February 8, 2022

New Feature: Custom Questions

New Feature: Custom Questions

Questions are the core of any good standup as they help drive discussion amongst the team. StandupWizard comes with a default set of commonly used questions, however you can now edit, delete, or add your own questions for any standups, as you see fit.

About the feature

Initially, StandupWizard shipped with a core set of questions that couldn't be changed. These questions (in order) were:

  • How are you feeling today?
  • What did you accomplish yesterday?
  • What are your goals for today?
  • Do you have any blockers?

These questions are core questions used in most standups that help determine work completed yesterday, work to be done today, and anything blocking progress. Although these questions cover typical standup goals, we recognize that they won't work for every team (language differences, different standup objectives, and so on). With that in mind, we released a new feature that allows you to change standup questions to fit your exact needs.

When creating or editing a standup, you'll now see a "Questions" section:

Questions section

Once here, you'll see the 4 default question described above. At this point you'll be able to move (via the arrows), delete (via the trashcan), or edit (via the pencil). Standups currently allow a maximum of 5 questions.

When editing or creating a question, you'll see 2 types available:

  • Select list: question text and options must be provided
  • Text Field: question text must be provided

The question dialog looks like the following:

Question dialog

Once you're done updating your questions, save or create your standup and participants get presented with them.

Additional notes

Since historical reports get saved, there are 2 things to note with regards to working with questions on a standup, both of which only apply once a standup gets created and has collected data:

Questions can only be archived

Once a standup is created, you can remove questions, however they are simply put into an archive state since the standup may have already collected data with the specific question and we want to maintain data intergrity among historical reports. With that said, participants will no longer be presented with this particular question from that point on, but you will still be able to filter past reports on the archived question. You can also restore an archived question at any point.

Archived question

Editing a question will impact previous reports

Once a standup is created, you can also edit existing questions, but since each question has a unique identifier, changing question text rather than creating a new question will also impact all previous reports collected using that question.

For example, if the original question text was "What did you accomplish yesterday?" and after some time running the standup you edit the question text to now become "What work did you get done yesterday?", any previous historical reports that answered the question "What did you accomplish yesterday?" will now show up as "What work did you get done yesterday?" in the dashboard. No report data gets altered in this scenario, it's just the reference to the question that changes.

TL;DR

You can now fully customize questions for all your standups! We hope you enjoy this feature and are excited to bring you many more. As always, if you have any features you'd like to see, please get in touch with us.


If you have any questions regarding this article or the platform as a whole, feel free to get in touch!

Don't miss a beat

Join our blog mailing list to get emailed whenever we publish new articles.

Ready to increase team productivity?Create your first automated team standup

30 day free trial. No credit card required.