You don’t need standups
I always upvote these things, not because they&#x27;re right. Because they show common misunderstandings about Agile. Agile is so simple and easy that the development community continues to screw it up. It&#x27;s important to understand how.<p>According to the author, standups are something companies require developers to do to report about what they&#x27;re doing. Many times they can take more than a half hour.<p>That may be true, but the purpose of standups is that the team requires one another to get together and talk about how to move the project forward. It&#x27;s not about what you did. That&#x27;s a status report. It&#x27;s about how you can help one another.<p>If you can self-organize, effectively communicate, and help one another as-needed without standups? Don&#x27;t do them. Easy. There&#x27;s no magic requirement that you have to. What we&#x27;ve found over the years is that if you give it a name and a time, at least you have a way to talk about whether it&#x27;s working or not. Other people can drop by to help out. But if that&#x27;s too formal for you and you don&#x27;t need it? Stop!<p>Standups remind me of brushing your teeth. When they&#x27;re working well, it looks like nothing of value is happening. Five minutes and people tell jokes and leave. It&#x27;s when they&#x27;re misunderstood as something else that they become useless and painful. Had to throw a SM out of his own team room once because he kept using standups as an opportunity to play &quot;What&#x27;s your status?&quot;. Nobody cares about your status. We care about how the entire team is working. Have some down time? Tell us you&#x27;re free and then go play tennis the rest of the day or something. It&#x27;s not a management, outside-in meeting. Just the opposite, in fact.<p>I love these articles because they remind us that the goal is what&#x27;s important, not the ritual. Unfortunately, people get the two conflated, usually due to a lack of multiple-team&#x2F;org experiences.