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Presenteeism check. Roll call, just like grade school.

To be entirely unfair, I think that's always been the real reason for the standup "ceremony" to get a daily roll call because developers doing "agile" apparently can only be trusted if treated like school children. I feel that way because that's always been a part of the point of why it is called a standup: it's supposed to be as boiled down as just "progressing" or "blocked, who can help?" and it's supposed to be done standing up so that it is intentionally uncomfortable and everyone moves quickly to get back to their seats and get back to actual work getting done.

I continue to advocate that standups are mostly useless and should just be a Slack message at most.

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sirwhinesalot 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's my thinking too. At my workplace we shifted to longer 30min meetings every two days where people actually get to explain what is currently blocking them. Usually it'll already have been mentioned in the teams chat but the higherups aren't super active there and this lets them know how stuff is going and why.

These meetings aren't really standups anymore though.

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jghn 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> always been the real reason

It can't "always" have been the reason. The original intent of agile was that it was by the developers, for the developers. It's unlikely the originators of agile decided they needed to treat themselves like "school children"

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WorldMaker 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Standups weren't in the original Agile Manifesto. Standups are most directly a Scrum-specific thing. Scrum was just one of the contributors to the Agile Manifesto, alongside Extreme Programming and some others.

Scrum has always been the one with more "ceremonies" and more middle management involvement at each step, adding Product Owners and Scrum Masters as entirely new classes of middle management. Given how often teams devolve into "Scrumterfall", that sometimes seems like the "natural state" of Scrum. Scrum was designed to make Waterfall companies happier with Agile. Scrum has all these ceremonies and extra middle managers that are just Waterfall things done more often and closer to the engineering team.

It's so very easy with hindsight to believe that Scrum was the "wolf in sheep's clothing" among the Agile Manifesto writers that didn't always believe in the goals of the Agile Manifesto. Especially "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools": just because they are called "ceremonies" doesn't make them magically stop being meetings and processes and tools. It's kind of worse than that because ceremonies implies rituals implies religious tones of control.

I certainly feel like Standups are a bad idea designed to make Managers happy. The kind of middle managers, especially, that feel some command-and-control need to treat developers like "school children" because they don't understand what the developers actually do and don't really care. But maybe I've just had too many terrible "Scrum Masters" in my life (what a terrible term, what an awful job role, what a waste of middle management bureaucracy) and there's some "ideal" Scrum I've never seen where that isn't the case.

(We probably would be far better off if more developers had listened more to the Extreme Programming side of the Agile Manifesto house, despite being confused/turned off by things like Pair Programming that made it "extreme". Though it was also things like Pair Programming that made Standups seem especially silly to XP, since you never not had someone to bounce blockers immediately off of in Pair Programming.)

	▲	jghn 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is all true. Though my recollection at the time was that the original platonic ideal was that both the scrum master and product owner were at least peers, if not devs on the team. Especially the SM. But it didn't take long for the product owners to start living in the product management branch of the corporate hierarchy, and not long after SM became its own profession.

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marcosdumay 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The people that invented Scrum aren't developers. They pretend to be, but make all their money with courses and management consultancy.

And go try to fit "required daily meetings" on the Agile Manifesto to see how well it fits. (The people that made this one were mostly developers. All working in a very specific area making very similar software, but developers nonetheless.)