[suppressingfire]

I think there's a stigma attached to the notion of the status meeting. Beyond that, at least to me, a status meeting is a kind of assymetric situation where one person with some kind of authority (manager, PM, ...) is trying to keep tabs on everyone else's work, where each attendee has to prove that they've been doing their job. In a standup, it's a kind of egalitarian environment where everyone is speaking to everyone else, and nobody is taking notes to report up the food chain.

[potatolicious]

This is exactly it, and I can't help but wonder if the people who vehemently dislike standups actually work in such environments (I know I have).

I also feel like the original "Standups are Poisonous" author may work in such an environment also.

I once worked for a company (who shall remain nameless) where the development process could be generously described as a perversion of agile. They wanted the cool buzzwordy notion of agile, but didn't want to actually subscribe to an egalitarian, hands-off environment where the engineering process is largely self-managed.

So, manager as scrum-master (noooooooooo), manager present at standup (noooooooo), and worst of all, story points becoming a measure of productivity (noooooooooo!). Standups would routinely last half an hour, even though our team was literally 4 people large, because the scrum master/manager would stop someone and drill down constantly.

Oh, and the manager ran estimation too, and with pressure from above would blatantly try to influence estimates downwards. The rest of the team compensated by inflating small tasks. Yay.

Tasks would also get assigned to specific team members from the get-go, because the team was horrifyingly silo'ed and we were constantly "too busy" to cross-train by spreading tasks around. I find that silo'ing is by far the biggest thing that makes standups seems irrelevant - why listen to what that guy is doing if that task has no bearing whatsoever on anything you're working on, or will be working on?

[tcharron]

Yeah, these are all common dysfunctions in teams getting started with Agile.

You see these a lot in cargo-cult style adoptions. They understand that they need to do these practices, but they don't understand why. The end result is that they try to pervert them to serve their own purposes (e.g. daily stand-up as a status meeting for managers) and lose the real value. Then they complain that "Agile doesn't work here".

[whydee]

Funny, that reminds me a lot of my last job. I am sure there are a lot of people stuck in a similar situation out there. Team members can't help but become biased against the process, and by association, the 'Agile' label.

[_delirium]

I agree this is the key difference, and I think the root of one of the problems: many workplaces that implement standup meetings have a manager or PM present at the meeting, even though this is discouraged by many agile evangelists. Sometimes the PM even acts as the scrum-master, despite the scrum process as officially conceived really discouraging that. And then it turns into daily short reports to the boss.

[johnbellone]

I agree with this. Most of the time status meeting is usually something I associate with bringing my manager up to date on what my team is doing. Typically this is a 1-on-1 situation. Sometimes it involves other managers outside of my hierarchy but still under product ownership.