A Terrible Way to Start Your Day: The Daily Stand-up

Modern Agile practices incorporate a daily meeting for software developers where they are expected to answer three questions:

What did you do yesterday?
What do you plan to do today?
Do you have any issues or blockers?

This exercise is the cornerstone of MmAgile (Micro-management Agile).

The Concept

In theory, the stand-up meeting at the beginning of every day is an opportunity for every developer to know what everyone else on the team is doing and then help anyone who is stuck or in need. When you read about the process or listen to an Agile evangelist about the process, it is described as a quick and efficient meeting. You can read a typical description in this article from Atlassian: Stand up.

The Reality
The irony of the article referenced is that it comes from Atlassian, the makers of Jira. If your software development team is using Jira properly and appropriately, the information contained in the stand-up already exists in Jira.

The quiet part out loud: Daily Stand-up meetings are for Scrum Masters and Project Managers, not for the benefit of developers. There is a context switching cost and complete loss of productivity for this ritual. Even at a half hour (prep, meeting, back into it) - that's an over 6% drop in productivity on a weekly basis. (Aside - I'm fully aware that you can track and bill meetings as being a capitalizable activity, but that doesn't inherently make them better for the software or the company.)

If teams are running stand-ups quickly and efficiently, meaning there are no details discussed, no problem solving, and no context given, then is there really value being conveyed? Are stand-ups not just checking the box that the team "did an Agile thing" rather than improving the software or the process?

If you are delving into details or problem solving, then you will find that the meeting will last even longer and contain people who don't need to be present for the current problem being discussed. In other words, it's a different meeting and not the right meeting.

So, how do we solve this?
If meetings are needed - they should be planned, thought out, and only contain stakeholders and the necessary participants. Having a standing meeting at all is antithetical to healthy and efficient software development. Any modern software team already has multiple forms of asynchronous communication methods: Slack, Teams, email, et al. These methods should be the first line of defense against needless meetings only designed to tout a process rather than following one.