Daily status updates are not useful. Linux kernel developers don't do them. I trust that nothing is stopping your engineers from having a chat and that their manager doesn't need to schedule their chats for them.
Cargo-culting someone else's process is a bad way to develop good process for your specific team and its needs.
You could use the same logic to claim that "issues and PRs are not useful" because the Linux devs use a mailing list and patches. I think that's obviously absurd, all that this example shows is that a mailing list and patches can be a useful way to develop programs. It says nothing about alternatives at all.
What specific needs are met by daily status updates? Professionals outside of software don't do that. The best software projects don't do that. It's very popular in CRUD projects led by non-technical middle management with trust issues.
> What specific needs are met by daily status updates?
You are assuming (1) that standups are status updates, and (2) that they are scheduled by manager, and (3) for benefit of the manager.
In the last several teams I’ve managed, it’s the crew that has encouraged meeting daily, and in the standups they are mainly talking to each other. It’s where they cover hot topics and bugs for the day quickly, with the fluidity of spoken conversation instead of Slack, and also there’s a non-zero amount of friendly casual conversation.
Don’t force teams to have standups, but also don’t assume a team won’t like it.
They just recommended cross-checking status updates in "stand up" meetings with commit history to catch engineers underperforming. That is (1) (2) and (3).
You are not answering my question. No, you ask your acquaintances who work in law, finance or medicine. Neither does academia have any "stand up". What specific needs do CRUD software projects have that are met by infantilizing daily status reports? What needs for daily status reports do these projects have that the Linux kernel doesn't?
> Professionals outside of software don't do that.
What, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, the everliving fuck are you talking about?
Professionals do this constantly. Go sit in an ER and watch the hand off between shifts. Go see any serious manufacturing facility and see them review daily everything that happened the previous day. Go see an effective sales org in action.
The scrumbags may have ruined software, but that certainly isn’t the world.
You make your not entirely unreasonable points sound like the output of a zealot.
"Stand up" meetings are not hand offs in the ER. Continuous integration with automated testing is.
Why are there no laymen agile coaches at law firms, and no "today I did this, today I did that" breakfast meetings in finance, or in CS academia? Other professionals don't accept this kind of infantilization.
Many teams have short daily gatherings — especially now that so many teams are fully distributed, it’s good for everyone to come together like that.
But while every team member talks about the difficult bugs they’re facing, sometimes the actual code tells a different story and can reveal that a team member is struggling to get working code together in any reasonable amount of time.
It sounds like you could just read their code and the meeting was unnecessary. Linux kernel developers are distributed but don't do daily status update meetings.
Yes, having a chat between the team for fifteen minutes every day is in fact quite useful, believe it or not.
We're not talking about hour long waterfall-y management progress review meetings here.