Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

Daily stand-ups have two formats, one is Round Robin that has origins in Scrum, other is Walk the Board that is more Kanban. I highly recommend you switching from "did yesterday/do today" to "walking the board" as it is less about checking what each employee delivered in a day but rather what the team can do to move tickets through the board. It is also more inclusive allowing quiet/introverted/non-native English speaking members of the team to participate in the meeting rather than rehearse their updates in their heads ignoring others.

This kind of daily meetings make me feel like I&#x27;m standing trial for my crimes. Especially if I&#x27;ve had a bad&#x2F;down&#x2F;unproductive day, which happens.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s better when you take away the power relations. And reduce the frequency during non-critical periods.

For me, they are. More so in my current role with a fully remote company. All calls are video calls, with RingCentral, Slack or Google Meet. We get to see each other face to face, get some social time and chit-chat a few minutes before diving into the standup.<p>Other teams do async standup via Slack, via Standup Alice. It seems to work for them.<p>I also really like the addition of an &quot;open forum&quot; in my team. Is there anything you&#x27;ve heard from other teams that will probably have an impact on this sprint&#x27;s tickets or ones in the queue for the next one? Its also a good time for the PMs to relate any relevant conversations had with other PMs that we should know about.<p>The real key to this is there&#x27;s no power play involved, and to have a good sense of scope about what&#x27;s appropriate to bring up and what isn&#x27;t. We&#x27;re also a hybrid core&#x2F;product team, so regular checkins are beneficial overall.

I think they are worth it for remote teams. Most of the work comms can be easily done in slack, but there’s definitely a benefit of making people talk to each other and express emotions at least once a day.<p>Normal offices accomplish that with water cooler talk and informal chatter, but you miss on that with remote teams. There might be a better way to solve the “loosing of esprit de corps” thing but dailies are the easiest thing I’ve seen do that.

Q. Are daily scrum meetings worth it?<p>Programmers: no.<p>Project managers: Why can&#x27;t we do this twice a day?

&gt; Usually the better the project is going, the less you need the daily.<p>That quote sums it up pretty nicely. To bad of a naming for this type of meeting. Hard to negotiate to do a &quot;daily&quot; less then daily.

I&#x27;m sorry, stand ups are literally a psychological trick played by middle managers to put pressure on devs. They undoubtably lead to higher turnover from devs fleeing chickenshit and I&#x27;ve never seen one actually lead to better code.

&gt; This will interrupt programming flow.<p>This for me is the biggest drawback. When you are in the zone and interrupted it takes long to get back in the flow again.<p>Another point is I don&#x27;t solve problems in a linear fashion. When I am stuck I sometimes jump to another part of the application that I know I will have to tackle later on. That&#x27;s just me. This is hard to explain in Agile with a PM&#x2F;scrum master present.<p>Edit: PM&#x2F;scrum master because we have mixed environment.

The one true benefit that i remember from my time working in scrum was when we moved the scrum meeting from morning to 12 o`clock. And the benefit? After the meeting, everyone was already standing, so we went straight to lunch as a group without any further delay. Saved a lot of time and effort to organize everyone.

Personally, I like the slack message standup over the meeting, but that&#x27;s mainly because I&#x27;m a terrible listener, at least with text I can go back and see what a certain person has decided to mention. I also feel like it&#x27;s easier to mention someone that I might need help from during the day

I don&#x27;t like or dislike daily meetings much personally, but I think they are needed - mainly for scrum master and PO. Daily can&#x27;t be replaced realistically with bug tracker dashboard because 80% of daily time is not bug status discussion but let&#x27;s say mostly human problems. Also I believe there is zero correlation between success of the project as a whole and a need for daily, none at all. People suggest async text in chat but eventually harder and more detailed issues will raise a need to actually talk and while it will save 20 minutes time of each participant who now don&#x27;t have to listen to other people&#x27;s issues it will also isolate people from potentially useful information and prevent them to suggest their ideas or ask for clarification , basically limiting in-team collaboration.

&gt; Another variation would be to do the daily on Slack which can even be asynchronous.<p>That is exactly what I do. Every morning answer 3 things in Slack. It is also good way to say &quot;Good morning, now I start to work on X, yesterday I did Z and I need some help on Y.

As so many things with scrum, a lot depends on the attitude of the scum master. If the scrum master is an ambitions person and focusing on results, stand-up meetings can be become a drag. If however, the scrum master has a focus on the team and it members, it can become a source of cooperation and encouragement. Many companies that want to implement scrum, do not want to pay the cost of hiring people who are good at being scrum masters (and are not necessary software engineers), but decide to assign the role to some existing people in the company, which, often results in people who see it is a stepping stone to a management position to opt for the role of scrum master.

I see the value in daily communication and the general topics (yesterday, today, blockers) of the dailies, but at the same time the daily standups show how the in general much of the modern work and communication has moved to asynchronous methods but the text book example still requires the events to happen in a synchronous way (eg. standup at 9 am) which obviously causes issues.<p>Then you move forward to move say the dailies in Slack, at which point they just get posted whenever people see fit, which sort of works unless the problems themselves need to be solved synchronously, as it is with many cases and they easily just end up being status reports instead of actual planning.

I think they&#x27;re absolutely worth it. The interruption of flow is minor, because they&#x27;re predictable. You can plan around them. If you&#x27;re working on something really complex and urgent, I don&#x27;t mind if you skip it occasionally (but don&#x27;t make that a habit).<p>I think it&#x27;s good to start the day together, with some idea of what everybody is working on. It helps to detect some issues that otherwise might be ignored or detected too late. Generally, communication is good, and short communication is better.

I haven&#x27;t found a way to make daily standups work in my team which is fully remote and spread out on 3 continents and 4 time zones (so there is no &quot;start of day&quot;). Instead I have a weekly sync with everyone and 1:1 with each person on a weekly basis.<p>Kanban board gets reviewed weekly for assignment and direction (and I keep an eye on it thoughout the week). Blockers get addressed asynchronously in dedicated discussion spaces as soon as they arise. If a solution isn&#x27;t found in chat then it becomes a topic on the sync meeting. But generally, there&#x27;s no &quot;spinning wheels&quot; as everyone is mature and doesn&#x27;t need a short leash.<p>Which leads me to trust. Everyone in our team has a decent amount of experience. They all know when they are stuck and they all know where to ask for help. I&#x27;ve always felt that trust is empowering and that&#x27;s what I wish for everyone on my team.<p>But in this context, 1:1 are very important and I try my best to make them safe spaces for people to bring up issues which would be more uncomfortable to bring up in a group setting, especially for introvert personalities.<p>Ideally, pick what works best for YOUR team. Experiment and try new things. What works today may not be the right thing in a year. These are tools, not dogmas. The worst process is the one everyone follows but nobody knows why nor how&#x2F;if it helps.

Yes, they do but it depends on the context. In my previous company (web agency) they were solving several issues at the same time:<p>- Project Manager (Proxy Product Owner) is communicating with the client on a daily basis and is getting some important updates about the progress of the Sprint;<p>- if there are some unexpected developments (for example, some User Stories appeared to be more complex) the Team and the PO can make a decision about it together, discuss various options, etc;<p>- the distributed team has a chance to see each other (we were encouraging video calls via Google Meet).<p>However, there are some certain rules which should be followed in order to make Daily Scrums effective:<p>- video (or at least audio) conferences for distributed teams – it can actually be slower to have this meeting via Slack;<p>- they must be timeboxed (15 minutes max);<p>- stay pragmatic about what you are discussing and ask the feedback of your team about it.

In my experience, daily scrums are without value. A well-functioning team already knows what everyone else is working on, what problems they&#x27;re having, and etc.<p>If a team isn&#x27;t well-functioning, then daily scrums could have some value -- but I think a better approach would be to fix the team.

When I was put in charge of a new team for a new project at my previous company, we did the most agile thing there is. We got together and asked ourselves (all of us having previously been on teams that had daily standups): &quot;So, what do you all think, is the daily standup worth it? No? Alright, let&#x27;s try without it.&quot;<p>It worked great. We ended up doing a quick meetings 1-2 times a week to sync-up and get the idea of where we are. Any blockers would be brought up informally (through Slack or in-person). We all knew each other well, so trust was high to begin with. Also, it was a relatively small team of 5 people.<p>I guess the point is that &quot;having daily standups&quot; is not agile. Regularly asking yourselves if they are or would be useful (whatever the answer may be) is.

Every article:<p>Title: Is [x] better than [y]?<p>Article: Depends on context

For a small remote company like ours, it would be exhausting to do daily scrum meetings. Instead, we have an hour-long weekly scrum meeting on Monday and it&#x27;s more effective.

NO.

i loved the dailies. it was the best way to earn money without doing any work. i always tried to prolong the meetings as much as possible. ah, i miss those days.

No