[AndrewDucker]

People aren't perfect. It's easy to get distracted, get off track, think that you'd be able to get back on track if only you could get your head down for a couple of days, and suddenly two weeks have passed, you're miles behind, and the people waiting for your work are all thrown off track because it's not there yet.

Spending 15 minutes per day making sure that everyone knows how the team is doing strikes me as a very easy way to avoid that.

Heck, it can be significantly less than that, if you use a tool to keep your tasks up to date and can just say "I got the frobulator finished, and moved on to the doohickey. Dave's giving me a hand with a small holdup there, and it should be finished on time." at the standup then the whole thing should take less than five minutes total, except when there _are_ issues that need to be dealt with.

[mooreds]

I think that standups are one of the best parts of Agile, if they are time boxed and moderated well ('let's take this [larger issue] offline' should be heard fairly often). Super easy to implement, and very helpful. I've only worked with small teams (less than 8 folks), but I don't think it'd scale well.