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Standups are Scrum (possibly XP), not Agile, but Agile is dead and Scrum is wearing its skin as a macabre disguise. It puts the lotion on its skin...

Standups are the first time I ever noticed that "X is ableist" without someone else having to point it out to me. My introduction to standup meetings was a bit after I screwed up my ankle. I spent a lot of time thinking in that meeting about all the injuries and disabilities that would make the forced standing still for 15 (or let's be honest, 30) minutes an imposition. Spines, knees, hips, ankles, toes. In our industry you have to be able to manage sitting at a keyboard for 8 hours, until 'Agile' came along.

Writing this out, I'm beginning to wonder if standups (the "Stand Up" part) aren't in fact illegal under US and/or EU law.

Yeah a peeve of mine as well, I've always thought the name is insensitive at best.

However, I would have thought it's taken as given that you only stand if you are able and the real goal is to keep the meetings short and focused; with physical "discomfort" being an inspired motivator.

Standups tend to be held on purpose in places where it's socially awkward or physically difficult to bring a chair. If you can't stand for 15 minutes then carrying a chair is probably right out.

I know some feminists, I know some people with 'invisible illnesses', and I know some people who are both. There's an interesting degree of overlap in concerns and complaints for the two groups, and the intersectionality makes for some interesting commentary.

If hosting a meeting in a location where the women's restroom is on another floor veers into discrimination, if starting every meeting with, "Gentlemen... and Susan" is bad, then surely holding a daily meeting at a location without chairs creates the same type of concerns. Especially now that we include microaggression as hostile behavior.

Yes I agree - that's pretty much my concern with the concept; although I've only really experienced stand-ups in normal offices in accessible environments, your description highlights the potential for it to be even more exclusionary.

Happily my current team contains remote workers, so even before covid, 'standup' consisted of at least two rooms of people staring at a screen or conference room phone. I haven't had to stand for five or six years.

Also the flip side of the "some people can't do thirty minutes" is "some people could do six hours". Trying to use gravity as a timer does not work on endurance athletes at all. And they often have partial immunity to long, drawn-out activities. An alternative mechanism to control for time would be less problematic all around.

I've come to believe that the real motivation is avoiding the need for a meeting room.

You are not wrong.

It’s hard not to look at the inadequate meeting space in most office plans and not take it as a giant hint that they just want you to “shut up and code”. I think we often get confused between the Right thing and the expedient/practical thing. There’s certainly a lemonade from lemons aspect to stand ups.

I would conjecture that there’s an Icarus aspect to Scrum. The other agile methodologies tried to massage the limits and strengths of typical programmers, managers and customers, to save our sanity and throw management enough bones to let us be weird, but not too weird. Scrum looks a lot more like Business as Usual, and so the MBAs embraced it and made it their own.

The lack of meeting rooms is because they want to save money on real estate and rationalize it as meetings are supposed to happen in the bullpen where everyone can hear and contribute. If they wanted people to shut up and code they'd have personal offices or cubicles

> My introduction to standup meetings was a bit after I screwed up my ankle. I spent a lot of time thinking in that meeting about all the injuries and disabilities that would make the forced standing still for 15 (or let's be honest, 30) minutes an imposition

We have "standups" without physically standing up. I've worked places where actually standing was the norm, but they definitely wouldn't have made someone stand if they had a medical reason not to (use some common sense!)

The basic premise of a quick meeting to make sure everyone is aligned, and that any blockers are communicated seems sound to me.

I sit down if people keep me too long. If they ask me to stand up I'll just say my feet hurt.

> I'm too young to have experienced anything else so I can't say it's definitively bad).

I'm not too young. Agile is definitely bad. It's a cancer on software development.

Standups in low performing teams degenerate into managerial oversight and "reporting". That's both demoralizing, and forces people who hate it out of the company. Standups in high performing teams are usually less useful because it doesn't really matter what process you use. Your best bet is one that lets them collectively agree on what to do, and then get out of their way.