Agreed. It’s a deliberate inefficiency to make sure you at least have a chance to communicate with your team on a regular basis. Otherwise you might go days or weeks without the chance to have a critical two minute conversation.
That sounds suspiciously like your team is not communicating enough in the first place though. I mean, I guess the profession does get its fair share of introverts, but I would have expected enough teamwork that everyone knows what everyone else is doing, at least roughly. At my last gig I remember we had three backenders and four frontenders on a game we were building and the stand-ups seemed superfluous, Ryan on the frontend knew all of the frontend tasks and their exact states, I on the backend knew all of the backend tasks and all of their states, stand-ups were more of a means to celebrate what folks had done and coordinate that info with our QA team.
My silver rule of meetings is “to make a meeting matter, make a decision.” If we were assigning new tickets and/or backlog, deciding who would own each of them, that meeting is valuable. Progress updates can be delivered asynchronously and consumed asynchronously, unless, say, one wants group applause.
Of course now covid exists and I changed jobs to a team that barely talks with me and daily stand-ups are kind of my only social contact with them, so that's less fun. But yeah, 100% the original vision of agile with the “developers should be meeting daily with the product users to clarify the underlying model and mold the software to their hands” should cause people to work together so much that stand-ups become something of an afterthought.
It sounds like you and your team are working on the same artifact and that your tasks are interrelated. That’s kind of a special case. At any given time our 3 engineers have maintenance tasks in flight on 4 or 5 distinct products.
> That sounds suspiciously like your team is not communicating enough in the first place though.
That's probably true. There definitely exist teams that communicate well enough that the benefit of a standup is nearly nonexistent. But many teams aren't like that and have a handful of people who need a structured process for communication or they will struggle. Standups aren't the best solution, but they are an easily implemented way of getting a team part way there.
You and Ryan are set then (as far as you know). What about the other people on the team? Did they also have flawless insight into latest progress and next steps?
