[tragic]

> P.S. I am tired of the YADIW excuse. Let's have a nice honest discussion about how it can be fixed.

If somebody complains that Scrum is bad because e.g. every day you have to update management at stand-up (as mentioned in TFA), but the Scrum Guide, every book ever written on scrum, the websites of the Scrum Alliance and scrum.org, and more or less every advocate of scrum great and small, states explicitly that this is not the purpose of the stand-up but instead to highlight obstructions and opportunities for collaboration, then I don't see what more there is to say than "you're doing it wrong" - because you are doing it wrong, in letter and in spirit. It may not be your fault that you're doing it wrong (it's my guess that the widespread perception that scrum is management-heavy is a function of scrum's market penetration combined with the inherently dicatorial culture of corporate governance). But doing it wrong you most certainly are.

This is not one of your complaints of course, but you do complain about estimation, which - as a sibling comment mentions - is simply 'out of scope' for Scrum, which is a smaller package than people think. (Plenty of scrum thought-leadery types are part of the 'No Estimates' thing, for example.) It does, however, mandate that you occasionally meet for the explicit purpose of working out how to improve processes that are not working properly (such as estimation) - in other words, that the team takes seriously as a collective all the things that scrum does not talk about in itself.

[ricardobeat]

Despite what every book says, despite having three agile coaches run workshops with the team, despite this issue being specifically addressed with everyone involved, and being acknowledged as wrong, it still becomes the purpose of the standup.

No amount of "this is not the purpose of a standup" and "you're doing it wrong" can fix human nature. Management is mostly interested in progress and timelines, and will give unintentional (or not) feedback, even through body language, whenever a task is delayed or impacted in any way. They have some authority over team members' performance eval. Hence people will end up reporting to them no matter how hard you try. The only possible fix is to remove management or product from the standup, which is how it was originally supposed to be - but that seems unthinkable in the "agile at scale' format most companies have adopted today.

[cutemonster]

> it still becomes the purpose of the standup.

Also, the meetings are a bit useless for the developers -- they can just chat directly instead, and look in Trello/sth to see what the others are doing.

So the for oneself most meaningful thing to do, during the meetings, is to impress the managers / others listening?

Since the meetings barely hello with getting real work done anyway

[mindcrime]

inherently dicatorial culture of corporate governance

Exactly. There's no point in blaming scrum for problems that are ultimately rooted in your corporate culture.... because those problems are going to (re)-appear no matter what methodology you adopt!