Standups can however very easily become very uncomfortable in a dysfunctional environment. (As the original article unwittingly demonstrated.) Consider the sta

Standups can however very easily become very uncomfortable in a dysfunctional environment. (As the original article unwittingly demonstrated.) Consider the standup to be the canary in the coalmine. Most of the time people can ignore the dysfunction, work around it and pretend it isn't happening by just getting on with the job as much as possible. But the standup will then become increasingly uncomfortable. Every single day. In a healthy organisation, you can have perfectly pleasant standups, even without Scrum or Agile. I mean, what does a healthy team have to fear from standing around for a few minutes bringing each other up to speed? It's a process that is very close to what often happens quite naturally around the time everyone on the team has arrived at the office (or online). A standup can only become poisonous if the poison is injected from elsewhere. In Gareth's case abusing it for management status reports. In other cases it might be tension between team members, not having a clear goal, whatever. The point is, you cannot have pleasant standup if there is that kind of stuff going on. Which is all the more reason to have a standup, unless it's your policy to ignore problems rather than dealing with them. Standups aren't just not poisonous either: they are a very good poison detector.