When agile is followed just as a practice

Agile, It's no more a buzz word, it's mainstream now. The real value agile brings to your team is the change in mindset.
With agile you take small iterative steps, involve end users early and look for constant feedback, expect changes to assumptions and business, improve predictability, equip yourself with tools, coding principles and best practices to ensure quality and finally deliver a product that is meaningful to user.

However, it become a burden when you follow agile just as a practice, and it doesn't matter how sincerely you follow it. For example the daily stand ups, you wouldn't believe, i have been in teams which have broken apart because of stand ups. It starts with a spark, "Why wouldn't somebody make it to the stand up, don't they have a respect to the team?" and very quickly turns into a monster.

My view has always been, the effectiveness of a stand up depends upon the quality of updates. If I have to attend a stand up just to listen to others updates on what stories they played the previous day, i can easily get that information from the project management tool (like trello, jira, mingle...) instead, it becomes quite interesting and effective when the quality of the information being shared is high, say when one shares about the issue she faced and how she solved it, or about the new feature one has introduced or when somebody seeks help because she don't know how to solve a problem and so on...

So rather cribbing why others don't make it to the stand up, the team should focus on improving the quality of the stand up there by making such defaulters to feel, they will miss quite a lot of useful information if they don't make it to the stand up.

Same applies almost to any agile best practices. And that's exactly why agile become quite effective when the best practices are not followed just as a practices but with clear understanding on the reasons behind them...

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