Interesting article. And an interesting discussion. I am shocked. The purpose of daily is to coordinate the team. A team is when people work together toward a common goal. If there is everyone individualistic ticking his own tasks and does not care, or worse does not want to care what others do around, it is not a team. From the discussion, I have an impression the latter is the most common case.

What I like about this article, is that it shows me where so many misconceptions come from. The developer is thrown into the Scrum team, without training, because Scrum is easy and anyone can read it from the web somewhere. Yes, but distinguishing what is a good practice and what is not, is not that easy. It also shows there is no common strategy to work approach in the team, no common culture, and also nobody cares. If there is an agile coach there, this is a fail. And it also fails of development manager as well.

In my last project, the daily standups were ugly. But extremely useful. They gave us immediate visualization of who is working, who is a free rider, and the level of disengagement. The team didn't like working in Scrum as it uncovered many hidden things, including enormous underperformance. We had to let go of one individualistic developer for whom the team was a foreign word out of his vocabulary. Thanks to daily we got quick feedback we have to focus coaching work on to teach the team how to work in the team. Once the culture got better, the performance improved as well. Daily is not a waste, and it is not an enemy. It is like starting point for a day, which is quite common in the manufacturing industry, in the army, in the hospital, or in many other places. We repeat the status from the last shift, so everyone is on the same page. We distribute the work for the day. We agree on daily checkpoints. Update impediments for an SM. If done smoothly, it all can be done in 5-7 minutes and everybody is aligned.