[replyifuagree]

Almost all problems with daily scrum/kanban/whatever can be traced back to inappropriate management.

Most of the time the issue is the daily whatever has been turned into a demotivating status meeting where a PMO trained project manager (PMP) is drilling each person for a status roll-up.

When management is inappropriate, the ignorance is so thick that no rational discussion can penetrate.

[vishalontheline]

I've been an engineer and a PM in Scrum, Spiral, and Waterfall teams.

That daily meeting can either be:

- One where, participants feel as if they are reporting to some person of authority who is there to judge them, but not really help them much, if at all.

- Or, one where everyone feels like the meeting is for their benefit.

One person (usually a manager) that feels too senior / detached to participate will quickly turn the meeting from the latter to the former.

If someone is in a daily Scrum meeting, then they must share with everyone what they did yesterday, how it's going and what they're going to that day. If they don't, then they shouldn't be in the meeting - they can get all the information they need by looking at the story board or meeting notes or reach out directly.

For distributed teams there are some wonderful tools to collaboratively participate in daily meetings. These tools will speed up the whole meeting, making it even less tedious than before!

Once everyone is participating, then it becomes possible to move beyond "worked on bugs" or "worked on AB-24132" to something more descriptive. Personally, I think of the daily meeting as the thread that connects the events of the previous day to the goals of today. It should feel like a story that you are living, and not some dystopian nightmare where everyday is just like the day before.

[cauch]

While I agree, it is also very common that it's the culture inside the dev team that leads to this situation.

Dev culture tends to idolize unicorns and 10x coders (more than management who has absolutely no reason to care about the status or ego of each dev individually) so they tend to, themselves, find intimidating to admit they are not one.

[replyifuagree]

Yep once we kick the PMP out, then we can work on safety so people will openly share where they are in the battle with the real enemy - the software.

As it turns out 10x isn't enough. Once the complexity of the solution hits a certain point you really need multiple brains working together to reliably evolve it in a sustainable manner that isn't rife with operational disruption.