When the author states "The first question of the daily stand-up is pretty pointless: What did you do yesterday?", he misses the real value in the question, which is to motivate me to do something today which I will be able to talk about tomorrow.
Why did you applauded his behaviour? So you could blame the method (which you didn't follow) later?
While such a thing may be true, and may need to be communicated to a manager, it probably looks bad to do it in front of one's peers.
I've actually wondered about this, ever since finding inconsistencies in the psychology literature about this subject, particularly those which echo my own experiences.
For example, Ordóñez and colleagues' 2009 paper, "Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting", identifies some of the negative effects: "narrow focus that neglects nongoal areas, distorted risk preferences, a rise in unethical behavior, inhibited learning, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation."
Other work related (Sivers, McGonigal, etc.) to this effect has also argued that announcing your goals make you less motivated to accomplish them. There's yet other work, by Brown (in the book Daring Greatly) that shows that for certain personalities, these types of environments have a very opposite effect to enhancing motivation: instead, they generate anxiety, guilt, embarrassment, humiliation, and even shame.
I'm not doubting your experience, but my experience is more aligned with the items I've just mentioned. So it'd be interesting to try to tease out why some people experience the benefits you outlined, while others don't, even within the same scrum team. At one point, I conducted an informal study within our own team on scrum experiences and the results are completely bimodal. It's perplexing.
We use stand-ups as opportunities to discuss obstacles that people are encountering and discuss opportunities for pair programming. I use them as an option in my training toolkit. If we're working on fairly routine things (like setting up unit tests, database layers, etc.) then I don't bother with stand-ups at all unless I sense a need (like someone hitting a wall).
* Creative
* Detail-oriented
* Outside-the-box-thinker
* Insightful
* Meticulous
If you restrict your hires to all excel in a single attribute, such as "self-starter", you may be missing out on some fantastic developers who excel in other things.
In short, some of your developers may very well find daily accountability to be helpful, and this doesn't necessarily mean they aren't fantastic developers in other ways.
Rant: Not everyone is an isolation-loving codemonkey. Some people need the feelings of team involvement, urgency and repercussions. If I'm just left to sit in the corner all day, and no one knows what I'm doing, and no one gives a shit if I do nothing... guess what? I'm going to end up doing nothing. Perhaps people like me are flawed, but we're still very talented and capable -- and not every company can afford to pass over the extroverted developers.
But the standup is not about you micromanaging. The standup is about the team. It's not about having an accountability red-flag to force people into labour, it's about creating a benign cultural incentive to work. Some people actually like discussing what they've done. And if someone is having a slight episode of procrastination then knowing one needs to tell the next day gives an extra motivation to sharpen up.
It's not about putting collars and leashes on people. It's about giving visibility to work. Often visibility without explicit punishments nor rewards is sufficient to give an extra boost to efforts. It's an automatic reminder to people on what is important, without being irritating or nagging.
The commenter didn't say it was the only motivator, they said it was a motivator. It isn't some black or white thing- it's just another aspect. Unless you naively think your developers are robots, they will all have varying levels of motivation at different times, and this can help.
Anyways, I agree with some of the complaints. The tools can help out a lot. I disagree about the firefighting comment though. The whole point of scrum is not to firefight and leave that up to the scrum master so you don't lose focus.
If you're not motivated to do the items in your Sprint anyway, then you got a bigger problem than what your standup can fix...