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Aside from standups becoming status meetings (which it a mechanism of superficial management used by terrible managers), one of my gripes with them is that they're often redundant -- everyone should know what everyone else is working on, and what everyone else finished, and any blocking issues, via your agile tool (e.g. Rally). Redundancy in information is a terrible, terrible thing, and it leads to a situation where neither becomes canonical because that other thing.

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In which case, I'd say stop putting information in the tool. We ran my last company on index cards. You can see a picture here:

https://www.quora.com/Startups/Which-is-the-best-To-Do-List-...

The average card had maybe 4 words on it. We knew about issues because we talked about them.

I love the written word, but it is so much slower and less efficient than face-to-face communication in so many circumstances. The highest-bandwidth, lowest-latency human communication system is conversation.

Stop putting information in the tool to create a reason to have stand-ups?

No, have standups to have an easier way to share information than a tool.

To me, it seems like a waste of time to have everybody constantly monitoring the status of every card being worked on when you can just have everybody stand in one place for 10 or 15 minutes, then maybe another 15 minutes of subgroups talking about potential solutions to issues that were brought up.

On top of that if you really want the tool to show everything everyone is blocked on at any time, you wind up spending a lot more time than strictly necessary just typing status updates.

In my team's standups, people frequently wind up shifting plans to cover issues that are brought up or offering work arounds to mitigate blocking issues and kick them down the road a bit to give the scrum master(who is also our VP) time to clear them. We also wind up frequently offering to pair with different people based on what they're working on(i.e. one dev is working on something that touches part of our system that's particularly fragile, another dev more familiar with that area will offer to pair for the morning).

Since we started doing morning standups I've seen our team get more productive.

You are advocating a meeting once per day. Why not spend 2 minutes at that time to look over the agile board in the tool instead? I look at my team's board several times per day, as well as check-ins, and I spend very little time doing it. I am also aware of status throughout the day instead of once during the meeting.

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