[bguthrie]

The difference is the audience. I usually think of a status meeting as a one-way infodump from worker to manager. In a well-run standup, your audience is the whole team, because you're accountable to the team rather than any one person, and as a team member you're an active listener. If everyone's talking at the boss while the standup is going around then you're doing it wrong.

Edit: wrong, not right.

[wpietri]

Exactly this. I've seen plenty of faux stand-up meetings, where it's all about keeping the boss informed, and everybody else zones out. That's entirely wrong.

Another wrong way is to take a long time. It's a quick meeting, where everybody syncs up for the day and major issues are raised. I think of it as like the way players will quickly huddle together on a sports field. It should be high energy, biased toward finishing, and tabling any significant discussions for later.

As far as I'm concerned, they only make sense in a team environment. Where people are jointly working on shared goals and extensively support one another. In the Extreme Programming approach, they go along with a team work queue and collective code ownership.

If people, say, have individual work queues parceled out by a boss and don't interact much, then as far as I'm concerned the stand-up meeting is the wrong tool.

[FourthProtocol]

Easy enough to say, not always easy in practice. If "the boss" has political sway then it's never going to happen. I worked in an environment that considers itself "very agile", because it "does standups". Any suggestion that it's being done wrong makes you look confrontational.

I was there because the money was good. Motivationally it was about as effective as being micro-managed on a waterfall project.