I agree 100% with the article’s premise, that standups as widely practiced — and as advocated by Scrum Masters around the world — are a waste of time, and are in fact a status meeting: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Do you have any impediments? — if that is not a status meeting, then what is??????

But I don’t agree with the conclusion or advice given. What teams need is effective leadership — not bossy leadership, but someone to ask hard questions.

Agile coaches assume that team members are like them — extroverts — and that given the space and time, programmers will blossom into collaborators and effective leadership will emerge within the team.

That’s not what usually happens.

What usually happens is that they stop meeting, and cliques emerge, with a few people talking to each other and excluding others most of the time.

What teams need is a leader who knows what everyone is working on, and what issues have been arising, and asks hard questions like “How is XYZ going to work?” and “How are we going to make sure that this and that doesn’t happen?” and “What test coverage do we have for our integration tests?”

And then helps the team to talk through the issues that surface in the resulting discussion.