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Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

This is really bad and a major failure on the part of the scrum master. The point of this meeting is to help the team sync on what they are doing and what they plan to do.

It should take 10m at most. Any issues (blockers, dependencies, etc) should be taken to separate ad-hoc discussions to let the team get back to work.

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If there is no room for syncing up and every issue is to be taken offline, one should question if it makes sense the stand ups should be kept in sync. In my team we do standups asynchronously over Slack, it's a great and non obtrusive way of updating each other and we achieve the same thing.

It's not the same.

The standup performs an important social function of making everyone involved in the work of the team. People have to face each other, feel accountable to, and feel supported by the group.

And of course there's no room for synching up: The morning standup is meant to facilitate those synch-up meetings, synch-ups that don't have to involve everyone.

>>> The standup performs an important social function of making everyone involved in the work of the team. People have to face each other, feel accountable to, and feel supported by the group.

This is a fantastic description. And it goes a long way towards explaining why standup (even if I'm not directly involved) leave me feeling so uncomfortable.

Kick project manager out of standup meeting and you will love them.

If that makes your standups better, you need a competent project manager.

You are right, problem is in project manager head, which abuses standup for status updates because of lack of understanding of purpose of standup meeting, or because of lack of discipline (developers may provide infrequent updates in git/jira). It's hard to debug development process by email. However, if developers will do their standups properly, then their development process will fix itself. (Or project manager will fire the most active one. ;-) )

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