This is at the root of my stink with standups - I've been on many teams where each individual is working on some part of the system and has essentially no overlap on a daily or even weekly basis, yet here we are all meeting because cargo cult development practices says we should. So it's irrelevant to me what Jane is working on anymore than it is to her what I'm working on. The naysayers will say that that's the whole point of us meeting, because there might be some esoteric overlap that will only come to light due to our over-communication, but for my money there are other ways to solve that without a lengthy daily meeting.
In the restaurant industry, they do similar meetings called pre-shift meetings, aka lineups. The purpose of those is to check everyone is on time, check their uniform, talk about current promotions/deals/offers, discuss potential goals/bonuses, etc. And it makes sense.
In software, standups make it easier for stakeholders to track that people go to the office, and do so at a reasonable time, although most people will not admit it because it sounds bad.
Of course, making sure that team members are making progress and they're not blocked is very important, but that might not be relevant for non-stakeholders.
Sometimes it's all unintelligible mumbling and serves no purpose other than cargo cult.
Right - but this gets to my bigger issues with how software development is done these days (and why I’m exiting as fast as possible after a 20+ year career...)... in theory we’ve got advanced degrees, are well-compensated, have to know dozens of technologies from the front end to the database, work twelve hour days, work weekends and nights on call, build systems that generate millions of dollars in revenues that keep the company running... but some project manager thinks they need to take roll call daily because I might not be responsible for myself? Gimmea break!
> making sure that team members are making progress and they're not blocked is very important
If you are blocked, you don't want to wait until the next standup meeting to address the issue anyway. Standups provide no benefit here.
> Sometimes it's all unintelligible mumbling and serves no purpose other than cargo cult.
I've come to the conclusion that standups exist simply to read the commit log to those who do not understand how to use <insert source control system>.
