One of the ways I train stand-ups is having teams do fake standups. Everybody gets a card. Some cards just describe a couple of new things to report. Some cards

One of the ways I train stand-ups is having teams do fake standups. Everybody gets a card. Some cards just describe a couple of new things to report. Some cards provide instructions to destroy the stand-up. Things like "Ask a lot of questions when somebody else is talking" or "Ramble on for a long while about the story behind a problem you had" Then the team gets a chance to practice figuring out what's going wrong and fixing it themselves. No SM or outsider needed. Really 5 minutes should do it. 30-60 seconds for everybody there, no more than 7 people on the team. If you're going 10-15 minutes? Somebody is talking too much. Having said that, what I look for is a 3-minute standup that's over quickly -- and then folks mill about for another 10 minutes freely grouping and talking about the stuff they've just learned and how to fix it. This should be an emergent thing, and only happens when the team is working through a tough problem. If somebody is managing that process the standup ain't working right. Stand-ups are a purposeful interruption, but they should also be energetic, to-the-point, and a way to prevent folks setting up a bunch of stupid meetings to waste peoples' time even more.