"Remember, they are not status meetings."
Additionally, I think it is important to remember that standup is not a "justify my existence on the team" meeting. Having nothing to report is fine.
Additionally, I think it is important to remember that standup is not a "justify my existence on the team" meeting. Having nothing to report is fine.
Off the top of my head, I'd look at the size of the unit of work and the length of the release cycle. I think Agile processes work best when the work is broken down into lots of small deliverables that meet the INVEST criteria:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INVEST_%28mnemonic%29
If the team is jointly completing a few shippable things a day, then everybody should have a pretty good idea that everybody else is working. Doubly so if those are actually getting released daily.
Conversely, this particular dysfunction of standups is a useful index of how much the corporate culture leads people to feel like they must justify their existence.
In a meeting where you're supposed to say what you've been working on, at a job where you're paid to be working on it, in what way is it fine to have nothing to report?
That said, in a quality team staffed with quality people, you don't worry about people goofing off during the time they're blocked... you assume they are doing some kind of self-development, or tweaking some small detail somewhere, etc. It's when somebody is blocked for long enough that it puts their tasks in jeopardy that the scrummaster needs to start escalating things and working to get the roadblocks removed, and/or manage expectations vis-a-vis the tasks for the iteration.