If your company is doing any kind of agile transformation, the first thing everyone implements is a daily stand-up. It doesn’t matter if you use Scrum or Kanban, or any other framework, one thing is for sure, daily you need to get off your seat and report on what you do.
This is where everything goes wrong and why the daily has such a bad rap.
So where did it come from? What is the history behind the daily stand-up?
Most people will tell you that the daily stand-up is a ceremony of Scrum. That is wrong. First there are no ceremonies in Scrum, second, if you go to the scrum guide, there is an event called Daily Scrum, not stand-up. And it’s not just that, nowhere in that event’s definition there is a mention of having to stand up. Crazy, right? So where did it come from?
Well, after a bit of digging, it’s a mix. The origin is Scrum and the Daily Scrum, but then you add on top extra techniques to force teams into making the meeting shorter. The idea is, if you are standing up, there is a higher chance you will not get in a complete tangent and discuss the problems of the universe. I can assure you, from what I’ve seen over the years as an SM, that doesn’t make a difference.
So now you know. Just one more case of misusing a technique to make something else.
Cheers,
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