Good morning. Let's go around the room.
"Yesterday I worked on the thing. Today I'll keep working on the thing. No blockers."
"Same as yesterday."
"I was in meetings all day so I didn't get to the thing but today I'll definitely get to the thing."
"I'm still waiting on the API from the other team."
"Same."
We burned 15 minutes learning what was already on the Jira board, which nobody opened, of course. Why read the source of truth when you can perform it live every morning in an agile theater production?
The standup has become a ritual, a daily offering to the gods of Productivity so everyone can feel like things are moving. We stand in a circle, we recite our incantations, and then we go back to our desks and do what we were going to do anyway.
On one team I worked on, I timed the standups for a month. The average was 14 minutes, with about 45 seconds of useful information per standup. Usually it was someone saying "hey, that endpoint changed, heads up." That could have been a Slack message.
Try cancelling the standup and suddenly you are not agile and do not value communication. The Scrum Guide says you need it, and the Scrum Guide is sacred text, handed down from the mountains by Ken Schwaber himself.
I propose we replace standups with a bot that reads the Jira board and posts a summary. If anyone has an actual blocker, they can type it. If nobody types anything, we saved 15 minutes.
As a Tech Lead, that is close to how I run it. The daily update is async, in the team channel, and the board is the source of truth. We only get on a call when someone has a blocker, and that call takes 5 minutes and covers only blockers.