[vacri]

Well said. In my experience, standups were short and covered a lot of ground. Problems were rapidly back-and-forthed. If you didn't have a standup, people would get annoyed because they needed to jaw with the group on something. It was a small, diverse team (one hardware guy, one firmware, two web, two support, a smattering of others) and that may have contributed to the need to cover ground quickly, but the idea that the daily meeting is by default a waste of time is laughable.

Trying to convey a lot of the things we encountered in text would have taken a lot more than 2 min/day, unless you were satisfied with rubbish and unilluminating two-liners. Sure, some days would go by with everyone saying 'going fine, nothing here', in which case we lost all of two to three minutes - around the same time as this magical email that apparently covers the more complex stuff.