[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.