I have worked in quite a few Scrum/Agile workplaces over the years. I have seen it work really well and I have seen it work horribly as well. The weakest part of Scrum is definitely the daily stand-up. I have often questioned whether or not I am wrong over the years because it seems the bulk majority of those who have worked within a Scrum ecosystem seem to like the daily stand-ups. I have voiced my concern about them over the years, but it usually riles people up and ends up being a one-sided debate with those in favour making you feel like a bad employee.

The biggest gripe I have with daily stand-ups and I am sure there are others (including the author) who agree with me on this: they often run over and turn into meetings/debates. While some workplaces I am sure have it down to a science, I routinely encountered stand-ups turning into group bitching sessions about a bad deploy, a changed requirement or issue someone is happening as a result of something that someone else did in a previous release or a management decision. Instead of staying on task, they would often derail. Even when someone would try to steer the stand-up back, it was too late. It would be short-lived and it would derail again. Time after time.

There is nothing worse than the feeling of being in a stand-up knowing that you have a few tasks with looming deadlines that you want to get done. This sinking feeling in your stomach that time is escaping you and there is nothing you can do about it. That the 15 or 20 minutes the stand-up is going for, you might have been able to knock one of the tickets off your list and reduce your stress levels a little bit. It's a horrible feeling and one I have felt many times over the years. It's a kind of anxiety that stand-ups seem to make even worse.

More often than most, the question of what did you do yesterday usually results in: I don't remember. And you know what, if you have a lot on your plate, that is a fair statement to make. What is the point of saying what you did yesterday other than to appease to micro-managers (as the article points out)? Does Steve the system administrator truly deep down inside care about that bugfix I finished yesterday? No. The stand-up seems to operate on this purist view that people have a set plan of what they will work on for the day. As a developer what I plan on doing for the day about 90% of the time never works out how I would have imagined.

I come into work with the greatest intentions of finishing off an outstanding task or finishing off some low-hanging fruit tasks in Jira, but then something will break, someone will ask me to do something and say that it is urgent and BOOM! there goes my "planned" day of doing what I planned to do invalidating what I just said in the stand-up.

I feel like I am in a minority that views stand-ups as distracting, starting out as status updates that usually diverge into meetings that cut into my precious morning. Don't get me started on what happens when someone is working from home, has to dial in and all you can hear is children screaming or dogs barking (I've beared witness to that a lot).

These days we have tools like Slack or Hipchat, we have collaboration platforms like Github, Bitbucket and peer review applications like Crucible. I feel like the stand-up is an outdated relic in todays development ecosystem. Instead of making it a single discussion everyday, how about we work on making teams talk together on a daily basis when they have a problem instead of waiting until the following day to bring it up?

A place I contracted at recently used Slack and they had a #standup channel in which people would post what they would be working on today, there was no requirement to dwell on yesterday only the today. And if there were any blockers or issues, you were encourage to create an issue in Jira and tag your manager instead of voicing them in the chat. In my opinion this was a good approach because it meant people could give an update without distracting others and on their own terms.

Stand-ups encourage anti-communication in that they seem to be used in place of actual communication, they can also feel like pitchforky at times: meaning people often get publicly implicated and blamed for issues/hold-ups which usually results in a defensive response. "I can't do anything until Michael addresses my blocker" to which Michael would reply, "I can't get to Daves blocker task because I keep getting asked to do other things"