[gedy]

This may sound like a no true Scotsman argument, when our company was trained by one of the scrum founders about 18 years ago, they were very clear that the daily standup was only for the team members, and the scrum master. (The scrum master could be a team member, and rotate btw). Managers were not allowed or invited to these. The only thing product managers and engineering managers would participate in and give feedback was in Sprint demos, and the beginning of planning meetings to answer any questions on upcoming stories.

At the time it was incredibly freeing and fixed a pretty awful and behind waterfall project. I was (briefly) at a startup a couple years ago that said they "did Scrum" and what a clusterfuck that was - all the managers meeting daily with devs to see if they were behind and scold them if they were. See ya.

[ta_1138]

But Managers as the center of the scrum is how many, many tech companies the outside world wouldn't call crappy run things. They also use Jira, mostly because they want reports that let people two or three levels up think they have any control over anything.

One of my least favorite standups was even worse than a ceremony for the manager: The manager and the Product representative were there in every single one, but they didn't actually pay any attention: Another 20+ minutes of "parking lot" would be added after the 5-10 minute process as they asked the team all the random questions they thought they needed, in which they also proved that they weren't actually paying attention to the actual updates, or the tickets, or anything. In practice, a sequence of 1:1 meetings where everyone was stuck watching, because after inquisition to one person, it'd come after another.

In practice, I don't think I've seen scrum run without a manager in standup, ever.

[LaGrange]

Your scrum master is management. It’s just a renamed PM.

I can run a very near standup when allowed to. I also think it’s a waste of time. Just send weekly updates to a group email, or something.