In the past, I’ve wavered about daily stand up meetings. The whole idea originally didn’t strike me as such as good one. It fell under the category of “something that may be useful, but could be a waste of time and there are other ways to accomplish the same goals”. Then I actually read the Schwaber book and changed my tone a bit. It sounded like it could be a good idea if implemented “by the book”.
So I was interested to see how it would turn out when I got on to a project that is a very “by the book” implementation of scrum. I’ve been on the project through two sprints (i.e. two months) and to be honest, the daily stand-ups have not been very useful. My original fears of this format were quickly realized. I did not contribute any information that could not have been acquired in a better more efficient manner and I didn’t receive any useful information that I couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. Obstacles were addressed and removed on a couple of occasions as a direct result of the daily standup, but most of my obstacles have been taken care of by me going directly to the scrum master whenever I wanted and telling him what the problem was. I didn’t want to wait for the next daily stand-up and within a couple of hours or sometimes even minutes, issues were addressed. Overall, I found the daily standups just distracted me from the work I was doing. The context change alone from the coding world to the reporting world was enough to drive me batty.
As a result, I’m back on the “Nah” side of the fence now on this technique. Daily stand-ups have just been a waste of time for me. In my opinon there are far quicker, more efficient, and more accurate ways to accomplish the same goals that daily stand-ups are suppose to address in terms of keeping the people on your team up-to-date on your progress and addressing any obstacles you are facing. Maybe they do work for some, but daily stand-ups are not always effective even if you do it “by the book”.