Posts tagged "Agile"

The Stand-up Meeting Is a Surveillance Tool, Not a Communication Tool

Every morning at 9:15, a dozen developers shuffle into a room or log into a video call to answer the same three questions they answered yesterday. What did you do? What will you do? Any blockers? We have been doing this ritual for so long that questioning it feels like questioning gravity. Stand-ups are just how teams work. Everyone does them. They must be valuable. Except they are not. The daily stand-up, as practiced in most organisations, is not a communication tool. It is a surveillance mechanism dressed up in Agile clothing. And in 2025, with distributed teams and async-first tooling, it has become an actively harmful anachronism that we keep doing because nobody wants to be the person who suggests we stop.

Scrum Is Irrelevant in 2025

Scrum had a moment. I lived through it, ran it, defended it, and tried to make it work in teams that had no business running two–week theater. In 2025, I do not need another ceremony calendar, another points debate, or another sprint “commitment” that collapses the first time reality shows up. Scrum is not modern. It is a ritual from a different era that now gets in the way. Scrum solved a 2001 problem, not a 2025 one Scrum came from a world of colocated teams, quarterly releases, and product owners who sat ten feet from the developers. That world is gone. Today I have: