| Wow, that's like a zoo of process pathologies. In order, the things I see: I like doing the stand-up as early as possible, so that there's minimal slack time before hand. And I prefer to work in ways that are less dependent on the state in one's head, including test-driven development and pair programming. The standup is always in the team room. Everybody on the same team works in the same room. Generally, you do it in front of the kanban that shows the state of the project. Because it's right where everybody works, it's pretty easy to be on time. Regardless, it starts on time. No waiting for stragglers; it just encourages them. You stand for 10 minutes or so. The team is some reasonable size; I think of 12 as a maximum. If the people turning up have nothing to do with you, then it's not actually a team. Teams are groups of people that win or lose together. Team members help one another out to achieve shared goals. If what people say is boring, you should be able to tell them so. They are there to talk to the team; there's no point in them saying things that aren't useful to the team. Coffee should be in or near the team room. Ditto water, snacks, and other things necessary for humans to do work. The stand-up should be run in such a way that people leave ready to jump on things. If I had to guess from your description, I'd say that Yahoo took a top-down culture, pasted on some Agile rituals, and kept right doing the same old bullshit. Which, honestly, is a giant waste of time. If you're going to do waterfall in a command-and-control context, just do that. No sense putting agile lipstick on your waterfall pig. |