| 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? |
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".