The daily standup, if people actually stand and if it's timeboxed to 15 minutes, is the least broken thing in all of Scrum/Agile. Honestly, I think it can be a good thing.
No one (except for terminal middle managers) likes status meetings but the alternative (in many settings) to a fixed daily status meeting is random, unpredictable status pings from management which are far more disruptive to the daily work flow. I'd rather give status at the same time every day than deal with the irritation of a "What's happening?" interruption.
As long as people actually stand and the meeting ends at 15 minutes and there is absolutely zero risk of follow-on meetings, stand-up is probably more good than bad. Done properly, it eliminates the resentment and politics that come from the "Does Tom actually do anything?" type of speculation.
That said, Scrum is just horrible. The whole package is a bundle of fail. Senior developers will resent it and leave, and while junior developers may benefit from the structure, what they really need is mentoring and they're not going to get it when all the seniors are either (a) trying to make an acceptable "user story point" count for the week or (b) looking for other jobs. Scrum sucks. It never adds, it's either meaningless or it detracts.
I don't know why it is that all this Taylorist pseudoscience that failed in the rest of industry has made a home in the software industry. Fuck Scrum and fuck Agile, and this is not "excessive negativity" because I have seen that shit burn down (pun intended) billion dollar companies-- not meaning "the culture became something I didn't like" but "Scrum directly caused it to lose 80% of its market capitalization". That shit is fucking toxic.
I worked for a few years in a company that did salutary scrum, which is to say that we shoehorned our developer-led process into the correct buzzwords and cargo cult practices to make the management think it was Scrum. That was the best job I ever had. I was very sad that the company was purchased by a larger company with a history of annihilating their acquired development teams without thinking. (That practice actually called into existence one of their current major competitors, as an example of the Batman Effect in action.)
As a result, I didn't think Scrum was all that bad, until the worst job I ever had instituted the daily stand-up meeting.
Anecdotally, Scrum will do nothing to help an already good development process, and will make an already bad development process much, much worse.
As such, it means nothing to me if a company "uses Scrum". I have to look at the individual development teams, and see for myself how they really do their work. A decent development team can create a facade over their own working process that looks enough like Scrum that management won't interfere with it. A horrible team can create a Scrum facade over their own process that multiplies aggravation for everyone with no benefit to productivity.
I'd even go beyond "fuck Scrum" to spurn any development process that has a brand name and a dedicated consultant ecosystem.
No one (except for terminal middle managers) likes status meetings but the alternative (in many settings) to a fixed daily status meeting is random, unpredictable status pings from management which are far more disruptive to the daily work flow. I'd rather give status at the same time every day than deal with the irritation of a "What's happening?" interruption.
As long as people actually stand and the meeting ends at 15 minutes and there is absolutely zero risk of follow-on meetings, stand-up is probably more good than bad. Done properly, it eliminates the resentment and politics that come from the "Does Tom actually do anything?" type of speculation.
That said, Scrum is just horrible. The whole package is a bundle of fail. Senior developers will resent it and leave, and while junior developers may benefit from the structure, what they really need is mentoring and they're not going to get it when all the seniors are either (a) trying to make an acceptable "user story point" count for the week or (b) looking for other jobs. Scrum sucks. It never adds, it's either meaningless or it detracts.
If you're really not convinced, read my take-down of Agile/Scrum on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-developers-at-strong-compan...
I don't know why it is that all this Taylorist pseudoscience that failed in the rest of industry has made a home in the software industry. Fuck Scrum and fuck Agile, and this is not "excessive negativity" because I have seen that shit burn down (pun intended) billion dollar companies-- not meaning "the culture became something I didn't like" but "Scrum directly caused it to lose 80% of its market capitalization". That shit is fucking toxic.