, maybe it would be surprise for you, but it's not a disaster, to be honest, it can show you where are the places for further improvements. It all depends what you will do with this knowledge.
Scrum (and Agile in overall) is about transparency and that's the biggest benefit of it, because first step to solve any problem is to know that its exists.

Is it bad that one of us didn't do any progress on sprint in a last few days? The answer is simple - yes. But is that mean the work shouldn't be done at all? The effort was wasted? I believe, not.
Situation like this tell us that we need to think about it little bit and consider what were the reasons of this. Maybe it shouldn't be solved right now? Maybe it could wait for next sprint?
Of course, there is a chance that work had to be done, it was something extremely important, which blocked whole team with progress on another stories in sprint. If so, it also means that something bad happened. Our planning was wrong? Why we didn't thought about this? We couldn't foresee this work? Or maybe we were just too lazy?
And - the most important one - how we can prevent this in future.

But, like with all other things, you cannot be too critical. You don't have to react on each situation, you know, bad things happens, but it's great to know that "something is in the air".
Everything depends on frequency, until it's rare it can be enough to take notes or just notice that fact, but if frequency increases it means that you need to take care of it. And remember - don't wait till it would be too late.