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The biggest flaw in Agile stand-ups is that it was developed before Slack became a standard.

For our small team, we created a Team Scrum channel solely for the purpose of allowing devs to check in at the start and end of day with work progress. This reduced a ton of overhead.


Not take focus away from that good idea (and it is a good idea), the biggest flaw in "Agile" is that people think that stand-ups are for reporting work progress/status. A stand-up is for getting clarification on what you are doing, arranging to get help, clearing up misconceptions between people, ensuring that the interfaces for different stories are meshing (and people aren't going off in wildly different directions), etc. This is why you have scrum master running the stand-up and not a manager. This is why you especially do not have a project manager running the stand-up! It is a technical meeting.

Status should be communicated through artefacts. For example, if the software has shipped, then the story is done. If you are doing a spike, when the new stories have been written as a result of the spike, then the spike is done. The only time you should need more status than that is when there has been a problem and your story got set back. In that case the scrum master should just tell it to the (project) manager -- it's a 30 second conversation and does not require the presence of your entire development team.

In the (very likely) case that your (project) management is not happy with the frequency of status reports (because it takes to long to finish something), then you need smaller stories. Getting your story size down to the size where you can complete about 1 per day will go a long way towards making your management happy. Of course the downside is that you have to be organised -- which, very ironically, most (project) managers really hate. They'd rather have stories that say "Deliver the product" with no other details and go back to their meeting (where they will undoubtedly discover new extremes of productivity, finding endless stacks of 3 word stories).

Way too optimistic.

Businesses instantly turn the methodology into a device for exerting power.

What you are describing only exists in books and on manifestos and perhaps in 5% of the businesses.

The rest bastardise and devour the methodology to their liking.

Group chat applications didn't exist before Slack of course.
Especially for remote first teams, standups are as much a social connection as an accountability, information sharing and blocker highlighting opportunity. I'm a huge fan of synchronous standups and really like zoom to get the added connection of video and audio with "async standup checkins" being the exception case if someone is at the doctors or whatever. All of this assumes a team with at least some timezone overlap.

Slack is great, but it doesn't completely replace the ability to see and talk to people once in a while!

Why conflate standup with a social checkin? Why not have a pre-lunch time to hang out and shoot the shit, instead of cramming it in as an ad hoc part of "the process" of standup?

Put your details, questions, concerns, etc in text, where anyone can read it any time they like, and make "social hour" something related to being a better teammate on an interpersonal level, instead of a mandatory part of the process.

People had been using other - and better - mechanisms than Slack for this purpose for decades.

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