Daily standups should be async

If what you call a 'daily standup' is a status meeting where each dev reports to the team lead/manager then sure it can be async and that would indeed be more practical.

But that's not what a 'daily standup' is supposed to be and the point is to get people together.

> "It’s clear how even though all companies say they “do agile”, in fact most don’t"

Well, indeed. That's why everything is called a 'daily standup' these days.

If you're using Slack, the Scrum Police is a great way to organize async standups: https://github.com/coveord/scrumpolice

Because of the confinement my team has switched to async standups to account for our varied work hours (people on kid duty, etc)

I think if your standup can be async, then it's ineffective, and you should get rid of it. And to be clear, that's fine! Not every team needs standups.

The only value in a standup is when team members actually share ideas about what they're working on. The detailed conversation happens outside the standup, but the purpose of the standup is just to get that moment of "I know about that, let's talk".

In that case, having everyone in a room (real or virtual) at the same time is more efficient than asynchronous updates. With asynchronous updates, people are in meetings, in the bathroom, not online yet, etc, and you have higher coordination costs.

I've been on teams that have effective standups, and teams that have worthless ones. I know what each one looks like. But for the life of me, what I can't figure out is why some teams have good ones, and some don't.

When I was doing daily standups it could be useful for people to say what they are blocked on and then for someone else to say that they could try to help them. Where it wasn't useful was if the two people tried to solve the issue during the standup while 10 other people were standing around.

My other pet peeve for our standups was that they would not start on time. This was very common when I started on the team. After awhile I would just force the standup to start on time no matter how many people were there, even if I was the only one there :) After awhile everyone started getting there on time. I understood why people would arrive late since we were always starting late. An unvirtuous cycle so to speak.

> In an ideal world, daily stand-ups are meant to unblock problems and help teams ship product faster. In reality, there's actually no space in the standup to dive deeper into actual issues. The second you do, everyone else tunes you out, your standup drags on much longer than it needs to, and you're asked by your manager to "take it offline".

There is an ideal balance between fully async and going down a rabbit hole. A good standup will have feedback from others in the group, but it is important for everyone to know and respect time boundaries. One or two sentence interjections usually work great.

When you're giving updates as frequently as daily, a synchronous feedback loop is necessary for the information to be relevant. If I post in a slack channel that I am debugging issue X, and 2 hours later, someone posts that they dealt with X last week and has a solution for it, I've just wasted 2 hours of time.