[Spearchucker]

Unfortunately these daily meetings hardly ever work out that way -

In Scrum, for example, a daily project team meeting occurs. It’s called a daily scrum, or stand-up. The stand-up has guidelines, including limiting the meeting length to 15 minutes. My experience is that this never occurs – stand-ups usually run on for at least half an hour, during which I’m subjected to anecdotes, show-offs, excuses and, if I’m really unlucky, insinuations and blame. The worst stand-ups include managers – their presence turns any self-respecting stand-up into a status report.

Ref. http://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=dce9dde8-d770-47c2...

[stephengillie]

You make an excellent point. Meetings are basically "team work breaks", where everyone gets to stop working but must remain together. Usually, team members discuss work, as that's always something these people have in common.

I'm contrasting this with the typical work break, where the team breaks into individuals for 10-15 minutes and everyone goes to a different location (water cooler, phone, bathroom, outdoors to smoke or stretch or walk).

[wpietri]

Well, a lot of places that are "doing Agile" (whatever that means) are really just doing waterfall with some different rituals and labels. E.g., the 30-minute standing status meeting, which has nothing in common with the Extreme Programming stand-up meeting except that people are standing. (Sometimes. I've seen places where they do the daily "stand-up" sitting down.)

If you're working in a place with a screwed-up culture, a daily stand-up will make a number of the dysfunctions obvious. Removing the meetings doesn't make things better, it just makes the problems subtler, and therefore harder to fix.

Anyhow, I also see plenty of places that make this work well.

[zacharycohn]

That just means you're not doing a good job running the meeting. If it's not working for you, change the things that aren't working so they are.

When you find you're getting away from something that was working... just go back to it. If there are anecdotes and side stories, develop a system where you can stop them.

If they run long, that's when a timer can be useful. Whether it's a series of 2 minute timers or a 15 minute one.

Don't slam an entire system because "it 'inevitably' stops working," just go fix it.