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Assuming this is scrum or something similar then if "[the standup] just drags for an hour almost every day" then they're not really doing it right.

I've been in well run Agile teams - and they're wonderful. I've been in badly run "Agile" teams and they're soul destroying. Either way agile is not the problem (or, I dare say, the solution).

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One thing I've observed in (badly-run, I think) Agile teams is big standup meetings, where if anyone starts a discussion or even asks a question (rather than just reporting status) somebody immediately says "offline!" -- i.e., have that discussion after the meeting.

I can see that the motivation is to avoid wasting the whole team's time on a discussion that only needs two or three people; but suppressing discussion can hurt too, as it stops people learning about tricky issues outside of their immediate work area.

It would be helpful to have some rules of thumb to show when you're doing Agile wrong. Probably those exist already -- anyone got a good link? And probably "too many people in the standup meeting" is a good rule of thumb!

Dragging on for an hour sounds absolutely awful. I'd even say more than about six people is too many.

The point of a standup is to learn that there is a tricky issue outside of your immediate work area, and to know who's got expertise on it. That way you know who to contact if "outside" becomes "inside". The actual details, you hash out in a separate meeting with just the people involved. "Offline!" is absolutely the right response if a standup starts veering into technical details.

I had one team of 10 that had a problem with our standups extending into half an hour once. We resolved that we'd make the standup one minute shorter each day. After a month and a half, we had it down to a one-minute standup (6 seconds per person). It was still useful, though a bit extreme - I'd target about 5 minutes for a 10-person standup (30 seconds per).

I've been in a situation where we did agile with 30 people. Standup took 10-15 minutes.

Did it work well?

Extremely. You'd take ten seconds to say what you had to say. Sometimes you'd say "I need help with SQL", say, and someone would say "I'll help", and you'd be done.

But we had a real agile guru on the team. We didn't do "Agile Methodology" exactly; we did Extreme Programming, and we kept tweaking it. Sometimes he'd say "let's try changing our approach in this way for the next two iterations, and see how it works out". We'd do the experiment, and keep the changes or not. We kept hacking and experimenting with the process, in a controlled way, but never in a "this is how it's done" way.

So if you have an "Agile is the one right way" person trying to run your team with big-A Agile, and he/she wants to do 30-person standups, you're probably in trouble...

Sounds great! Keeping track of how well the process itself is working, especially, and being willing to continually tweak it to fit the team and project.