Blocker

Anything stopping a piece of work from moving forward that the person can't resolve alone.

📌 Example: 'I'm blocked, waiting on the API team to deploy their staging fix.'

🛠 In practice: The whole point of standup is surfacing these fast. A standup with no blockers reported for weeks usually means people aren't saying them out loud, not that nothing's wrong.

• same thing as ImpedimentImpediment is Scrum's term for what most teams just call a blocker.
• often caused by Zombie TicketTickets stall into zombie status most often because of an unresolved, unreported blocker.
• opposite of Status UpdateA good standup surfaces blockers; a bad one devolves into status updates. They represent the two ends of what standup can become.