Abbas Radhi - 4/14/2025
Daily stand-up meetings have long been a critical part of agile development. Stand-ups were originally designed to be concise in-person meetings. The team stood over a whiteboard, with each team member having the opportunity to briefly share progress, plans to proceed with their work, and whether they were encountering blockers. The usual sync-up. But today, with teams increasingly working remotely, the traditional stand-up is long gone. Has it lost its value? Is it more of a burden than a benefit?
It’s time to ask a simple question: Are daily stand-ups worth it?
Stand-up meetings are meant to be short and efficient, usually standing up to encourage brevity and focus. But in today’s digital workplace, they’re often just “another video call,” or maybe not even that—just "another call.” Lacking the immediacy and the energy of in-person communication, they become stale and repetitive. When a meeting is online, it loses the sense of urgency that made it effective in the first place. What remains is a ritual, you could say—possibly unnecessary.
Let us step back and rethink. Is there a possibility our time is being wasted? What if there were a better way? Okay, maybe we’ll dive deeper into what the issue actually is with stand-ups.
In practice, daily stand-ups are often anything but fast. What’s supposed to take 15 minutes can easily drag into 30 or even 60. Now, multiply that by five days a week. Depending on the size of the team—some development teams are huge—the cost of the people required to attend these meetings should raise concern. That’s a significant chunk of people's time talking about work that could have been spent doing something more productive.
Here’s the thing: talking about work in itself is actually beneficial, but only when you’re communicating the information to the right person. Here lies the biggest problem I see with stand-ups. It takes a one-size-fits-all approach to updates. Usually, everyone takes a turn giving their updates, regardless of how relevant their work is to others. The truth is that some people love hearing themselves talk. If you’re only interested in what one teammate is doing, you still have to sit through every other update to get there.
What if instead of waiting in a queue to give and receive updates, you could do it more “asynchronously”? Now, that may sound fancy, but it’s really not. What if the approach to sharing updates was by sharing them via a shared team chat or some daily update channel? For one, it allows team members to write more thoughtful and complete updates, rather than scrambling to recall yesterday’s work on a groggy morning call. Then the benefit is also a persistent record that can be reviewed anytime, making it easier to revisit past decisions, as well as enabling members to filter through updates efficiently.
The idea behind daily stand-ups—quick updates, keeping everyone in sync—still makes sense. But the way we work today is different. Many teams work remotely, across different time zones, and have different ways of working. It may be time to rethink the ritual.
Asynchronous updates might not feel the same, but they can actually work better. They let people take their time to write clearer updates, and they don’t interrupt the workday as much. Plus, you get a written history you can come back to later.
In the end, it’s not about keeping stand-ups just because we’ve always done them. It’s about finding the best way for the team to stay connected and get work done. Maybe that’s a daily meeting, maybe it’s not. But we should at least stop and think if the way we’re doing it now really works.