My mind was blown when I found out that daily standups were a Kanban philosophy and not a SCRUM philosophy. Only because every SCRUM team I have been on has standups and it is essential, as long as they are less than 1 minute long.
Also not in XP. I eventually came to like standup meetings, but with one caveat: no management (including project management) is allowed to attend. Otherwise it becomes a status meeting rather than a "How can we get past our current blockers" meeting. Management glazes over all the technical talk -- the very thing that we need to speak about if we are to need a meeting at all.
I'm going to say this rather rashly (and maybe regret it sometime in the future): any "Agile" process that includes a status meeting for developers is broken. Status should be determinable from the artifacts that have been produced. If management can not see or understand the artifacts, then your process is broken. If they prefer not to look at the artifacts, then your management is broken. If they need status on something that is "taking too long" then you haven't broken up your tasks enough. If you have broken them up enough and it's still "taking too long", then there really isn't much to say other than "this blew up on us" -- which is obvious.
What a standup is good for is casually checking with your teammates that the approach you are taking is reasonable and to discuss other strategies. It's useful for asking for help, swapping pairs (or getting one in the first place). If you find yourself doing the "This is what I did yesterday. This is what I'm going to do today" dance, then you are not getting much value. It should be blindingly obvious what you did yesterday, because code was written, reviewed and hopefully merged. Possibly you may want to say, "Hey, can you review my code?" It should be blindingly obvious what you are going to do today, because you grabbed a card/task from the backlog. The only thing you need to talk about is, "I'm confused. How do I do this?" and the like.
> status should be determinable from the artefacts that have been produced.
Hell yes! Status meeting can be a band aid while you get people to properly document and communicate those though. You often don’t need the whole team for that though.
