[romankolpak]

Daily standups while being mostly useless on the surface, have an implicit value of enforcing a daily face to face communication between team members who work remotely. In remote teams I often find that people who don't interact face to face frequently, but work on the same part of the system, are more likely to run into communication problems down the road - doing duplicate work, passive aggressive attitudes in PR reviews, poor communication in general which impacts the system in a very direct and negative way.

Here's a thing -- people rarely become friends over email or slack conversations, unfortunately. And a team of friendly people who trust each other and communicate efficiently (e.g. feel absolutely comfortable setting up a quick video conferencing call to talk about an issue) is a lot more valuable than a team of people who rarely talk to each other and mostly prefer texting over anything else.

Those are my findings when working with remote teams only. I don't think standups are necessary for colocated teams, which can sync at will anytime they want.

[segmondy]

Exactly. I have some remote folks on my team, and folks rotate in and out of being remote on a daily basis. So we do that, but I renamed it to "daily status" since we are not standing up and no one is. We conduct it all 100% over the computer, so those remote don't feel left out. We keep it on track and for us we do it right after around lunch. So people have things they have worked on for the day and things they need to do after. Doing it in the beginning of the day forces everyone to come early defeating flexible time. Doing it at end is the same, and if you're blocked it's silly to wait till the end of the day to tell the team. It's just another tool in the box, if it works for your team great. if it doesn't, shed it. Attitude can determine how useful things are.